Final Artefact
I have really enjoyed this module because I have had to stretch my creativity to try to make an interactive artefact. I struggled for while to think of a way to make my artefact interactive, but in the end I think I made the right choice. I started out with four routes, or journeys, and I had to choose the one which was the most interesting and the most accessible to me. These four routes were:
- My route to work
- The route from my bedroom to my car
- The route from our holiday villa at Center Parcs to the Main Plaza
- The route from the car park to the Ricoh Arena on matchday
After careful consideration on each, I dismissed idea three, mainly because of the issue of accessibility. I was going to Center Parcs only for a weekend in November, meaning that I had to get all of my footage whilst there with no option to reshoot. As much as I would have liked to used this as my final artefact, it just wasn’t plausible. My route to work was an interesting one. I did learn a lot about the route I take to work during our first exercise where we had to make a derive. When I stopped to take pictures and record sounds, I was quite amazed at what I saw and heard that I don’t normally see due to having my head set to get to work and wearing headphones on the way. However, I felt that I had covered most of this route in the derive I created and there was not much else I could do with it in the terms of interactivity. My second idea was thought up mainly for me to test Microsoft’s Photosynth program. I had heard of it but never actually used it so I thought up a very short and easily accessible route for me to take images of and implement them into Photosynth. I was quite impressed with the results, however if I was more skilled at photography, I could use this program to my advantage. However, I still didn’t think I could use Photosynth as my final artefact, which left me with my final idea, which was the one I was favouring over the rest from the start.
I am a season ticket holder at the Ricoh Arena so I know the route from the car park to the Arena very well, as I take it most weekends. Using what I had available to me, I used my mini tripod and DV camera in my car to record the road route of the journey on a non matchday. I then used a HD handheld digital camera to record the actual walk part of the route on a matchday. This gave me the chance to show the difference between a matchday and a non matchday. When using the handheld camera, I had more flexibility on where I could film, for example in places where the car cannot get such inside the Arena concourse, up the vomitory (horrible sounding posh word for the steps up into the stadium area), the scoreboard and the teams coming out of the tunnel.
Once I had all of the required footage, I edited it together into the 21 separate video files for each section of the journey as shown in the Google Map posted on the blog. This is where I encountered my first problem. I was going to try to make a navigable flash file incorporating buttons and action scripts. To do this, I converted the 21 video files into the .flv flash file format that is compatible with Adobe Flash. Having used flash last year for the first time, I could only remember the very basics. I knew what I wanted to do with my artefact, but I couldn’t quite tweak the setting to match my artefacts needs. It then occurred to me that once I have imported all 21 flash video files into one navigable flash file, it was going to have a large file size, which would take a very long time to load over the internet. It was for that reason that I decided to change the medium for my final artefact and use a HTML based website using CSS to style each page and image hotspots and hyperlinks to link between each video. I am confident with Adobe Dreamweaver having used it before coming to University, last year in 112MC and for my Advantage Module last year. I made a webpage for each flash video, embedded the video and included hyperlinks to the video that preceded it and followed it. I gained confidence in my final artefact when I was asked to show it to the rest of the seminar group, as a good example of interactivity. Overall, I think I made the right choice to use HTML and am very pleased with the outcome of my final artefact.
I have also been asked by my peers for assistance on this module, and I am happy to have been able to help:
The video I created to help:
The video I created to help:
I have learnt a lot on this module and I am happy that I have also been able to help out others with their problems. I have tested both the offline and online versions of my final artefact to check that all of the links work and direct the user to the correct places. All in all, I am happy with my final artefact and this blog and I look forward to getting my result.
