Project 1

Timothy Baker Reflection

This project is not exactly what I wanted to end up producing. Originally I had wanted to create a 30-second flash animation. I bought the software for animating various types of media just for fun and designing my own pet projects. When I went to use it this week I had trouble, and found out that I was not registering my account and that I could only access a fraction of the features. This was really frustrating and forced me to use the Power Point format. Also I wanted to use my own photos from the North American International Auto Show but I lost the camera and could not use them.
I worked to make the most of with what I had to work. I choose Power Point because it was the medium I was most comfortable with for this first project. In later projects I will see what other forms I can branch out in.
I am a little concerned with the lack of color in the presentation. I was not completely sure how to get the most out of Power Point 2003, as I usually use 2007 and 2008. There was no place that I saw that really stood out to me as needing color in the wording but I did notice how much color was added by the pictures.
I tried to use as much of the techniques mentioned in the book as I could. I tried to use Arial fonts for the titles of all the screens. I also tried to load all of the pictures or fancier texts in the top left corner of the screens. Originally I placed the pictures on the right but then decided to use the books suggestions and I think that it worked better since not everyone is drawn immediately to text. The techniques were new too me. I had learned about putting everything in a left to right and top to bottom order in my Programming class, but other techniques like sameness creates contrast were wholly new to me in creating any type of media. Another that I found extremely intriguing was idea of using all of one style or similar style texts. I am pretty sure that I did a satisfactory job of using extended viewing fonts versus quick view fonts, but I am not positive since I had not even heard of those categories before starting this project. It was harder to use the text book’s plan of asking for audience feed back. It would have been nice and I agree with it most of the time but in this instance it was much too hard.
I am not sure how the citations are supposed to work since this is the first assignment. I also added two pages to the assignment but did not think that would be much of a problem since the two were an opening and then a citation page.
Altogether I think that I did a pretty good job on the assignment. It was definitely a learning experience and I hope that some of the techniques demonstrated will be of use to me when I make other projects.

Proposal for first module project

In my first module piece I would like to advocate greater support and awareness of full sized electric vehicles. I will be choosing to use a 30 second flash animation, hopefully with an animation studio that I will be buying in the next week. If that does not work I will probably just write a power point¸ which is not nearly as exciting.
I am trying to narrow down the list of main topics to at the most three. One that I know I will use is that electric was one of the original power plants for cars. This is an interesting historic fact that is not really well known, and I love history so it intrigues me as well. The point I would try to make with that piece of information is that for a long time electric vehicles were more reliable than gasoline, and gasoline won the right to be the most widely used form of drive system because of the wide spread growth of refueling stations. With new plug in hybrids and plug in electric cars gasoline’s only advantage has been swept away. I also would like to have a few comments on all of the electric cars on display at the North American International Auto Show. There are several high powered vehicles that could turn heads¸ and they are said to be the greatest portion of this year’s show.

Screen Shot

At first, when I took the screen shot I thought the assignment was a little strange. I mean, come on, what is a simple picture going to do that will teach me anything about writing? It’s the exact same image that I have been staring at for the last hour. When I wrote this reflection though, my whole view changed.

Composing in a digital age is very different from any time before. I know that I personally see my work as much more variable then I had before. Looking at just the image on the screen and having no control over what it looks like or what it says was really eye opening. With Microsoft Word, I can type a huge essay and print it out. Then if I feel that it needs to be changed I can just start the program up again and fix it. When that new and improved version is saved that original work is erased from the memory, and the new is left in its place. With actual physical writing or even typing on a type writer, any attempt to just go back and fix the original copy would have left a smudged and ugly mess. That plain physical caused any single draft to be unique. This really changed my view of digital composing.

In this digital age any type of composing can be quicker and much more variable. The author has access to so many different methods of communicating now then in the past. I think that an interesting way to better understand digital composing would be to do the exact same project as both a hard copy and a digital copy in a different medium. Talk about the exact same topic, maybe even use the same words but see what new and exciting thing you could do to change the digital copy.