Week 27, Making
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Still doing the dissertation, I want to finish the typing up today so I can make the flash site and put all the contents to make it more interactive.
Still have some parts of the artifact that is not functioning, I hope by the will of Allah to make it all functioning and working well by Monday the 26.
I think I’m underestimating things, my plan was to finish the whole dissertation by today, and up to this moment a lot of the typing up is left.
Just wish me luck
Week 26 , Making
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
I was doing video editing as I lost most of the work in the corrupted hard drive, so I put the sound, made some text in live type, I wanted to make it using aftereffect, but late decided to make it in live type.
Other stuff that I benefited from dong the editing is:
When exporting files from final cut pro i always wondered whenever I finish editing and I don’t export it as quick time, it asks me for file and give a message that files were not found. For the first time I realised how to over come this problem, by first publishing the file then check the option “make movie self contain” this mains that instead of referencing the files it will contain it in the actual quick time movie but this option will make the file size very big.
When I animate something using live type of after effects, the result was most of the time misleading and it is not easy to know until you render a final work and export it to see how it will look in real time. I had to export the final file many times which was very tedious to do.
Friday 16/03/07
Today I did very well, did a lot of the dissertation writing up, put most of the writing up together and wrote the progress report then for the month of February then in the afternoon I went to Amar showed him some of what I did and he seamed to be happy about it. the only comment he gave me was that I put the 25th of march as deadline for the project for my self and he was a bit concern about it and said it is not good to leave it this late, try to finish before that so you have time if things go wrong.
Week 25, Making
Wednesday 7th March 2007
I was doing the interactive part for the last week, and still buttons need to work properly. The selection buttons I think I will manage to work them by next week, however the submit for rating button is what I’m more concern about, I have seen many codes that you could manipulate to use it for this purpose, but I put it for testing nothing is working properly. Friday 9th March Today I have been trying to do some text animation in after effect, but when I couldn’t succeed, I went to live text and read some tutorial on how to make animated text by the use of this software which normally comes with Final Cut Pro. I was quite happy with what I learned, how to write text there and add some effects, manipulate the effect to make it unique by increasing its speed, rotation, add a background or sometimes import a movie to take colour sample from it and then finally render it to use the animated text in Final Cut Pro again. When rendering something in final cut pro I never understood the term self contain (one of the option that you should make), only yesterday I could understand that It means all files that relates to the movie will be included in the rendered one, which will increase the file size and if the option is unchecked it will not include it, and will only reference the files which save a lot of space. 
On Saturday I started putting my dissertation in organized way, in order to make it easy for me when It comes to putting them and displaying it on the site for presentation. Tonight I will be doing text animation using after effect, as I did not like the one I did in Live type, it is ok but I would love to have a go on after effect to see what it can do.
Sunday 11 March:
Dead line is very close, my plan is by the will of Allah to finish the dissertation and show a fist draft to Amar by at least thursady. I did finish the design of the layout, however I need to link them and put them together before I put the data.
The interactive screen play still not finish, the design is finished, button is working fine, however I still need to assign an array or something, in order to make a set of selection on each button. Meaning I wanted when user select the brush tool to display a selection of different types of islamic shapes, when the stamp is selected, a selection of different stamp tool to be selected …etc.
Week 24, Making
Saturday 3rd March 07
On Wednesday the 28 of February, my hard drive stopped working, the new one that I purchased on January, I felt devastated, almost what all I did for the last 12 days was saved there, I didn’t make a back up, this means I’m back 12 hard working days, I couldn’t do any work during that day or nigh.
On the next day I eventually I remembered that being tense wont solve anything, it is more beneficial for me to be patient in many ways religiously and health wise than being tense. I took the hard drive to Husaein, after a friend advised me to do so. Hosein was kind enough to take the hard drive and told me that it needs to do hard drive recovery and this might take hours and this might result in lost of data. Hearing this increased my tension, however I didn’t have any choice but to accept it.
Week 23 Making
Saturday 25th February 07
The layout of the website is finished now, every thing is in flash,. My initial plan was to make all using css and html or xhtml, but as my target audience are young children and most of the appealing young children’s sites are in flash, I came to the decision of making the site in flash.
I concentrated on the use of bright colours according to this article under the heading “Appeal To Kids And Teens” from
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/design_no11.htm
The article gives practical advice in how to make a website appealing to young children, following are the things that I should pay more attention to:
- Give the children direction on how to use the site
- Avoid scrolling make all the important site content appear on the screen without scrolling.
- They like cartoon look characters, bright colours, colouring page and games.
- They like watching animation than reading
As a result I decided to make most of the component of my site animated, or video and use less of a text. Also to have interactive stuff to make kids come and again.
For the last two weeks I was doing the design of the interactive part it is almost finished although I wanted to change some stuff which I was not 100% happy about it, such as the moving sky. I wanted to animate some Arabic letters, shapes or anything that gives the theme of being Islamic Arabic. I will see how it goes.
Screen shot of the site intro
Week 21, Making
Friday 9th February 07
This morning I went to Amar to discuss with him my progress and sign my monthly progress report. He was very happy with my progress which increased my enthusiasm to work much harder to get the project hopefully done on time.
Yesterday, i bought another hosting space with a domain name under my name “umalkheir com” to put my final year project documentation.
“Minisilam” was the first name that I thought of when thinking of what to call the site, and as a result bigRedFeet sponsored the site and the price of the winner prizes. However, during the making stages, I just had and idea of calling the site “islamoArt”.
I asked friends opinion, what do they think of those two names
(MiniIslam) and (islamoArt)?
Most agreed on islamoArt, their opinion was that Islamoart is more artistic, elegant name. In my opinion miniislam, gave me the impression that I’m belittling Islam by saying mini, or if though saying that there is an Islam for young kids and another for older ones. Also the domain name was not written the way it was said “mini islam” as it was already taken by others, all these reasons made me changes the name of the site to “islamo art” and the domain name with .com was available.
Straight away I put some of the layout files to see how it will look and there is the site.
Screen shot of the testing site
islamoart.com
Week 20 Making
Friday 2 February 07
I’m still in the making part of the project and planning to finish by beginning of March so I can only concentrate on the dissertation and final touches.
Designing of the information part of the site is on progress, I’m planning for the time being to have only four links;
One for the video, another for the 3D interactive informative section, a third one for the Islamic world, a forth link for gallery viewing (where children work will be displayed) and a last one for contributors who want to be part of the project.
I designed the whole thing in a library theme, information can be found.
Screen shot of the informative part:
