COMM 700 presentation in the books

Our COMM 700 presentations were on Tuesday afternoon. I thought that mine went well. A little bit about what we did: We were tasked with putting together a 12-to-17-minute presentation that would run in a loop at the Mac terminal you see there. We used Camtasia, a screen-recording program. My presentation was about 13 and a half minutes.

Each student was assigned a two-hour afternoon window to be present to answer questions. Three professors evaluated each project, and they showed up during that time to watch the presentation and talk to the student about it.

This was the first year for this new format, and I think it went well. I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do regarding the project. My COMM 701 work will go so much more smoothly as a result.

Printer friendly

My COMM 700 final project presentation is almost here, and I ordered some print work for a few of the pieces I’ll be showing.

I think everything turned out well for the purposes of the project, although I’ll be doing some tweaking with my client/dad before we get serious quantities printed. I like what we came up with.

A slightly different approach to video

When I started out working on my client’s promotional video, I had in mind one long introductory video of perhaps 4 to 5 minutes. This would touch on the highlights of his work and strengths as a consultant, and then finish up with some personal family stuff.

But, when I put together a shorter video with that footage for my web design class a few weeks ago, I found that I really liked the shorter approach.

So what I decided to do instead was build a 2-minute introductory video, which is this:

And I’m working on a series of shorter, topic-specific videos. Here’s the one on client relations.

Firebug!

A colleague showed me a fantastic utility for Firefox a while back, and it’s been a great help as I’ve been working on my websites.

Firebug lets you look at HTML elements that can be hard to spot, and even lets you edit and see what changes might do. For those inexperienced with code, such as my ownself, Firebug is an absolute lifesaver.

Cutting it out

I picked a main image for my web design project main page. Not to be too self-regarding, but it is of yours truly. My original image was something shot in our studio at work. My colleague Shannon and I were stand-ins for our staff photographer William, who wanted to nail down the lighting for a magazine shoot.

I wanted to cut out the top half of my profile, which isn’t too hard in PhotoShop CS5. This tutorial helped.

And voila.

I feathered the edges a bit too much, so this will need some refining. But it’s a start.

Web designing away

I’ve taken a few days off from posting (thanks to Thanksgiving and all), but I haven’t taken much time off from my digital media work.

My main focus has been web design. This has been my Bible:

 

I’ve been working on redesigning this site that I have been working on for my father, who is a consultant in the transit industry. I’m also working on the site for my web design class, which is going to link to this blog. It’s a work in progress as well.

Heading toward the home stretch

Thursday was our materials deadline for the COMM 700 project. I turned in my web design, resume, business card design, and PowerPoint presentation, as well as two videos. I’ll be updating and fine-tuning the web design and videos, but a lot of the bulk work, if you will, is done — and that’s a good feeling.

Also on Thursday, we were led through a Camtasia tutorial. Camtasia is a screen-recording tool that we can use to present our final project. It looks like a great program, and appears user-friendly enough to work well for the task at hand.

 

File management, content management, and the web

A couple of things I’ve learned while making my initial foray into web design:

• Planning and managing content organization are incredibly important.
• There are zillion little things that you’ll forget to do, even when building the simplest website.

Regarding point No. 2, I’m referring to navigation issues, lacking a favicon, stuff like that.

Regarding the first point, Smashing Magazine has a couple of well-put, relevant posts, one about planning and organizing content, and another on time-saving workflow tips.

In Living Kuler

So I am busy building a web design, which necessarily involves messing around with color quite a bit. If you’ve never checked out Adobe’s Kuler color site, do yourself a favor. Whoever invented it is a genius.

Editing the video

I’m using Final Cut Pro for the video portion of my project. It’s apparently out of date thanks to the release of Final Cut Pro X, but that’s a subject for another time.

In any event, I put together a rough cut of a 2 minute, 39 second promotional video for my client, a k a my dad. He liked it, which is great, but I’m making some tweaks to it (for one, the aspect ratio is off).

Here’s a brief cut from one of the interviews, in which my dad talks about the important points of client relationships.