Final Perception on 212mc

The 212MC interactive media module has to be the longest running module, which went right through three seasons, without it being running for the most part of it. From the beginning of October we had our first lecture with Steve Dawkins and watched the infamous “Man with a Camera” movie that is directed by the legendary Dziga Vertov.  Dziga Vertov was an unknown Russian man to many of us media production students in the beginning, even though he is the main man who bought many shots and concepts we see in our daily lives and present Hollywood cinema. Point of view (POV) was a camera angle that is used in many movies that engages the viewers in the main characters perspective, that keeps the audience engaged through the movie which is a concept used in the 1929 movie by Dziga Vertov. To think that a movie full of camera shots, that made no sense to the majority that were watching it can have such an influence in our cinematography. After watching the hour movie for the first time, we all thought it had to be the most tedious film we have ever had to go watch, but when thinking about it from a media point of view on our discussion after the movie, we all realised that the most lifeless movie had meaning behind everything especially considering it was filmed back in 1929; 80 years ago. After our first Interactive lecture, the class got cancelled and postponed to term two which led us to forget about the legendary Russian with the most tedious film, but had a whole lot of meaning. In our second term a lovely new lecturer came to the rescue for the course that meant it had to go on again in a new term, new room and new teaching methods. From the first lecture, I personally regretted taking the class but after term two came across and the teaching methods were diverted 180 degrees, I thought I would have a shot at this course since a computer background is essential and key to have in the media world. Adobe Flash was the program that we had to learn how to use, and I must say it was really confusing and I didn’t know much about the program when we first got introduced to it in the beginning of the course. Although some of my classmates had experience with the program, there were a certain few including me that had no clue about the program. To see how far I have came across is a great achievement and realised that nothing is hard if you put your mind into things. We first started with basic features such as drawing lines, making faces and getting use to enabling simple buttons, which were hard to understand at first nevertheless only time got us used to the program and the functions it had to offer. After a couple of weeks of flash workshops and when most of the class got the hang of using the program, we started making mock ups of what our final piece should look like, with scenes linking with one another, Buttons around our scenes that take us to the next page. The mock ups that were published at the end of the workshop were hard to complete since It seemed impossible to remember all the steps to get to the final point, therefore we had to start memorizing and jotting down important information that would get us to that point, or let our object move from one end of the screen to another. Flash seemed impossible at that point for me to get my head round, but in the end I found it was much easier to use than the first time I glanced at it. Along with all the workshops to remember and work through, we had an online blog using www.wordpress.com to blog our daily inputs on what we have learnt, and what we are doing in class and reflect on every other day or whenever you have spare time. I am extremely pleased that we were introduced to blogging in our “Interactive media” class, due to the fact that I had to produce another two blogs for other modules, which were easy to open and was already in the habit of blogging once in a while whenever I had the spare time to let my creative juices flow onto the keyboard and to the open world wide web. As we were blogging as much as we can, we had to start our final projects that had to consist of still shots, which take you from one scene to another with an engaging story that had to be broadcasted to the class. Since I have been traveling back and forth from Liverpool to Coventry for the weekends, I have come up with the idea to interpret a train station into my interactive piece.  Although a train can be extremely long at times, a lot of time and effort was spent thinking on the train, until I thought of an idea to incorporate a mother losing her daughter, which we have been learning a lot about lately to give the story a little twist. With Shannon Matthew’s evil mum in the tabloids last month, that gave me a completely broad image of how bad it is to lose a child and made me want to interpret that concept into my final work. My final idea at first gave me the opportunity to use a camera to take my still photographs and a marantz to capture real environmental sound to give my artifact a realistic edge. Although everything may seem to come along just fine, when your trotting along to your location which in my case is the train station, I got stopped by the national rail security which actually kicked me out of the station for violating there no taping conduct inside the station, which completely blew my whole project for me. With the blow to where the sun don’t shine has hit me and ruined my whole idea, I had to incorporate another idea which was to use images from www.flickr.com to give a high quality still images to import into my artifact since I was not allowed to capture my first shot of the train station. I have learnt that even though I had my hopes high for going around the city and taking still images, I did not have a plan B, which made me panic at the time, but that can be taken as a lesson for future reference. With all my shots chosen off the flikr website, it was time to import it all into scenes with a detailed script, and sound effects in the background to give my short story a true feel for the missing girl. With flash being as complicated as it could be at time, when it was time to import all my photos, with the sound effects and text to all follow, I realized that Adobe Flash sometimes does not do what you want it to do at times, which leads you to closing the program down and opening it back up, doing exactly you were doing last time, but always seems to be a miracle when it’s working the second time around, which is frustrating when you just want something to work and look good. I also found the concept of using new effects confusing which I looked at many from http://www.actionscript.org/, but never got the chance to actually get them to work which is disappointing, but with much practice with flash eventually get to the point where one day can incorporate these effects into future artifacts. With my blogs updated more or less regularly on word press and my workbook reflecting on all problems, achievements and everything that I have learned through these past terms, it all looks pretty satisfying to look at the end result. I started the course knowing nothing about flash in the beginning and have now developed an artifact with a blog reflecting upon it and a well-established presentable workbook. I must say I have achieved something in this module when looking back to the first day of lectures with Steve Dawkins. Overall as I am looking at my final piece, to be honest i never thought I would ever get it done, and really got the hang of the once “complicated” program, and would take my experience and the background I have in flash now and advance it a little bit further, by trying to add more complex effects and even more artifacts to improve my skills, and one day be better than my class mate Luke Jones’s final piece. The more I have been using the program, the easier it was for me to function and maneuver around the program to do what I want it to do. I would like to give a special thanks to our module leader, Mez Packer who came to the rescue and saved us which looked the most dull module I would have ever taken, and came out from this module on Wednesday 11^th February with a full workbook, a updated online blog, this essay to reminisce upon and a fully working flash artifact with all the recommended requirements. Thanks.