FET 5622 Assignment 2.1 - Penny Gardner

One of Gus's tanks of cichlids in Sept 2005

 

Link to FET5622 Home PageLink to activity 3.2 - Haiku gif with text in downloaded font.Link to activity 3.4 - decorated haiku - two versionsThis is a link to the Red Centre site, activity 3.5Link to animated haiku activity 3.6This is a link to the car animationThis is a link to the edited sound fileThis is a link to the haiku readingThis is a link to the car web movieThis is a link to the haiku web movie

 

 

 

 

 

 

This page contains the first three haiku activities and a link to Red Centre:

You can use the view menu to change the text size in your browser.

Activity 3.2: Haiku, Text only

Image of a haiku, which reads: Red rose opening, summer comes but fading soon, as petals fall

I selected this font: Jenkins v2.0 (from Cooltext.com), because I wanted something that looked a bit scratchy, like a rose. The colour changes in the font are designed to show the colour of the petals developing, then fading and going brown.

The text and background were created using MS Word, then converted to a gif and file size adjusted for the web using Adobe Photoshop Elements. File size of gif image: 6Kb.

Skills gained during this activity: I found out how to download and save a font using the control panel, discovered how to copy and paste a table into Photoshop Elements and started to experiment with Fireworks.

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Activity 3.4 Decorated Haiku version 1

 

A Haiku, decorated with fallen petals, reading "Red rose opening, summer comes but fading soon as the petals fall"

 

I looked for clip art of rose petals but couldn't find anything suitable; in the end I drew them in Paint, copied into Fireworks, feathered the edges and sized and positioned them. The cream canvas has a green overlay with a parchment texture. I changed the text colours from the original, these co-ordinate better. Final size of gif image: 16Kb. Skills gained during this activity: learning more about Fireworks, adding layers, rotating and enhancing images.

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Activity 3.4 Decorated Haiku version 2

 

Another decorated haiku, reading 'red rose opening, summer comes but fading soon, as the petals fall. It is illustrated with a red rose and an overlay of fallen leaves.

 

My husband took some photos last weekend, of roses and fallen leaves in our garden. I cropped one of the rose photos, feathered the edges and saved as a gif. The fallen leaves photo was resized (proportions didn't matter with this) transformed to a smaller file and added as a 25% overlay.

Final size of gif image: 25Kb. Skills gained during this activity: learning more about editing photographs and positioning images.

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Activity 3.5 Red Centre

Please follow the link to this activity.

I found it fairly straightforward following the course instructions for this exercise. I have used Photoshop Elements before and found Fireworks to be similar in optimising and sizing images. However, lots more practice will be needed before this can be done without the instructions, as not everything is intuitive.

Skills gained from this activity: I discovered that you can use Fireworks to design and lay out webpages, inckuding slicing, creating hotspots and behaviours. I learned how to create rollover images and buttons and how to link to web pages which open in a smaller, predefined, size. I learned that Fireworks creates the Javascript for you and that this exercise has only touched a very small part of its capabilities.

File size of thumnail jpg images: 30Kb (within 50Kb limit)

File size of large jpg images: 288Kb (within 300Kb - 350Kb limit)

Activity 3.6 Animated Haiku

Please refresh the page or press F5 to see the animation. Refresh again to replay.

Skills gained from this activity:

This was some learning curve! I created 7 frames in Fireworks, gradually introducing the different layers of the decorated Haiku. Actually, I realised that it's more a case of deleting things from the completed gif in the earlier frames. Found that 120/100 of a second was about right for most of the frames, but gave the last line a little longer for readability before the final fallen leaf overlay was added. Selected 'no looping' so that it doesn't play continuously, thereby giving control to the user.

After some more practice in Fireworks, I improved the rose image by drawing a vector outline and using a solid mask. I changed the opacity from 50% to 100% over four frames of the animation to give the illusion of the rose opening. I think that I'll have to slow this down when applying the sound, as it plays too quickly for a narration.

Final size of animated gif image: 37Kb.

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References

Cooltext.com: http://cooltext.com/

Font-a-licious Fonts (1999) http://fontaliciousfonts.com

 

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Author: Penny Gardner W0031478, Course FET 5622 with Dr Peter Evans

This page last updated on 10 October, 2006