17th Entry

This week’s lecture was dedicated to talking about the coursework. The coursework is to basically design a website for an online shop selling CDs. First we need to have a slash page as the first page of the website built with flash. This then leads to the main page which connects to three additional sub page. One a video with edited sound, another containing content with at least one paragraph and a final ASP page which draws content from a database. We need to use one of the Intensivstation templates and need to insure that the website is properly coded using independent XHTML strict and a CSS style sheet. During the lecture a sheet came round with half of our marks for our blog. Daniel ended with one final slide about text in multimedia.

The tutorial was on working with images, sound and video in Dreamweaver. First we inserted a pre made button below the two existing buttons providing a link and a text alternative to the image. We then experimented with alignment, borders and vertical and horizontal space on the button. We then moved onto sound and video, which in effect was the same thing since they were both included in the video. Once the video was embedded we experimented with different media player parameters to add or change some of the default values such as auto start, controls, volume and horizontal and vertical alignment.

It was really nice to have the whole hour dedicated to explaining the coursework. It’s quite a big coursework with a lot of different requirements so was a nice way to avoid confusion later down the line. As far as coursework goes it seems quite interesting and a nice way to test what we have learnt over the past months. Not too confident with sound and video editing so hopefully they will be covered in one of the next lectures or tutorials. This weeks tutorial went well, bit boring though since I finished in 20 minutes and had nothing to do for the remaining 40, but I guess its better being too easy than too hard!

For my independent reading this week I’ve got some Audacity tutorials and a how to guide on Windows Movie Maker.

1. Audacity tutorials

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials

Last accessed: 25/02/08

2. Windows Movie Maker how to guide

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx

Last accessed: 25/02/08