Assignment 3 : Messing with clay

I think today was the most amusing day of my life. Even if it is for the sake of this NM module...

I bought 7 tubes of blue plasticine and a styrofoam ball and started moulding my blue CNM mascot early in the morning. The night before I was making the graduation cap along with the scroll, after a long day of scientific observations done for anothercross faculty project.

I was sitting in a discreet corner of the school, minding my own business with the blue doll, hoping that none of my friends would see me and think that I have finally lost my mind doing projects in school. The main challenge creating the doll is to make sure that it actually stands and will not topple when I get to Dr Millie's office. I have made an appointment the day I decided to use the 'clay doll' idea because I believe Dr Millie is one of the key 'front person' of the department and it would be fantastic to have her in my Ken Burns video.

Equiped with my blue clay doll and my DSLR, I headed for Dr Millie's office in time for our appointment before her meeting. I wasn't in the best shape to do the project because I was ill and made a few mistakes here and there before I got the right angle. Thanks to Dr Millie who was really patient with me and even told me to take care after the shoot was done.



Then I headed to the CNM conference room, the set for the rest of my shoot. Because it was the mid semester break, a lot of the academic staff were not in. I went to all the office I could and managed to find some of the professors in. Rodney, one of the research fellows offered to help too. I also managed to get Alex and Dr Chung Peichi to help me 'mould' my doll.

Basically, instead of getting them to 'mould' my doll' I did a reverse effect to make things easier. Thus, they will not mould the doll from a ball into a doll, but from a doll into a ball. In other words, they are destroying my clay doll to what it was originally.

The final effect would only be obvious when the final product is done. Meanwhile, here's how some of the photographs ( frame of the video ) will look like.





Interesting, isn't it?

Please look forward to the final video.

Assignment 3: First ideas first

We have to present a storyboard for the Ken Burns video that we would have to present after the mid semester break. There is one to be done for each CNM and NUS. It should be like a promotional video and thus must reflect some good parts about NUS/CNM.

My idea for the CNM started from the slogan that I thought up while looking at the 3 alphabets. Like the past few slogans that I have created for CNM freshmen camp and events like that, I like to use the 3 alphabets to create a slogan.

"Creating and Moulding"

That was what I wanted as my slogan. So what could CNM be moulding and creating?

"Creating aNd Moulding your Future"

This came up to mind and I thought it was a good slogan to work on. Thus, based on the idea of moulding, I came up with this idea of CNM moulding us from a little clay ball into a clay doll ( that is more 'in shape' to work in society )

This can also reflect how we, as freshmen, came into NUS without knowing a thing, and through our major, Communications and New Media, we are moulded into people that can stand for themselves in the media industry.

So instead of using various transitions, the bulk of the video would be based on the immense amount of work done by taking a lot of photographs and even making props.

This is the storyboard for the CNM Ken Burns video.



Then for the NUS video, I want to base it on another form of wordplay by using the alphabets 'NUS' to replace nouns that end with '-ness'. I wanted to use words like colourfulness to describe the colourful culture, 'conduciveness' to describe the facilities that NUS have.

For this, I would need to use a software like Adobe Premiere Pro to create good transitions so that the video would look impressive. The choice of font for the text is also important.

I guess for the NUS video, there is nothing much to talk about until the final product is out.

So look forward to it.

Assignment 2 : A day in NUS

This was a very rushed piece of work. Nevertheless I tried my best when I took the photographs. Afterall, Dr Julian do know that I took the Digital Photography module and I must live up to the name. Or at the very least not mess up the composition and colouring of the photograph.

To me, whenever such an assignment comes up, my main concern would be how to differentiate my idea from the rest. It might not be true but I sincerely believe that design is all about creativity and a component of that would be to stand out from the rest. No one would be interested to look at your work if someone else's was better.

I tried my best to add some fanciful borders and ornaments onto the website along with the encoded photographs I took. The disk space restriction was a tough one to work around but I did what I could to reduce the size as much as possible without turning the pictures into thumbnails. Afterall, it is part of the requirement that the pictures are of a decent size.

My main idea was to create a poem around school, describing hidden messages around the school that students have failed to notice. This is inspired by the Da Vinci code where different pictures, could have zillions of meanings, depending on how you look at it and what you choose to perceive from it.

Therefore, when one look at the images that I have on my site, it would not seem obvious as to what I was talking about. But the similarity in terms of the forms and shapes that were present in each picture would link to tell the story.

The link is still currently not working because I have some problems uploading it onto the correct server. Will link this when it is up.

Assignment 1: MDL website

With the CSS crash course that I had from the various online tutorials, and with the help of my group mate who have had more experience with Adobe Dreamweaver than me, we managed to made the changes that we want to the MDL website.

Firstly, the toolbar at the top was changed into a film strip. We did this because from what we know, one of the key things that the students go to the Media Development Laboratory was to borrow video making and editing equipment. A film strip became the core of the design with colour over the icons when the cursor hover overs it. The idea was thought up by Raemarie, my group mate and I thought it was a fantastic idea. I did the first version of the film strip using computer graphics, but we managed to find a stock image of the film strip that was free for all to used and used it.

Because the background was too bare, I found a stock image and blurred it and used it as a background for the website's frontpage.

It was not easy for 3 CNM students who have little experience with web design software to do up all the formating for a webpage like this. I attempted to create flash tutorials to replace the word ones that was found on the website but I wasnt able to create a good one that is comprehensive enough for students whom might be visiting the site.

Slightly before the deadline, we realise the display problem when we view the website on different browsers. It was a panic rush trying to sort the problem out and we eventually solved it using a function on Dreamweaver.

We made it in time. And I followed Dr Julian's instructions and made a new URL mirror for it.

Check it out at: http://mabraezy.mooo.com

The name is from... Mab(el) + Rae+Z ( hi) Y(un) = mabraezy

The others might thought it was pretty lame. Well, I thought it was pretty clever.