Course Evaluation for Digital Media

Although I was a little wary about Digital Media when I first learned about the course, I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected to. It sounded impossible since I was so technologically impaired before taking this course, and the work did end up being hard. But I still had a great time messing around in the different programs such as PhotoShop and Flash. When I first made my poster, I realized that I had built up the work to be harder than it actually was. I became more confident with the skills I was learning how to use and I'm really happy I had the chance to learn more about this aspect of Radio and Television.

I think the lecture was helpful just to give us some background on Digital Media itself. It was good to know the history and reasons behind every aspect that we learned about and how they're used in day to day situations. The lab was helpful to teach me the basics of the programs we had to work with. It gave us an idea of the variety of tools we had right at our fingertips and lead us to explore further into everything we could do and work with.

I think that the lectures worked well for learning the background, but it seemed like it could've been improved in its format. Although it was a lot of fun to watch all the YouTube videos that served as examples of the ideas we were learning, it might've been more helpful to learn more about the programs we would use. For example, if we had learned about the different tools that PhotoShop had to offer and what they each did it might have been more helpful when we actually got to apply this in the labs. To improve the labs, I think we could have been more time efficient. We had to sit and watch the prof run the examples for the first hour of class even though it could've been done more quickly to give us more time to work through the tutorials. I would have learned more if I had more time to practice hands on with the programs while having the prof and lab assistant there to help me.

This course changed me in a number of ways. It changed my perspective on Digital Media and the type of work that it entails. Before I thought it only dealt with technical type stuff like creating computer software whereas now I realize it also includes making commercials, posters, animated film, websites, etc. When I first applied for RTA, I was set on doing broadcasting. Now that I've had a chance to learn more about the different options, I'm looking further into maybe staying in Digital Media or Audio Production. I realize that there's a whole world of possibilities for careers that would fall under this category and there were lots of things I enjoyed about working in Digital Media. I think it's helped to expand both my creative ability and improve my knowledge and skills with computer software. I am now able to think up my own projects and how I would interpret things differently from others. I can do anything I want through the software I've learned to use. Before coming to Ryerson, I had never worked with programs like Flash or DreamWeaver or even PhotoShop. Now I know how to efficiently work in these programs and make projects of my own. It's amazes me how technologically advanced I am after taking Digital Media!

The most important lesson I've learned from Digital Media is that I have the ability to learn and do anything that I set my mind to. As cheesy as it sounds, it's true. Before the course started, I was dreading how bad of a failure I would be when it came to animating a film or creating a simple poster. I had never worked with it and I built it up to be much worse than it actually was. Once I took the time to work with the software and explore all the tools that I had right at my fingertips, it was obvious that I could do anything I wanted to. This course has really helped me expand my personal skills and I really did love all the projects I accomplished [although I wasn't too happy spending a bajillion hours in the labs at the time]. The final products always made all the effort I put into them totally worth it.

Reflecting on Typography

For this open blog topic, I want to reflect on typography. I learned a lot about animation interactivity, and my favorite part about that topic was typography. I never realized how much work goes into animating a segment of words when I saw them before. Now when I look at small clips of animated speech, I know just how much effort someone had to put in to make that short 5 or 10 second animated film. Also, images that are made up with words need a lot of effort as well. I think it's awesome when I see a picture that's made completely out of words that relate to the overall image. I have a lot more respect for animators and anyone involved in graphics now. It's definitely not an easy job! Here are a few typographic images that I found and really liked.

Website pictures!

Some snapshots of the website that we created in class today!

