Task 3: Planning and Creating a Simple Piece of Digital Media

Target Audience

My target audience will be a number of my peers. Therefore, I thought about what I would like to see in a presentation and concluded that I should create something that appears fun and attractive. An interesting composition will be needed, as well as visual aids that explain what I will be discussing. I will have to create a theme for my presentation and stick to the same theme throughout the three slides. 

Colour Swatches

Thinking about the design of the presentation, I first considered the colours I should be using. I wanted to use colours that referred to Egypt, which linked to the topic of my project. I therefore began to look at the colours typically used in Ancient Egyptian art and created some colour swatches from this. As Ancient Egyptians would have a limited supply of colours they were available to, a lot of similar colours arose. Most were earthly colours: mixtures of browns, reds, golds and yellows. There were also a few dark, dim blues and blacks. However, while I was researching this I realised that there were few bright colours being used. I therefore decided it would be most suitable to stick to earthly colours when creating my presentation.

Backgrounds

Like with the colours, I wanted a background that linked with Ancient Egypt. I first found a background that contained attractive hieroglyphics (seen right). However, I felt that the colour of this background (a dark black) wasn’t suitable, as I had decided to stick to earthly colours. I then began to think of what else linked to Egypt and came up with the idea of using papyrus paper. I found an attractive texture of papyrus, which was coloured a light brown, and decided that this looked simple and effective enough to use for my presentation background.

 

 

Title Text 

I wanted my title text to be bold and stand out, yet I also wanted it to fit with the style of my presentation. I experimented with a number of different fonts (my favourites seen below) and eliminated the ones that didn’t quite work.  Some appeared too fancy and complex to work (font number one and five), while some didn’t fit the style I was looking for (four and six). My favourite typeface, however, is font number two, as it is simplistic and looks attractive, fitting perfectly with the background I had selected. There are so many fonts to choose from that finding the perfect one became a quite difficult part of the development process. 

Composition

I drew a number of sketches to decide the most attractive and suitable composition for my PowerPoint presentation. I decided that it might look effective if I had a “band” across the top and bottom of my slide (seen in black below). I would use a picture, which related to Egypt, as the band, therefore giving balance to my composition. Next, I would write my title text – in the font that I decided upon and a large text – and make it stand out. My information would be placed below this, while a picture would be placed to the right, so to hopefully breaking up the text. 

Composition Step 2

I added a background and Egyptian images across the top and bottom of my slide, which I felt really added balance. I then created a text box, positioning it in the middle of the slide, and added various effects to make it stand out. However, I felt that this appeared too simplistic, so edited it slightly, as seen in step three.

 

Composition Step 3 

The faded the background out slightly, so that the other pieces of the slide stood out more vividly, while I also added a title text. I then stretched the text box. I was pleased with the stage. 

Composition Final Step

Adding the finishing touches, this is the result I received.

Presentations

 

 3D Animation

The Task 

-- During my first lesson in "Communication Skills for Digital Media", we were put into groups and given a subject to research. The subject my group was given was "3D Animation". Together, we had to prepare a presentation then deliver it the following week. Presentation complete, here is my reflection on our group’s delivery.

Working effectively as a group

-- I felt that, despite our troubles, we did work effectively as a group. We held a number of group discussions before the presentation and created our PowerPoint together. By working as a group, we came up with the points to discuss and what to include in our PowerPoint. No problems occurred during the initial group meetings and no group member became missing, therefore I felt we worked effectively together. However, maybe if we had arranged more group meetings and discussed the presentation in more detail we would have been more successful.

Contributing to the task

-- We each talked about a different slide in the presentation, while we created the PowerPoint as a group; therefore no one was left doing nothing, we each contributed. 

  

Problems

-- The problems we encountered developed in the presentation. Very little problems occurred during our group discussions and the making of the PowerPoint. It was only during the presentation where things seemed to go downhill, mainly because of our lack of rehearsal.

Research and content

-- We decided, as a group, to carry out our initial research individually. In our first group discussion, we thought about types of 3D animation and decided to look further into the making and design of the popular Toy Story 3. Hopefully, with this topic, everyone would find what we were saying more interesting. 

   At first, we decided to look specifically at one character (Slinky Dog), showing the design process behind it, starting from the influence of the animation character's design (James Industries' “Slinky” toy), to the final outcome. However, at our next group meeting, a member of our team had found an interesting step-by-step process of creating a single frame for Toy Story 3. After reading this guide, we felt that this would be more effective to discuss. But we didn’t just want to jump straight into Toy Story, so at first we decided to discuss the history of 3D animation.

Improvement

-- To improve the group’s preparation we could have rehearsed our presentation. Because we didn’t rehearse, a number of issues developed during our presentation. For example, our group became confused at who was supposed to be talking about one certain slide, which arose a few problems during our presentation. By rehearsing our presentation beforehand we could have stopped the issues that arose.  

Visual Aids

 -- We did create a PowerPoint that made effective use of visual aids, displaying images as we discussed them. However, to improve we could have added more style to our visual aids, as they appeared quite basic.