Changing to Stop motion/ Planning and 5 hours of work

Since Last time I blogged, we have made ALOT of progress.

We managed to get all the content needed to build our website, by taking various photographs and creating a our walking experience video.

After editing the video in Final Cut Pro, we decided that it was too jittery and jumpy, so we decided to make it smoother looking by opting to create a stop motion of our walk.

I personally went up onto the Barbican last Wednesday and did this by using a Nikon D80.

Once, we had the final footage we needed we all met in the web designing room to start the planning of our website pages.

Our idea changed quite a lot, as we went from wanting to make the video interactive so the viewer could choose which way to go, to just making the front homepage interactive and using different slices over a particular picture we took of the water front.

We then made these slices into separate pages, which gave you information about a handful of the shops/cafes/bars on the Barbican as well as some of the Barbican's history and the Mayflower steps.

We only decided to pick the most popular places on the Barbican to give the person a taster of what is there and where they could go if they decided to go there.

After a lot of time creating the slices and making them into separate pages, we placed a START button in the right hand lower corner of our homepage which takes you to our stop motion video.

The process, of the video consisted of uploaded it from the camera card into flash, changing the image formats from NEF's to JPEG's and changing the resolution of the pictures, so they didn't turn out to be pix-elated.

Once it was all uploaded we reversed the image frames so they played in the correct order then started work on creating a backing soundtrack to loop in the background.

We did this by using Garage band were we decided to choose a plain and simple acoustic guitar loop, which we thought complemented the video.

This was then converted to an MP3 format and saved and copied to one of our memory sticks. We then opened it up onto the same computer used to build the website and added the music into flash, which we then sped up and put on a loop to match the video.

We then created a linking page from the homepage to the video which allows you to decide to go back to the starting homepage after you have watched it. We then added this link to all other 6 pages we created.

This was the final touches to the website, we made sure it worked by previewing it in safari, which it did and were very very pleased with the outcome. :D