How technology guided us

A short slideshow by Simon and Rory

This is a screenshot of Adobe photoshop, which we used to create our advert and album cover, pictured. The album cover simply required text adding, and slight cropping of the image. The advert need the photo to be resized as well as imposed onto a black background with text added. Unfortunately the programme is very hard to learn to use, meaning that some of the more advanced functions are neglected, and it is not used to its full extent.

Here we have a screenshot of Final Cut Express HD, the programme we used to edit the shots, as well as to add transitions and other effects to the final piece, the prepatory piece, and the audience feedback/response. Pictured above is the prepatory piece, running free, by Iron Maiden. It also converted the final piece to a QuickTime format, which means that the piece is viewable on a wide range of machines. However it is a large programme which takes up a lot of space on the computer, and is prone to crashing, loosing all unsaved work. It also is quite hard to get lip-syncing to the exact second in the song, as there is no facility for temporarily playing back audio at a reduced rate.

Above is a screenshot of our blog. This was created o the website moonfruit.com, which allows you to choose the format of your site, as well as to add content, such as images, and text. The next slide contrasts the above view with the “editing” view.

This is the editing view of moonfruit, showing the editing options available. One of the main problems we found with moonfruit is that it limits the amount of content that you can upload, as well as not allowing direct inks in the text of blogs. This means that the site may seem a little disjointed, as some posts refer to images, which are in a different section of the site. Also not being able to link to references in the text means that only one address can be given per blog, which means redirecting people to the links section, and loosing the synergy of the site.

Above are (l) photobucket.com, and (r ) youtube.com, which are the two sites we used to host images, and video, which moonfruit would not allow. This meant that to see the Images, we had to link to them from moonfruit, meaning a disjointed viewing experience, and also annoying if they are blocked by your internet provider.

Above are slideshare, and 4share, the sites used for hosting the powerpoint and podcast respectively, because moonfruit is not able to. This does create a disjointed feel to the browsing experience, however they are both free of charge, and are accessible via a link from our blog.

Lastly, the above site is vimeo.com, an alternative to youtube, we are using for our final piece, as youtube had copyright issues, and muted the soundtrack, not very useful for a music video. Vimeo is less well known than youtube, however has the same basic functionality.