Graduation Show

We had our Graduation Showcase at the City Canteen & Bar, just a few doors along from D10. The show had been alot of hard work for everyone involved. Myself and Nic took on the role of overseeing the show, Aled and James designed and built the graduation show site, Lindsey, Carol and Nic all looked at the design for the flyers, Gareth and Rob cut the showcase to be shown via mac as well via Bluetooth to mobile phones, Tom helped to build the LED lights that we had for the show and with the equipment, and Shamim with making sure that the D10 studio was ready for the Mygo House demonstration. It was all hands on deck on the day. Myself and Nic went to the printers to pick up the posters. These posters were good in the sense that everyone had designed their own business card, and these were all together on the poster - each card being perforated so people can tear off each one separately. We only had a few hours to spare before the start of the show, but we had all the flyers ready for beginning of the showcase. James had done really well at obtaining 3 Apple macs for the show. These were on the middle table, along with a few laptops, so that people from industry could look at our portfolios.

We had the Orball flash game on a large Plasma screen, and our digital stories were all on a dvd played through a projector. At 2 points in the evening the Mygo 'House' team, demonstrated the game a few doors up at our D10 office. This worked well, as it requires participation by the user to get the full experience of the game.

All in all the night was a success, and I think that people from industry were suitably impressed. I had a few chats with various people, be they freelancers or from companies around the Bay. I also had a chat with someone who used to be the head of S4C. It was a great environment for everyone to chat and show their work and I was really pleased with how it went. It was a fitting end to my D10 journey.

Portfolio Website

I have finished my portfolio website. I went for a clean style, using CSS and Php for the contact form. This site is a portal to view all my work whilst on D10. All of us on D10 completed our sites in time for the Graduation Show, and mine can be viewed at zoebritnell.co.uk

Unique Media

We had a presentation by Unique Media, who are based in Bristol. For the first part they talked about general issues to do with encoding and media formats on the web. One point was made that although the quality on the web of video is not as good as on TV the consumer doesn't generally mind because they can choose what and when they watch something on the web. However, if that quality of video was on a dvd or on tv, then the consumer would mind. I think there is alot to be said for consumer choice - if we feel like we have a choice of what to watch, then we will accept that the quality of the picture is not as clear as on tv.

Having said that, Unique Media did go into some detail on how to encode well, and the importance of correct formats and compression, to give the user the best experience.

One point was that when shooting, obviously continuity is very important, as if you retake a shot the speaker and props must be in the same place. This is obvious, but easily overlooked. Another point is that you can start on a wide shot for an intro, and then stop the person talking and zoom into a tighter shot and then they can continue speaking. Cutaways are also vital to a completed piece. Unique Media like the Windows Media file format to export the video as it is good quality and has a wide hosting support. I personally like the Flash format, but it can be more expensive to host and difficult to scale up.

Greenfield and Bluetooth

We had our graduation show yesterday, which was very successful - more on this later. Firstly, Rob Light at Greenfield gave us a presentation about mobile marketing and bluetooth technology. The outcome of this connection with Greenfield was that they supported us on a graduation night by letting us encode our D10 showreel with exerpts of all our animations and other screenshots of our work, to be in a format that could be sent to mobile phone via bluetooth. Therefore, whoever came to our showcase last night could access this showcase directly to their mobile phone via their bluetooth connection.

The beauty of bluetooth is that you can receive multimedia information such as adverts, event info. etc via wireless free of charge to your mobile.

Rob Light told us about mobile marketing, i.e. promotional material sent to consumers, usually that you have to sign up for. They have tried this out, for instance, at a rugby match where consumers are notified how to get the information via their mobile and then have access to future events match details.

I like how this way of marketing can be very useful at events, as we found out at our graduation showcase. Also that you have to register, so you don't have unwanted adverts on your phone. For my final module on D10 I researched about the potential impact of multimedia in the developing countries and its use for education, essential information. There is quite alot of scope for mobile phone and bluetooth technology to take off in these countries. I could see the potential for health, education and agricultural information to be downloaded to users, so they can have direct access to essential information that helps their communities.