Sunday 23 February 2014

Uni stuff & doodley cards

Hihi,

Been pretty busy with uni lately, hence the lack of updates. This term we're doing TV instead of radio, and I've discovered that this is a lot harder. I've been working with Nicole and Verity, and I think it's been really good to have three of us on a team as there are so many things to think about when recording footage for a television package. The last time I did video work was at school with a little consumer Sony Handycam, which was easy to use. The kit we have here is a professional Sony Handycam, with a gun mic. Heavier and more awkward to use! Each week we've completed a shooting assignment, which has progressed from a simple five-shot sequence to getting material for a 1-2 min package. This week, we covered the M Shed museum winning an award. It was half term, so there was plenty of fodder for vox pops.

Here's the package I edited together on Friday:


Yes, it is Verity reporting at the start with my voice on the voice-over at the end, but we were all practising using the editing software so I didn't want to drag her away from her work to record the VO!

I think the effort expended in creating a TV package is incredibly challenging, and I'm definitely more at home with the editing process (yay, computers).

Cards

Right, on a totally different note, I've been to a few birthday parties over the last month or so and I enjoy making cards for people, so here are a few doodles I did:

Bunny for Sara

Link for Jamie

Totoro for Rachel

I never really enjoyed colouring when I was younger, because I found colouring pencils didn't suit my scribbly style of drawing, which you can see in the picture of the bunny. I tried a different way of shading with the other two, which I think has worked a lot better, as the shading looks smoother.

Ok, now I have a small mountain of reading to do so I'm going to tackle that today!

Sunday 9 February 2014

CSS3 Patterns



Disclaimer: These work best in Firefox 26.0 or Internet Explorer 11.0 - they should work in Chrome 32.0 but I've noticed the rendering unfortunately isn't quite as good as Firefox's, so the flowers look jagged. So, yeah, you might be seeing a bunch of words and no pretty pictures, but fear not, I've screencapped a couple if you don't happen to use one of these browsers.

Right, I got a bit distracted from coursework and started playing around with some CSS to make a new website design...I quickly got bored of that and decided to have a go at making some patterns using CSS3 gradients. I came across Lea Verou's page on gradient patterns when I was looking into CSS3 while working at Nokia a couple of years ago. I didn't really have a good reason to use them back then, so I filed the page away for later.

One and a half years later, here I am, fiddling about with gradient styles. At first I just didn't get what what going on, but trial and error led me to this:


Nice enough, but kind of plain. Further messing around, and I made something a bit more exciting:


And eventually, I made some flowers and leaves:

I'm quite pleased with how they turned out - not sure if I'll end up using these for anything, but I'll stick the code up on GitHub once I've tidied it up and added the backwards compatible tags.