The Day After the Storm

Sunday has been a far more informal and relaxed, with only four of us plus Sue in physical attendance.  We started out testing the technology for our Skype call to Toni, which created some interesting feedback and sound effects as we all logged in to Skype and had a conference call whilst being in the same room.  Unfortunately, Toni did not arrive online, so we progressed by doing a skills exchange looking at both Audacity and Garage Band.

 

The practical use of these programmes to create audio for a range of New Media work seems to be of interest to a lot of people within the MA, although our resident guru Katherine was unable to be present to take us to the next level.  We did manage to establish the basics and some of the possibilities for both of these tools and the effects that can be created in each. 

 

Christine also gave me a personal demonstration of iShowU, a piece of software that can be used to create screencasts or demos from a Mac.  There are equivalent products for PC users – such as Camtasia – which allow you to achieve the same effect.  This tool is extremely useful for e-learning resources, and I think Christine’s use of it for her recent workshop shows how useful a tool it could be for us as collaborative writers.  It seems extremely easy to use, so we may have to play with this as a way of creating resources for each other in online skills exchanges.

 

We discovered that Toni had made it to Skype – an hour early, due to our wonderfully confusing daylight saving time system.  However, she had emailed us a short film that she has been making whilst in Australia.  It was really good to see some of Toni’s work – in her great personal style.  We projected this up onto the main screen for all to enjoy.

 

One of our last exercises with in IOCT space itself was to record a response to Renee’s virtual postcard to us.  We achieved this using the inbuilt iSight on Christine’s laptop and iMovie.   I believe this has since been loaded into BB for Renee and others to see – but we will try to get this visible via the googlegroup so those poor souls like Alison, who have to stand outside the door of BB now, can view this.  We decided to leave in the outtakes, for humorous effect.  However, Chris did take the opportunity to ask Christine for a quick demonstration of basic editing in iMovie, just so we could see how we could have edited this clip to give a more professional impression of our good selves, had we chosen to do so.  This was certainly a useful skill-sharing day for us Mac users, whilst Mary worked to download a clip of a Blondie track on her PC (I am sure the purpose of this will become clear at some point…)

 

We pretty much concluded the day – and indeed the retreat – with a fab roast dinner at the pub across the road from the IOCT.  Sue joined us and gave us all some reassurance about our dissertations and chatted about some of the changes she has made to the course since last year.  She also challenged us to think about what we intend to do once we have completed the MA, and we either pleased her or scared her by our general enthusiasm for continuing study to PhD level. 

 

All that remained to be done was the washing up and the farewells upon return to the IOCT.

Skills Exchange

The main skill everyone really wanted to have a grounding in (however basic) was the use of Flash.  Christine really inspired this with her talk about her work and the demonstrations she gave.  The skills exchange really focused on this, with us all coming up close for a chat through what flash can do and ask questions of Christine.

 

The basic principles we covered were: the use of layers, file sizes (using vector images vs using jpegs), key frames, motion tweens, creating symbols (which can then be animated), buttons, previewing information about the flash project and how to publish them.  We debating pre-loaders and Christine magically obliged Chris in his request to make a green ball “bounce around”.

 

Christine explained how the programme is based on older animation techniques and demonstrated some of the simple (but effective) things one can do with flash.  This was inspiring for those who were really daunted by Flash and felt this was something they should be doing in their work.  However, the overall content of the day actually showed the new students that they do not have to do everything – Claudia in particular noted this whilst we were making cups of tea.  There is such a wide range of tools available, but as writers we need to choose the tools that will facilitate what we want to create.   There was also the general realisation that many of these programmes overlap, so whilst many people were panicking about learning new programmes, they could actually achieve things using programmes with which they were already familiar.

 

Christine’s main tip for those wanting to progress further beyond this session was to visit the W3Schools, as the tutorials offered on this site are free and quite user-friendly.