In progress

During my research I came across an amazing platform called Codecademy which is loaded with helpful learning tutorials.  This website offers many popular programming languages such as HTML, Python, Java etc. It has plenty of positive reviews and feedback on social media. Codecademy is free service offering course for basic programming.  However there is a chance to sing up for subscription service Codecademy Pro for $19.99/mo for advanced learning.

I love using this website as it is easily understandable and has been very benefical so far :)

(https://www.codecademy.com)

Inspiration II.

Second part of my project beside the interactive website are videos filmed during my trip to the US in February. The main filmed character is Kool G Rap rapper. I want to capture one whole day in his daily life. I think I chose the best day for filming that will be him performing in February at the event. The video will capture behind the scene from the gig and also his personal commentary.

One of the inspirational video is this ‘everyday’ by Gustav Johansson:

Another video will be containing short in interviews with the artists and people attending the show mix with cut outs of NYC scenery.

Inspiration for this video is coming from the music video by 30 Seconds to Mars – City of Angeles:

Inspiration I.

In this post I want to focus on inspiration for my interactive website. I want to design simple yet engaging website. I prefer minimalist web design with clean lines and well-arranged menu.

The photography, videos, words and interactive elements help the audience engage better with the content.

My main webpage layout will be interactive map. The map will show New York with the places important in the hiphop history. These places displayed as little clickable icons will open up with the show story about certain event or artist. The design colour scheme will be basics – black, grey, white with the hint of red.

I really like Jason Davies: World Airports geometric design. It looks simple and minimalist.

(https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/airports/)

I plan to create map by myself using the Illustrator and Photoshop programs however I will need to follow up map temple in order to have a final result responding to realistic proportions. For I think this image will be my base for redesigning.

(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3K33tFJNvwmozIf4BzYTFsxiJ2F3A3VYdLo9pxVpZIqRqBCP7dPw5yFafBlKuVHlBqa2GyDm392aYYkhyphenhyphenT6LvwofN-wu48unyWzD3c1EIqTPP4eStNlUtQ2b9jnd0Mt4sFeWcZmvGAGjp/s640/NYC-MAP-safety+for+tourists.bmp)

Another website which I find very inspiring is http://www.zazzle.com/10th.  

The video background is beautiful and not distracting visitor from the content. I think I can apply this feature too using some footage capturing street of NYC.  I like the fact that menu is located at the top of the page

(http://www.zazzle.com/10th)



(source: http://www.scribblelive.com/blog/2015/12/10/24-best-interactive-websites-2015/)

Sound

I have planned to incorporate sound effects into main website layout - possibly into hyperlinked icons and background music too.

I will use Adobe Audition CC program for audio editing, which was introduced to us in the lecture couple weeks ago. I found it easy to understand and work with.

(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsPV77u8iLmM99KbI_zV80uWE529NesbRU4EvRtAZ7q1evT5gwio1oL8KiBJUAPPOZE6N6lTF3-VGDRTiYLCPM1rgw4ol0Ep3G_Gz66RG0EY15MvoIz6RF-3vX8EAPobo90g-LeKrauEQ/s1600/au_splash.png)

On other hand I have easy access to use Apple produced Logic Pro X music production software. It is massively popular among professional music producers and engineers.

Logic is the best for creating music itself but Audition is mainly for editing audio files. Therefore Audition is my go to application for this task.  Audition is great for changing files format, simply mastering tracks or very useful noise removal tool.

(Recording studio, South-West London

Picture taken by me)

For the most of the music in my videos I have to select only copyright free music.  My main sources are SoudClound (https://soundcloud.com) and Audiolibrary provided by YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music).

SoundClound has dedicated copyright free section collecting hundreds of music files. Website also offers advanced search tool for this type of music. One of my favourite is CopyrightFreeNetwork SoundClound profile.

