college

planning the week ahead

Image by Rakka via Flickr

Next week i’m off college, but i’ve a lot of work to do. I have about 80% of footage and sound to work with so i can begin to put together a ‘final’ demo version of our college video.

At the minute, i have over 300 video files sitting in a folder, 500+ sound effect files and over a hundred images. Over 13 gigs in total of raw material. That’s a hell of a lot of work.

I’ve renamed all those 300 video files and sorted them in to folders as it’s vitally important i’m well organized. You have to be when producing any sort of lenghtly film with loads of footage and effects.

At the minute i have some titles/introduction complete, plus the finale. In total, about 20 seconds of actual video but it probably took me 8/9 hours to do. I also have a custom mp3 made which runs over the introduction.

This week, i’ll need to start cutting up video and using our different camera angles to good effect. I’ll also draw out a timeline of events for myself to keep me on track. The final video will be about 30 minutes in length and i’d imagine i’ll be swapping angles and changing scenes every few seconds to make it look as polished as possible.

I’ve no idea what the final product will look like, but i’ve already got some ‘world class’ stuff in it which will definitely blow people away. Our plan now is to make this in to a dvd with full menu’s and fancy introduction + an actual DVD case & cover to present the dvd in

God help the other groups who are doing similar projects - that’s all i’ll say - they don’t stand a chance

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Off the Ball

As part of one of my college modules, i had to create a poster / banner for a fictional game. Could be on any topic and the only guidelines set were that it had to be priced at $39.99 and it be made by a fictional company called ‘games up’.

It was pretty well received… didn’t think it was anything special myself as it lacks a ‘web 2.0′ feel and looks half film / half game. The images could have been cartoonized or touched up with power meters and rather than have 4, i could have just gone with one and less text for maximum impact.

I’m not quite sure what’s going on with the rings around the ‘Off The Ball’ logo - they just sit there and add nothing whatsoever only to break up the logo from the main text / images. Anyway, like i said, it went down well so there you go… more perfection isn’t needed

I’ve also just thrown together a really quick light saber effect demo and put it up on youtube;

We’ve plans to take in a Jedi & light saber in to the Dragon’s Den as part of another college project. Above is really patched up job, but it was simply to demo what sort of effect can be got. The real thing will be much more polished than all of these short clips i’m uploading here and there. Anyway, as you guys can see, it’s college that’s eating up all my time

all going to plan in college

I’ve been back at college 3 weeks now and you’ll have noticed a real drop in my work ethic online. Whilst some of that was due to slow connection speeds and none at all at times most of it has been down to the fact i’m using much more of my brainpower at college and burnout in the evenings.

There’s a mountain of stuff i’ve learned but some of the more interesting stuff includes;

• OSI layer model
• basics in javascript
• how to form questionnaires and get accurate results
• pings / ip’s / subnet masks
• routers / hubs / switches
• how memory works

Then i pick up on some nuggets of unrelated stuff like why airplanes turn off all lights when coming in to land, how/why a CPU is powered by a quartz crystal, how electricity is made, what you need to become a lecturer…

That’s just the stuff i can recall off the top of my head and i’m fairly well up on it all now. You could give me an exam in any of that i’d pass. So i am much more focused on college this year… i set my stall out to get an average of above 70% and so far so good. 9am or 4.30pm, it doesn’t matter - i’m alive, alert and absorbing information. Last year, i’d be done by 2pm (mentally), and i’d be thinking ahead of what i’d be doing that evening when i got home.

Online, i’ll be glad to get this skydive competition done and dusted. It doesn’t look like i’ll hit the $1k mark this month, but i’m sure i’ll come up with more creative ways of raising some cash

This ALWAYS happens, but ironically, this month has been pretty good for me in terms of revenue online. Although i haven’t done much and it’s probably been my worst month in terms of work rate this year, i’ve made $60 in affiliate earnings and another $150 in ads on this blog (some of which was put in to the charity skydive fund).

