Interesting ideas

Reading through all the post the Fd students have been doing recently. I saw particularly struck by one video on jessies blog. Stop motion animation is relatively straight forward - we did some in the induction week for fun. But they take time - and they are fairly familiar to us. Jess found one that takes the idea and technique further. Goodness know HOW long this must have taken!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The future shorts website and Youtube channel are great. They showed an excellent selection of short films at the Little theatre this week in Bath. One film - made in Bristol also uses stop motion. Again the idea and technique have been taken further than usual.



Lastly I have been interested in 'light writing' for a while. The technique relies on long exposures from a locked off camera with someone drawing with a bright light or touch etc. If offers an inoffensive way of adding graffiti to a building! There are plenty of great examples with this effect but this movie adds the technique of stop motion too. Stunning.



Keep blogging, Mike J

Audio processing - tips and tricks

We have been working recently with Apple's Soundtrack Pro version 2.0. I have used version 1 a lot in the past and I really liked it. The new version has more features and I have to admit that I have found it more difficult to pick my way around it. We also had quite a few crashes - I don't know if its was bad luck or bugs. But it was frustrating.

One area that is impressive with Soundtrack is the noise removal and normalising functions. These are very nicely explained by Genius DV.

This article covers normalising, this one noise removal.

A more basic option is to use the amazing 'levelator'. This free application available in Mac, PC and Linus, optimises an audio file. Once downloaded and installed files are dragged to a panel in the centre of the screen. There are no controls/prefs. It just works saving a file next to the original one with the addition of the extension.output. Very neat. It works a treat on speech based audio. Its fast too.

Short films

Virgin media have just run a short film competition. I really liked the winner - black hole and we've watched and discussed it in class. What about the shortlist? Since we are not doing animation I have spent more time looking at the live action shorts.

Since I am currently running a module called 'planning a film' with the aim of writing and preparing to film a short (5 - 8 minutes long). Its interesting to look at the winner - Black Hole and the runners up.

Black hole Competition winner as chosen by the judges



5 bricks high (Short listed)



Butterface (Short listed)



The calling (Short listed)



Elevator music (Short listed)



The hobbyist (winner of the the People's choice) (Short listed)



What do you think of these? Can we draw any conclusions from the short list?

Interestingly none were highly rated by the visitors to the Virgin Media website. Only Black hole was listed on the most viewed selection!

Lastly Virgin Media have now up some details about the filming and the filmmakers on the website. It make interesting reading too.

manipulation of provided material

All the FD students were provided with an interview, some vox pops and a poetry performance. They had to edit and create an interesting radio package with these elements. The edit had to be completed in 3 hours.

Sean's edit



James's edit



Jessie's



Laura's



Megan's



Chris's



Hannah's



Richard' s



Fiona's



Ciaran's



Nathan's



Matt's

Portable computing - the LAPSTICK!

In Fridays effective learning session we explored the idea of student 2.0. I would like to recap some of the ideas I worked through.

Some of the students had laptops - most would like one. But they are expensive and its quite possible to do your studying without one. However its nice to have a personal computing environment within which to work. So I proposed the lapstick idea.

Using a 2 - 4 gig USB stick you can load a number of applications, then run these via whichever machine at the University you happen to be working at. Then when at home you can continue working in the same environment on your desktop machine. With USB sticks now costing a mere £10 this makes it particularly cheap and convenient. But how do you do this?

First you have to consider the 'platform' issue. Namely WINDOWS or APPLE MAC. At Bathspa we use a mixture - Macs in the labs, mostly PCs (but not exclusively) in the Library.

Starting with the PC option. You need to first download a program that will permit you to run apps from a USB stick. Then load the apps as well. Fortunately someone has done all the leg work for you. You can download the whole package - including a selection of applications wrapped in the application that will allow you to piggy back on the 'host' PC. Visit portableapps.com . There you can download the standard suite - later deleting any applications you don't want. The whole process takes about 20 mins. If you want to do this, do it on a PC. The key application is the portable version of firefox.

Now the Mac version - in some ways this is easier since Macs have permitting this way of working for ages. You need to just find the individual applications you want, download and install on the USB stick. You will find them at free smug.org. I would suggest that you start with the portable version of Firefox . For Media students I would suggest that you add the VLC media player, Audacity - the audio editor and Open Office - word processing etc.

Of course it would be great if we didn't have to run different version of firefox across the platforms. So that it wouldn't matter if weere using firefox on a PC then on a Mac. The browser and be consistent. Well it might be possible. More next time.

More FD blogs

Some more blogs have been set up here are the names and links:

Here is hannah's blog.

Here is chris's blog.

Here is Sean's blog.

Here is Nathan's blog.

Here is Laura's blog.

Here is James's blog.

Here is Ciran's blog.

Here is Richard's blog.

Here is Fiona's blog.

Phew! that should be all of the group. Now you should subscribe to each others logs in your Google readers.

Here is a video from Youtube that might help you. Good luck.

Mike J

welcome to the new FD bloggers!

After last weeks session on setting up blogs here are the URL's of the FD students. Why don't you visit and put a comment on them?

Matts blog . Fantastic start Matt and a great example to the others! Here are Matt's audio projects.

The vox pop



The Cojack interview



Jessie's blog

When I have the other blog addresses I will add them. In the meanwhile you have to confirm your email address now with DIVSHARE before you can share your files etc. I need the EMBED codes to place the players in a post - like I have with Matt's.

Mike J