(Screenshot - https://soundcloud.com/cfnetworks)

During our lecture discussing this topic we have been introduced http://www.mobygratis.com website were artist Moby offers his music copyright free for students or non-profit filmmakers. I am Moby fan personally so I think I will definitely take some advantage of this opportunity.

(Screenshot - http://www.mobygratis.com)

Lastly I want to upgrade my camera equipment and purchase professional camera microphone. As I plan to film interviews for this project I think it would be beneficial to have  external microphone in the future too.  After I have done some research I am trying to decide between external sound recorder (Zoom H1) and RØDE VideoMic GO On Camera Microphone. 

The external RØDE microphone is widely popular and has great result producing good quality recording. It doesn’t require any batteries and it is easily portable.

The sound recorder allow user to have control over the sound recording while shooting the video. This technique is called ‘Dual Sound Recording’.

Presentation

Over the weekend I have been working on my presentation for this module. I will be presenting on Thursday 15^th December afternoon in class. I am hoping to express and share my motivation and inspiration about my project and also include parts from my research.

Design of the presentation is planned to be visually interesting and entertaining. I included a few pictures from my previous visits to NYC. These pictures are mainly from studio recording sessions and capturing the artists who I want to work with for my narrative.

(studio recording session

 New Jersey USA, October 2015)

In my presentation I mentioned a few projects I worked on in the past.  Describing my previous experiences will help audience to understand main idea for the project.

(Noreaga and his manager

New Jersey USA, October 2015)

1/12/16 Workshop - making webpage

In this week workshop we learnt how to create html website. We started by creating and defining basic html fine in program called TextWrangler. There are many simple and free programs which we can use for this task for example: Worded, Notepad or TextEdit. 
We practiced our html typing by following tutorials on www.w3schools.com. This webpage has plenty useful tutorials which I will definitely need for my project.

I will be using KUNET Webserver to host my project website. In order to do that I needed to set up my account on http://kunet.kingston.ac.uk website using my KU username and password. For this step I chose FileZilla program to log in. After a few unsuccessful attempts when server was not responding I finally made it work.

Now this is my webpage http://kunet.kingston.ac.uk/k1655928/.

In next couple of weeks I plan to design my website and have it almost ready so after my visit to NYC I can concentrate on editing photographs and videos only. 

Changes & Details

I decided to do some changes to my final projects. The original idea was based on my personal travelling experience and travel tips. However I want to concentrate on hiphop in NYC and its history, affect, artists and future. I have been working with small british-american hiphop music label for over 1 year now and I had amazing opportunities to be part of the many projects and events.

The music label Full Mettle was founded by Kool G Rap, called by many "The Godfather of gangster rap" or "He's your favourite rapper's rapper". His music lyric are full of stories of the daily struggles faced on the harsh streets of inner city New York. His unique style and storytelling abilities wrapped with his cunning lyricism has come to inspire artists from the likes of Big Pun, 2Pac, Jay-Z and Nas to name but a few.

I want to keep original idea for interactive map however now it will be showing places from where the most influential rapper coming from including short stories. I am planing to cover around 15-20 artists. I want to keep map design simple (probably black, red, white colour scheme) with icons showing content after double-clicking on them. This map will be opening page of the website including few other hyper links containing other content.

(source: http://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-vector-new-york-city-boroughs-map-152208935.jpg)

This second part of the project are interview videos and footage of NYC (I am travelling there in January 2017 and I also have some footage already from my previous visits). Inspiration is coming from 30 Seconds to Mars music video City of Angels where various artists and other people talking about Los Angeles and their love for this city. 

I am thinking about doing 3 videos. First will be capturing my visit to NYC in the January where I am travelling with my work team to record music album with one of the UK hiphop artist. We have planned many studio recording sessions so I thought it would be interesting to see production of music album nowadays. Then other video will be interviews with different artists and pictures of NYC through the history of hiphop. The last one will be shortly capturing Kool G Rap's journey in the music industry.