Typical So if you want to make money online, you just gotta stop working and focus your attention on offline stuff - worked for me this month

First week back in College

This week was my first week back in college. I started on Tuesday. Although a lot of people are reluctant to be back, i was looking forward to it. I love projects and having things to do each week rather than one big exam at the end of the year - that’s probably the single biggest advantage of this course and the reason i like it.

We’ve already been told we’ve got a group project or two and have to present it to people, but due to the fact there’s only a handful of people in my class we’ve already formed a group and have begun planning a ‘Dragon’s Den’ mock up which we’ll film and edit and then present. I’d hazard a guess the other classes won’t even from groups for another couple of weeks, never mind come up with ideas and choose one

photo credit: unknowndomain

We’ve an excellent impressionist who can pull off just about any character out there. With the right props and script it’ll look fantastic. I’ll be taking on the editing role. Although i’m still a novice editing videos, i’m the best we have. This time, i’ll be using adobe premier pro cs3 and really going for a professional look.

You can bank on it being done right. I love that stability i can offer - even it takes me days and days to do something, it’ll be done My last video took about 11/12 hours in total to complete and i did that pretty much non stop one day. I’ll probably spend more time on this one. Even though it’s a hell of a lot of work, i’d love to be able to come up with something top class. It’d be another feather in my skills cap.

It’ll be invaluable experience if i can do a job on this - it’s not like creating a website or designing… it’s much more difficult imo as you have music, video, text and special effects to deal with and all require loads of thought and testing. Anyway, once i get that done, it’ll be going up on youtube

My modules this semester are;

• Hardware
• Web Client Programming
• Interpersonal Communications
• Requirements Modelling
• Networking
• Data Analysis for Computing

In lay mans terms;

• How computers are put together
• Javascript
• How to work in a team
• Planning / Preparation
• How to get PC’s talking to each other
• Pie charts / graphs and making statistics look good

All pretty easy stuff. I shouldn’t be failing any of those. Looking forward to getting stuck in to them

back to college tomorrow

It’s hard to believe 1 year has passed since my first day at college. Having said that, a hell of a lot has happened since then. Looking back on the post i made 1 year ago (totally clueless about what lay ahead), i was remarkably accurate in my predictions…

Maths for Computing should link in with programming so that’s why i’m thinking both of them will be hard. I’ll have to work at them early on otherwise they may start to go over my head…

The rest, like i said are what i’d call ‘idiot proof’.. Study skills etc.. should be a bluffers subject all about personal growth and all of that stuff.

That was pretty much spot on… programming was tough, but i stuck at it and in the end it was one of my better subjects. Maths of course was my weak spot.

photo credit: The Green Party

(note: yes, that’s my college, yes we have a wind turbine on site and it is as big as it looks!)

The year ahead will be tough. I’d imagine worse than last year (or better, depending what way you look at it). I’m aiming for above 70% in all exams… I’d imagine this year, there’ll be much more emphasis on team work and working in groups. This year, i also specialize in one of 3 streams called ‘applications & support’, unlike last year which was a general first year.

To the best of my knowledge there’s only gonna be about 7/8 people MAX in my class, probably 5 or 6 in reality. Whilst that’s gonna be tough in many ways, i suppose it will benefit us as we’ll get more 1-v-1 time with lecturers and we’ll also have a much tighter group.

As usual, i’ll be driving up and down daily to college. Just under 2 hours in total every day. This year, the college has introduced a pay parking system so i’ll be forced to fork out €8 per week for the privilege of parking on campus. The staff, who are obviously worse off than us students financially, get free parking - equality at it’s finest, eh?

There are a limited number of free spots for students (very limited), so i’ll have to see if my 8.30am arrival time will be enough to get one every day *crosses fingers*

Anyway, i AM looking forward to it all and i feel i’m much more fired up for it than i was last year… i think that’s because i know it starts to get serious now