After the second workshop I was worried, that I wouldn’t be able to animate anything for the magazine but it turned out to be quite easy in the end. I really like how our magazine turned out. For the picture on the cover page I used a gif. I didn’t find an easy way to just use the original gif so I had to break it up in to the individual sequences using Photoshop. I also had to add the content of the cover page to the gif otherwise it would have just played on top of the titles.

Using the “Folio Overlay” function you could then put the individual pictures back together. The same works for videos by the way. If you open your video with Photoshop and then export it as individual files. And again just use the folio overlay to make it play for example as your cover.

This is the gif I used (you might have to view image to make it play) and next to it is the final cover page (just a jpg). Made some slight changes to the original, adjusting it to the right dimensions and our actual content.

I made the content page interactive with “Object States” and the “Buttons and Forms” function. Once you know what you’re doing it is fairly easy to make things appear and disappear. Select your objects and turn them in to states. Then use your button function redirection them to the different states. So if we use the content page as an example (see below). I selected the black box and the corresponding grey box, made them both a state then turned the + and the – sign in to buttons and directed them to go to the next state/the state before. So now when you click one of the +signs the grey box will pop up and tell you some more about the article. To make it disappear you just simply click the -sign. Really easy but really effective!

We added the register to all the different articles to have the same style through out but also to link them all together. So now you can not only move to the next page by swiping but jump directly to the article you want. Magic!

Really disappointed with the second workshop for digital publications. I’m at university to learn new skills from the teachers here. If I wanted to watch video tutorials I could/would do it at home. If you show us videos at university at least talk about what we just watched, explain it some more but the best thing would be to just come up with your own little tutorial (It doesn’t have to be anything fancy) and just talk us through the different steps, show us what is possible and what to look out for. Teach us in person and not through videos.

In our first workshop we looked at interactive magazines on the ipad. We split up in to smaller groups of 3-5 people. This way it was much easier to try out interactions on the ipad. In the bigger group we then presented the different ways that we came across on how you could interact with the magazines and talked about how they are/aren’t useful.

So far so easy! The skill we’ll be learning is to create our own interactive magazines. However, before we could start animating we had to come up with an idea and concept. Luckily we are working in groups. My group decided to go for a student food magazine. Foodent! (yes, clever name isn’t it). We divided the work up in to particular parts so that I am now in charge of the cover and the content page. You can see my ideas below:

We’ll be using InDesign to create and animate our magazines. We decided to put together our ideas before the next workshop so that we can finish our work as soon as possible. Using InDesign but the wrong dimensions I came up with the digital version of my idea.

Second year at Lincoln University has begun. Everyone is back with new ideas, wanting to get started, ready to do stuff, to learn new skills, to make new friends and most importantly to be creative. At least that’s what it is like for me.

I can’t believe it’s already been a year. In year one our project for Digital Media was to create a 20sec sequence for one of three given titles. In addition we had to create a web page to display it on. It was my first time working with Adobe software but since I had a brilliant tutor (yes Graham if you’re reading this, give yourself a pat on the shoulder) I quickly learned the skills necessary for this project. The result you can see below:

So why am I mentioning all of this if this blog is all about our year two projects? At the end of the year I want to be able to compare it to all my new achievements, maybe laugh at how long it took me to create 20sec worth of material but most of all I am just proud of the result. In a way it is my motivation for this year to keep on learning new skills and to get better.

But I have learnt so much more already. Over the summer I created a new web page for my mum (link). It’s not perfect, I know that, but it is so much better to what she had before. I also started a new animation project. I decided to look in to stop motion animation (video below).

Long story short, what I want to say is that I’m really exited for second year to begin.