MoustafaMMUblog

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Personal Employability Evaluation

Coming to Manchester Metropolitan University to study Creative Multimedia, I knew that I would be encouraged to visit and take part of many great events and exhibitions that would help me think more creatively and that will broaden my vision. On my first week there we paid a visit to MOSI to see the Hadron Collider exhibition that was being featured there at the time, I found this exhibition to be very interesting. We got to see the many components that brought about the Hadron Collider and the how it functioned, we also watched videos of the history of the project and we walked through recreated sets of work spaces and managed to get some insight into how it came to be. The Hadron Collider project is a very ambitious science experiment that took a lot of hard work and effort to realise, it definitely helped to shed light on what sort of course I was getting into and it made me realise that a lot of effort will be needed to be put in to create the kind of work and projects that I really want to make.

Mozilla festival was my first major event of the year. We left Manchester to go to a tech festival in London that featured innovative thinkers from around the world, this was a huge deal for me, I got to see some very interesting products from very creative people. During my visit I sat in on a discussion regarding music distribution and open source music standard for releasing music much like IMDB. Sources such as Spotify and Soundcloud allow artists to distribute music to the public with varying degrees of control over how their own content and how it is published, the reason for this discussion was to go over the positive and negative aspects with regard to who benefits the most from this formula. I thought this was a very useful topic to discuss as it was attempting to improve the way in which artists can communicate with their fans.

After London my class was tasked with helping to organise a 3D printing event that was taking place at The Shed, we did this by planning and creating promotional posters and maps of the campus to hand out to the visitors on the day. During the night of the event we helped by managing the guests and directing them to their right locations, this was a fun experience for me as I got to see a 3D event for the first time and when I had time I also managed to browse the booths and I had a few interesting conversations with the designers . One particular piece that I found very interesting was a piece about prosthetic body parts such as ears noses and even eyeballs. In conjunction with this I paid a visit to MOSI to see another 3D printing exhibition that focused more on an overall wide variety of 3D printable objects from bicycle frames to mechanical time pieces. This brought home the fact that we are headed towards a very bright future in terms of 3D printing.

Berlin was the second major event that took place in my first year at CMM. During my visit to Berlin I got to see great cultural movement expressed through art, walking through the streets of Berlin I saw many great pieces of art work almost everywhere, it was a major cultural moment since the second world war and it really brought home the powerful effect that art and creativity in general can have on a society.

UnitX was our final major project of the year, it was a project that really hit home regarding how I can eventually contribute to the industry. During our final performance day I walked about the rest of the exhibition and got to witness some of the other great pieces of work that had been produced by other students, it was a great experience to see the varying levels of work that had been created and it gave me insight on how my work can develop over the course of my stay at MMU.

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Unit X evaluation

Our final major project of the year was based on a collaborative performance piece between the Royal Northern College of Music and the Manchester Metropolitan University. This collaboration featured singers from the RNCM and 1st year students from MMU from both the Creative Multimedia and Interior Design courses. The purpose of this project was to get all parties to get accostomed to working with external sources and to practice unusual performances outside of their normal environments. My group had the task of opening the Songs of Travel piece by performing The Vagabond and Let Beauty Awake at the Shudehill tramstop and the tram journey to Market street. This project definitely gave me a lot of insight as to how life after university might look, I got to experience working with people from different fields with different experiences and I was forced to work collaboratively with my colleagues to overcome obstacles that were presented to us. I was the only one in my group who wasn't studying Interior Design so I had to rely on my team mates to utilize the space and surroundings given to us. Coming from Creative Multimedia I felt that the technological aspect of our performance came from my ideas, there was a long period at the start of the project where my group struggled to come up with ideas. Over the period of the project we certainly had to revise our ideas and develop them further as we seemed to have differing opinions on how the final product would look. Eventually though we ended up producing some very good work and the process paid off. On the final performance day we all definitely enjoyed showing off our hard work and the viewers seemed very pleased. The learning outcome from this to me personally is that I need to make sure I don't waste too much time trying to come up with the perfect idea and focus more on developing my idea as I go along. Also, team work is something my group seemed to lack so it's another thing that we could all work on for future projects and collaborations. Overrall I enjoyed this experience as it taught me a few valuable lessons about the industry and how I can contribute to it.