Web 2.0 Characteristics

The five characteristics that define Web 2.0 are dynamic content, user contribution, social media, online applications, and harnessing collective intelligence. Dynamic content is organic and changes every second. It's basically a mash up of information. A real-world example of dynamic content would be the iPhone application that combines the yellow pages with Google maps. It makes it easier for the viewer to navigate their destination by seeing the address not only in writing but as well as on a map in relation to their location. User contribution is pretty self-explanatory. Outside viewers contribute their own information, ideas, creations, etc. into a website that allows other viewers to see their work. A real-world example of this, besides the obvious YouTube, would be eBay. eBay allows people to post products that they are trying to sell to other people. It also allows potential buyers to read the feedback these sellers have received in terms of their reliability with other customers. Users contribute to eBay in a variety of ways that allow a great amount of networking to happen. The third characteristic of Web 2.0 is social media. Social media is online media that provides opportunities for socializing, connecting, sharing, etc. The most popular forms of social media today would be networks such as facebook, myspace, and twitter. Each of these networks has unique ways that people can communicate with one another through the internet. Whether it be tagging someone in a picture, "poking" someone just for fun, or "liking" someone's status, there are a variety of ways that people are able to communicate through these massive networks. Online applications are the fourth characteristic of Web 2.0. These are applications that are generally thought of as things you would traditionally buy and install on to your computer. Using modern technology, people can now easily access this software through online applications and download it themselves right in the comfort of their own home. An example of an online application would be the Adobe Suite. A buyer can go onto the Adobe website and purchase a variety of packages that include different elements of their software such as Flash or Photoshop and pay right then and there. The software then automatically downloads with a few clicks of the mouse. This saves them the trouble of going out and buying a tangible version of the software in a CD form and having to install it all on their own. The final characteristic of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. This characteristic enhances our productivity and saves us time since it assigns keywords to content. A real-world example would be the ability to bookmark a web page. By bookmarking a particular website, one can easily navigate back to the information they had found there that was relevant to whatever they were researching. It saves a person the time it takes to find that website once again and he/she just has to simply click the bookmark to find the same information they had found before. In conclusion, technology has come a long way from what it used to be. It's ever changing and is becoming quite advanced with the various applications and networking abilities that people are able to use today. Web 2.0 became a huge step up from Web 1.0 with its interactivity and dynamic data. We can only imagine how advanced Web 3.0 will be in the future and the amazing abilities that technology will have.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider Flash Project

Artist Statement
My interactive ended up being completely different than what I had first expected. I was hoping to do a poem, but since the ones I wanted to use were copyrighted, that idea was definitely gone. I then thought about doing an interactive assignment that was similar to the example of the “Seven Deadly Sins”, but having it on the “Seven Natural Wonders of the World”. After playing around in Flash last class, I decided I wasn’t as keen on this idea either. That’s when I had the idea of animating a nursery rhyme.
I chose “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” because it was one of my favorite nursery rhymes growing up. I remember learning the hand motions to this famous nursery rhyme from my grandmother when I was a little kid. This inspired me to go outside your normal cartoonish animation and incorporate my own interpretation to the assignment. I felt it was a fun way to change things up a little bit, but I was worried about the amount of work it would entail.
I started out the project by getting a friend to photograph my hands while performing the nursery rhyme motions. This took some time since I had to stop at each movement to have a snapshot taken. I then brought all of these photographs, approximately twenty of them, into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I used the polygonal tool on every single picture to outline the hands and crop them from the background. This was one of my most time consuming tasks throughout the whole interactive assignment. I then resized the image and imported it into Flash. I also recorded the guitar playing the melody of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”. After debating about singing it, I decided I would add kinetic text for the lyrics and have the guitar as a nice background accent. After attempting to import the audio file as a .wav multiple times, I realized I had to convert it to an AIFF file in Audacity. This was a minor glitch that didn’t take too long to resolve.
Once in Flash, I imported all of my Photoshopped images as well as my audio file. I then created the “play” button after drawing my spider. Throughout the project, I would use a variety of my pictures to create the images of my hands moving. I had to keep watching my project to hear the music and time out the kinetic text so that the lyrics would match up with the background music. When picking fonts, I tried to pick different types that I felt corresponded with the words that they were scripting. For example, I picked a child-like font for the beginning and other words throughout the project. I also chose my color scheme for the backgrounds based off this child-like idea. Since my target audience is, obviously, a younger generation such as the 2-5 range, I chose colours that corresponded with this age. Blue, yellow, and pink are the classically known “baby” colours, which is why I felt they worked well with my project.
Even though this project was way more time consuming than I predicted and I had a lot of obstacles, I am still pretty happy about my final product. I know there are certain aspects that could have been better, but I still feel that I did a pretty good job, especially since it was my first time working with the Flash program. (Other than the tutorials we’ve worked on in class). I tried to include a variety of actions that we learned such as the spider button at the beginning and the ‘again’ lyric that I turned into a button at the end. I also used tweening, symbols, kinetic text, and many other elements. I knew that it would be a challenge, and I was surprised with how well I actually utilized the tools in the Flash program in my project. I’m very proud to call “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” a Michelle Chieng original!


