Sound Slides

For this project, we needed to take our kiosk presentation pictures and put it into a video-type format with cut and looped music.

When I started cutting the music for the project, I was very glad with the song I had originally chosen. It had a good chunk of instrumental music that looped fairly well. I didn't want to use a very short clip that was looped because I was afraid that would get annoying and repetitive, so I was glad I chose the song I did.

It took me a little while to figure out the Sound Slides program and I ran into some issues. I was almost done with my presentation when I realized that the picture of the first slide that I had taken from PowerPoint, still had the music player symbol in it. I got rid of that in the PowerPoint program and saved it as a picture. I then uploaded the better picture but couldn't figure out how to delete the first one. I ended up just starting over because I couldn't figure it out. It ended up working just fine the second time around.

I didn't have that hard of a time with this portion of the project. I ran into a couple issues but think the finished result looks pretty good.

CD Release Poster

I'm going to be honest, I was not feeling this project and was not overly enthused about the way mine turned out.

For this project, we had to make a poster advertising a CD release party for the band we did the Kiosk presentation on. When I first started the project, I did not have a necessarily clear idea as to what I wanted it to look like, I just figured that once I started, ideas would come to me as they usually do. Unfortunately, because I couldn't quite grasp how I wanted my work to look, I didn't really know how to start or what images to look for.

My first draft of the poster, I started with a completely different look than what I ended up with. I wanted something eye catching but with a quirky look and utilizing my negative space. After working for over 2 hours on my first version of my poster, I got so frustrated that I was going to stop and come back to it. I just hated what I was making. I decided to look for other images just in case, and I stumbled upon the one I ended up using.

One of my biggest problems actually turned out to be the band's name. For a poster, I wanted the name to be big, but not overly stretched down and still readable. I tried putting it diagonally but didn't like how that looked. So when I got it to a decent size, I wanted it to stand mostly on its own so it stood out (being placed between the teeth on the picture also helped).

I liked the background picture but honestly, I don't think it worked for this poster. I just couldn't wrap my head around what I wanted the poster to look like, so I didn't end up with the greatest finished project.

In fact, I'm not very satisfied at all. In a way I wish I could do this over, just so I would have the chance to redeem myself. I'm just not happy with the outcome.

Kiosk Presentation: The New Pornographers

For this project we had to make a kiosk presentation on PowerPoint. We had to choose a favorite musical artist or band and have a full presentation with music that would run on its own. I have used PowerPoint before for various class presentations, so I didn't think it would be that different. I found out that there is a lot more to PowerPoint than pre-set templates (which we were not allowed to use).

For the first slide, we had to provide a title slide, with the band's name, our name, and some pictures (but no pre-set templates). I was lucky to have found the picture I did of the band, one that just blended into the rest of the slide. I wanted to make the first slide simplistic but still interesting.

For the second slide, we needed a bulleted list of interesting facts. I decided to use the picture I did because I thought it would be funny if it is a slide about who the band is comprised of and how they came to be, when you can't see their eyes. I added the picture behind the list because I didn't want the slide to have a little bit more to it.

For the third slide, I had to provide a CD cover and track names/times. The times and names had to be formatted so they aligned exactly. I found this a little more challenging at times than I had expected, because some of the track titles were too long to fit on one line.

For the fourth slide we need a 4 row table with words and images. Instead of listing the four CDs the band had released and showed highlighted tracks etc, I decided to show where certain songs from this "indie" band had been featured in movies or television shows. I also added some images of the original CDs the songs had been on so that at least some of their CDs were advertised a bit.

For the fifth slide, we needed a works cited with working links (something that took me a little while to figure out). I had so many extra photos and posters that I had found, that I decided to make a collage of them as the wallpaper for the slide. I also decided to make a small advertisement of the band's upcoming CD, since there wasn't really a place for me to mention it in the previous slides.

Overall I was very happy with my slide show. I was nervous about the animation, though at first. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to animate the show so I figured that I might as well have it animated with no one else's animated than being the only one with no animation. At first I thought it may have been cheesy but I think it ended up just adding a little more interest and fun to the show.