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Here is the final performance on the tram. It worked out just as planned, the animation flowed quite smoothly except for a couple of minor synchronisation issue but it was nothing really noticeable.

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A demonstration of the final video animation

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For the ipads we decided that they should be a part of the costume, the centre ipad featured a heart beat so for this we came up with the idea that it should be placed on the chest however for stability and saftey it had to be strapped to the singer in some way. For the casing we came up with the idea of it being transparrant, for this we tried a A4 wallet with which we cut out the shape of the ipad and strapped it around the neck, this idea failed however as the plastic wasnt strong enough to hold the weight of the ipad. Instead we tried actual ipad casings, we found this to be the better option as the cases were much more sturdy and reliable. For the central ipad we wrapped the strap around it and then sewed it to the casing, after testing it we found that it worked fine. For the other two ipads we programmes the animation to take place about a foot higher than ipad 1, so for this we attatched 2 wooden sticks to each case to create handles in order to hold the ipads higher. Creating these casings for the ipads added more to the performance… Too bad the faces didn’t.

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On the rehearsal day we came to discover that the animation was 10 seconds too long, the videos kept playing even as we got off the tram, we also found that the last scene in ipad 2 wasnt in sync with the others. This meant having to go back and edit the clips. To do this we removed 8 frames from the middle of ipad 2 and then increased the three videos to 15 frames per second. We then played the animation along with the song to make sure it was in sync.

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The process of creating the animation was long and tedious, it took a few attempts of trial and error before getting the formula right. We had to line up every video to match the other with the exact number of frames per second for it to work, this meant planning every scene carefully.

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To create the animation we used the animation suite where we were able to use a digital SLR camera to capture the frames. The camera was attatched to a stand and we were able to adjust the distance/angle and lighting. The programme we used to put the animation together was Dragonframe, it allowed us to capture individual frames and play them after each other to show a stop motion animation. It was fairly easy to use and it served it’s purpose well enough but we found ourselves having to export the images afterwords to a different movie editing programme to put the video together.

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After planning the story line we went ahead and created all the pieces we needed to create the animation. Most of the pieces were done using paper except for a few small props such as the flowers and the rope.

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This is a mock up of how the final animation might look. We did this to present at the presentation day and the feedback we received was generally positive. Everyone seemed to be on board with our idea. The one thing that we will have to work on obviously is the timing and the quality of the transitons between screens.

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We started planning the animation and what story will be told through it. We decided to go with a cartoonish look about it to keep in style with the shadow puppet, this allowed us to create simple characters that everyone could easily understand and relate to.

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For the ipad animation we had the idea of multiple ipads with a synchronized animation flowing through them. This will be achieved by filming three seperate videos and playing them simultaneously to give the illusion of a single multi screen video. This is an example of how we would go about it.

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This is a demonstration of what happens inside the box. It is a few short segments of the story of a traveller. I think it turned out very well.

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During rehearsals our performance sort of fell apart a bit, the box wasn’t 100% completed and so the curtain kept getting blown by the strong winds on the day. This was certainly something to consider as it really made us think of how easily things could fall apart on the day of the final performance. We also discovered that people weren’t exactly very eager to have a look inside the box, we had to gesture over to a few people to look inside.

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On rehearsal day, this day was allocated for every group to practice their performance and to put their work to the test

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After successfully testing the box and making sure that it would function in daylight, we went about creating the set pieces that would go inside the box. We created 4 scenes of travel and adventure. We created these shadow scenes using foam board because we needed them to be secure and safe to handle on the day without worrying about it falling apart. We used wooden sticks to attatch to the back of the pieces to manipulate them.

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We took the box out to the location to test it and see how it would look in action. For the lighting needed for the performance we used a flash light, we had no source of electricity outdoors so we had to rely on a portable, battery operated source of lighting. We placed the flash light on a tripod to give ourselves the flexibility of being able to position the light at different angles. We found that this way provided the right amount of light needed to make the piece work, it was also cheap and easy to set up.