1. I learned a lot from doing this animation project. I found out how time consuming flash can be as well as frustrating. There were many elements I wanted to incorporate into my flash that I couldn't figure out or get to work. Even though there were many times when I wanted to throw the computer on the ground and give up, I felt very accomplished once the project was completed. I found that it can take a lot of hours to create a simple thirty second project which completely blows my mind. I have so much more respect for animators and people who work with flash on a daily basis.
2. I was very impressed with the other students' flash projects. Everyone had creative ideas and I think all the projects were pretty well done. It was interesting to see the various elements other people were able to include in their project and the tools they utilized in flash to complete their work.

Innovations in Digital Media

For my blog topic, I want to talk about the today's lecture where we discussed innovations in Digital Media. Technology is rapidly changing and evolving every single day. People have drastically changed the way they communicate due to these new technologies. Way back when, letters were the only way to communicate across long distances, and even then, the postal service wasn't always 100% reliable. After radio, television, and telephones were made, these became better and faster ways to communicate. Messages reached a bigger audience through these widespread devices and people became more accessible. Then the internet and cell phone came into play and they basically took over for communication systems. People can now e-mail each other at any time of the day or call/text a cell phone whenever they feel like it. This saves them from having to have any actual contact, which makes it impersonal. It seems that texting or e-mailing make people a lot bolder because of this fact and sometimes say things they wouldn't have the nerve to say in person. Once myspace, facebook, and twitter came along, things just got crazy advanced. You can now see all aspects of someone's life online without them ever knowing. You can also contact this person from great distances and even instant message with them over the web. People update their twitter accounts hourly and inform the world of their every action. Has technology gone too far? Not saying that I'm any better than anyone else (I, too, have a facebook account and am sometimes known to "fb stalk") but I still sometimes question the communication lines that we use today. Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with people, especially if you are great distances away from each other, but it still involves absolutely no contact whatsoever. It's so impersonal. That's why I prefer Skype or iChat since I can then see the person as well as hear their voice. This makes things much better than just "poking" someone on facebook or "liking" their status. I think that it's great that technology is advancing so quickly, but I also think that sometimes need to take it back and go the old school way. I love receiving letters, although this may seem like a medieval act in this day and age. I know that many people enjoy reading letters or long phone calls, so instead of just texting someone or quickly "facebooking" them, people should take it back a bit and actually pick up the phone!

Digital Media & Music Culture

Digital media has definitely had an impact on the music culture. Before there was graphic arts and designed album covers, people didn't purchase as much music. Records were packaged in boring brown paper with string to tie them together. Once Alex Steinweiss designed the first cover in 1948, sales of records skyrocketed. They increased 800%!This completely changed things because music culture became a huge part of the media and affected everything in it. The cover art became a representation of the artists, especially once they began to have a say in their cover art. Cover art became imperative to the music culture because it represented different genres of music, different bands, fashion, & it even went so far as to represent politics. Without digital media, the music culture would not be even close to where it is today and wouldn't be such a huge part of everyone's lives.
I definitely would say the way that I have enjoyed music has changed over the past five years. If you look back less than ten years ago, the iPod hadn't even been invented yet. People still purchased CD's to play in their portable disc players and bigger CD players at home. When the iPod was created in 2001, it turned into a music revolution. From that point on, the iPod began to become more and more technologically advanced. I went from playing CD's in a portable player to uploading music from my computer onto my iPod instead of buying the actual, tangible discs. I then upgraded to what I now have, which is an iPod touch. It's incredible how advanced technology can become in such a short time. The original iPod, although thought to be incrdibly small at the time, is now "chunky" in comparison to the newer iPods such as the mini, or the touch. I now have a touch screen device that is as thin as a pencil and can store games, music videos, movies, internet access, etc. It's really quite amazing to think how far music has changed over the past 5-10 years! I now can get on my computer and download any song that I want with just the click of a button instead of having to go out and buy the whole CD.
I think that the design aspect and how it affects the music culture today has definitely declined over the past decade. People now don't care as much about buying the CD's since they can purchase one song at a time. Therefore, the cover art isn't such a huge factor. It's not as common for people to even see the cover art of the song that they're purchasing or the artist. iTunes makes it possible to turn on your computer, and download a song without having to see anything about the artist picture-wise. Compared to the 40's when the digital media was first incorporated into the music scene, the significance of design has definitely dropped. Although it made a huge impact at the time, people aren't as appreciative of the cover art as they were before.


-Alex Steinweiss, cover art for Frankie Carle.

-Alicia Keys cover art.

I definitely think that many artists have found their inspiration from some of Steinweiss' original designs, such as Alicia Keys.