Project Proposal

Project Proposal ‘My Perspective of New York City’

 Concept

‘My Perspective of New York’ is working title for my final project based on personal travelling experiences. It is an interactive story consisting of a website and a few short videos.  Website will also include interactive map of the New York City with places what I visited and have a personal attachment to them.

Target audience is same age as me mostly and I would like them to have same experience. 

Project will record my journey from last three visits to New York City and also capture more footage and images on my future one in January 2017.

Project Requirements

                   The equipment

–      MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)

–      Nikon D3300 + 18-55mm DX Nikkor Lense

–      Adobe Photoshop, Ilustrator, Premier Pro CS6

–      Final Cut Pro 10.1.4

The assets

-       Graphics – Design of the website – Layout, interactive map of New York City, video postproduction and edit

-       Photographs – from my personal gallery, portraits, new City photographs taken in January 2017

-       Video footage – NYC video footage, People’s personal opinions footage

-       Audio – Backround music to the videos

 Project description

The website’s main page will be interactive map showing places what I visited and I have found interesting and also some must-see spots in NYC.  I want to keep website simple what will make it mobile-friendly too. Website will be built on the visual interactive design mostly however there will be little stories included to the images.

Storyboard

The idea for this project is coming from my personal attachment to NYC.  I visited this place two times for work purposes last year and once for holidays in February this year. Both visits were really special to me and it is the reason why I want to share this experience.  I want to create platform where I will post my personal recommendations of attractive places, must-sees and my favourite hidden spots. The main page will be space for interactive map of Manhattan with this places highlighted including short written stories. 

Second part of the project is the video of the NYC with the couple of short interviews with the people living and working there.  The video participants are artists and working professionals who are residents in NYC or whom came there to achieve their dreams and goals. I want this video be motivational and inspirational to wider audience.

Adobe Photoshop I.

The best way to learn is practice -  as much as possible. Last weekend weather was perfectly sunny and warm so my friend and I decided to go out to take some pictures as a practice material.
I purposely took couple blurred photographs in order to sharpen them later in Photoshop.

Original picture

Edited picture

In this case I tried to sharpen image using High Pass Filter. 

Firstly, I converted original background layer to Smart Object. This way we keep all further steps separate to original image without making permanent changes.

Then I selected High Pass Filter option what highlighted the edges of the picture. High Pass is displayed in Radius Pixels Value. We need to be really careful and not to be heavyhanded with this feature. Honestly I think I bit overdid it here as the edges are way too radiant.

The next step is to blend High Pass Filter into Overlay what can be found under Smart Filter option and double-clicking on Blending Option. There is a few options for the blending intensity.

The final result looks overall sharpen but the certain parts are not defined and overexposed.

Source: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/sharpen-high-pass/

The Beginnings

Past few weeks we have been practicing Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator programs during our workshops which are considered essential across the professional designers, photographers, editors etc. Personally I have been using editing program called Pixelmator which I found easy to learn and use now on the daily basics. This application is cheaper (£22.90) and therefore much more cost effective than Photoshop (monthly subscription around £9.99/year £89.00). The quality of the Pixelmator is comparative to Photoshop. Pixelmator can do everything what Photoshop does but it does not work another way around. On the other hand, Pixelmator can be great tool for the beginners and a good first step into editing pictures. Photoshop is more powerful and therefore suitable for professional use.

I have used Photoshop for my work in the past however Illustrator is completely new program for me. Honestly I find this application more difficult and challenging but it brings new ways and options into designing process.

Consequently I have been looking for the best learning sources and tutorials. Firstly, www.lynda.com - education platform which provide wide range of tutorials and teaching courses online is extremely helpful. The videos are very well made with attention to the details. However this is paid subscription service what can be not so affordable for students. Luckily, on Youtube hundreds of videos tutorials are free and easy accessible to everyone.

(Video made of layers in Adobe Premier, 7/10/2016)

(Eadweard Muybridge, Running Cat, 1887)