Digital Graphics!

For the past 5 weeks I have been enrolled in a digital graphics course with Lamar University. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use my creativity with something for a change. It challenged me to try new things out such as animation, logo making and a newsletter. The course broke design into the CRAP, while the abbreviation seems funny the breakdown of CRAP was very helpful in organizing my text and artwork for the assignments. Being an art instructor I have always just relied on my artistic “eye” to figure out why certain designs are superior to others. I enjoyed the simplicity of CRAP in organizing why good art is pleasing to our eyes. This is something I will definitely use in my classroom. I believe the real benefit to this course is that it gave me lessons that I could take straight to my classroom. The logo assignment was brilliant in really breaking down a persons identity into a visual form. While it seems like a basic thought I labored over color, line quality movement etc. in my piece, I believe my students will benefit from that sort of self exploration. Having other peers via the discussion board was very beneficial in knowing how well I achieved my goal on these projects. Just having dialogue in regards to getting technology used in multiple types of classrooms was eye opening as well. I sometimes find that I look at these courses from a unique spot, as an art teacher. Most other students in our program are technology instructors or in core course areas. I like how I get to see everyone's point of view via our discussions and am sometimes surprised at how similar we actually are. After doing these projects such as the animation I am interested at how having students create their own subject matter will help retention. I would like to see if student ownership makes high school age students more receptive to simple technology. I know that my animation wont wow them, but if they had made it- it would. Through the whole course I was most pleased with my newsletter. It was by far the most relevant project to me and really the most useful to my department. We get so bogged down with emails and blogs are only good is your coworkers constantly check them, so a digital newsletter every two weeks could really show off my department and educate our school on our events and accolades. In short this has honestly been my favorite class, it has given me real useful things to stick in my teacher tool belt and I had a great time experimenting with our assignments.

Design principles in the Gorgeous Book of Kells

For this assignment I looked primarily at the Book of Kells Monogram page. I remembered it fondly from my art history class and loved its images and the meaning behind them. My first impression of the page was its heavy lines and the balance of weight to each item on the page. Although the giant shape that resembles a P is larger and beholds more prominence than the other smaller letters on the right side of the page the page remains balanced. You can see contrast throughout the piece with the thick lines surrounding the letters and pictures. This is almost like a black outline that sets these elements apart in the picture. There is also a great deal of contrasting color such as the red and blue and the use of gold and black. The very stylized artistic elements such as the style of text, the Celtic circle designs and the general filling in of pattern is very repetitious and gives this page a great flow. The alignment of the heavy long line (in the P) on the left side aligns the elements to give right side a more even presence. The proximity of each picture is important in this piece especially since they larger characters are more important. For example Christ's head is much larger than the small mouse. I like in this manuscript how they embellished everything with heavy design. The purpose of such books was not only to teach about Christ but to also entertain people who could not read. They learned through the symbolic imagery. Smart!

Finished PSA

For the last 3 weeks I have been working with a group of fine ladies, Ing Mu, Ranada Smith, Julie Barber, and Melba Gilbert. We hardly knew each other when we started but that changed very quickly as we were given a seemingly daunting task of creating a 60 second PSA from scratch. I entered the assignment with trepidation, as I have never been in a successful group. I have always been unhappy with the end result or been an inactive member of a group. I was glad to be wrong with this group of ladies.

From the get go we worked very well via email. We decided on cyber bullying as our topic as we collectively felt that it was a current and relevant topic. I personally liked that I could use this in my class yearly as well as share it with the campus for internet safety week.

We divided tasks by offering our strengths. I offered to help with the script, take photographs and record audio. I used photographs that referenced technology used in cyber bullying and Ing used photoshop to alter them to match our video. I used audacity to read the script that Ranada put together and edited it also using audacity. Melba shot video and then Ing used Adobe Flash and Photoshop to edit and create our PSA. All of our footage and images were original and Ing received the music from a free sound effect site called www.freefx.co.uk.

As a group we had to be flexible and be able to change things when necessary but this was really no problem. The best part of working with everyone is that via email we were able to share our vision. In the end no ones toes were stepped on and we were very successful with our end product.

Podcast- Movie Maker

Powered by Podbean.com

Microsoft Movie Maker Vs' Cyberlink Power Director

This week we needed to use a free yet relatively easy video editing program. I unfortunately have the world most unreliable laptop could not at first download movie maker, which is among the highest rated and easiest rated free programs. So I chose to download for my free 30 day trial Cyberlink's Power Director. The download was easy, i looked at reviews from cnet.com and they gave this program 4 stars. After downloading the program I think this was highly overrated. At first glance everything seems very easy, their icons are all pictures that can set things such as blending effects, artistic washes to your video as well as the normal attributes of a video editing program. The most basic program is that it has so many bells and whistles that it turns out to be too busy to navigate and the sequence editor is very touchy, you will end up clicking on 30 things before the portion of video you need. Frustrated, I ended up at my parents home using their already installed but yet lovely Microsoft Movie Maker. This program is free in most Windows Vista-7. It was incredibly easy to use, drag down menu, easy addition of music and the splitting feature was very nice. For the basics this is the best. I can see my students using this as a entry level video editing program, a start so to speak. In later courses such as multimedia or animation I can see where adobe's suite can come in mighty handy. For fancy fade outs and artistically overdone effects other programs may suit your better but for basic editing that ANYONE can do, Movie maker is gold!

Web Conference Week 2

I did not get to attend the web conference this week. I have had a huge amount of technical issues and am having to use my parents PC for the most part. But I logged in and viewed the conference after it happened. I along with others are/ were very confused about our assignment. It appears that we are only responsible for the podcast portion, so audio only. Dr. Abernathy answered everyone's questions and immediate feedback and guidance was offered. Web Conferences are a great way to interact with classmates and professors but I find the timing of them to be frustrating, especially the second week of school. I honestly feel like I am drowning in this course due to the timing...

My Digital Story

I really enjoyed making this, sorry my microphone sounds so poorly. I am hoping to get a new one by next week.