Accountancy Workshop

Jack Wyn Williams who is a production accountant gave us a talk on general accountancy. Book keeping, tax and budgeting was addressed for both freelancers and staffs.

Legal Principles & Practicalities

Richard Pugh, a solicitor with 30 years of experience came and gave us a talk on legal practices. The elements that were addressed were:

• Law of contract
• Companies & Partnerships
• Rights/Option agreements
• Development rights
• IP (General)Exploitation (General)

<>
It was useful and interesting talk, because I had learned new things. Previously, in my academic study, I had studied IT legislation, which included some of the elements listed above.

CSS Training

CSS training was delivered by Jake Rayson. The training was a whole days training, which introduced use of CSS and some guidance for when using CSS.

<>It was useful training session for me because it was my first time getting my hands on CSS using Dream Weaver. I previously done CSS, but it was using notepad.

Visit from Unique Media

Jon Stethridge the managing director of Unique Media gave us a talk on shoot / edit and encode for streaming media. The talk also included some element on planning a project.

<>Elements on shooting a video and encoding them by using different types of encoding were also discussed. Encoding for a live broadcast was also addressed.

For more information on unique media, visit www.unique-media.com

Graduation Soon.....

Cyfle graduation is this month. Yep, 6 month gone quick :P hope you all attend to see us and see what we produced during our time at Cyfle.

Graduation will take place on 21st March 2007.

Please click on the link to read more about the graduation [http://www.cyfle.co.uk/english/view_news.asp?page=news&id=24]

To learn more about Cyfle courses, visit the website on [www.cyfle.co.uk]

Work Experience - Day 10 (2nd March 2007)

Final day began by attending a meeting on PID (Project Initiation Document). PID is a legal agreement between the client which states the Terms & Conditions, highlights the Budget, Time and the Scope. Questions such as when will it be done, who will do it and how are answered in the document. This document is used as sign off.

More on PID can be read on [http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documentation_and_templates_project_initiation_document_pid.asp]
Carried on with further testing to the Contract Shop website as the bugs were fixed. Few bugs I had found earlier this week which had been resolved.

It has been a great experience working with Sequence. Everyone is very friendly, helpful and approachable. Really enjoyed my 2 weeks :)

Thank you to everyone in Sequence, specially my brother Kamal for his support and patient

Work Experience - Day 9 (1st March 2007)

I carried out further testing on the Contract Shop website. Did some background reading on C#, pronounced C Sharp. C# is a language object orientated language developed by Microsoft. Sequence uses asp.net as well as C#.

More infor on C# can be found on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp]

Work Experience - Day 8 (28th February 2007)

Carried on with the Gwagle scoring mechanism research, and testing the Contract Shop website [www.contractshop.co.uk]. The Contract Shop website allows businesses to register their business.

Work Experience - Day 7 (27th February 2007)

Tested contract shop website did conducted research on scoring mechanism used by other people/organisation online. The scoring mechanism will be for voting for the best answer submitted by users in the Gwagle medical community website.

Work Experience - Day 6 (26th February 2007)

Today I continued with testing the Sell4wales website as well as re-testing the Buy4Wales site based on the client’s feedback.

A 2nd research task was given by Phil Murphy to work on regarding the Gwagle website. Gwagle is a medical community website in case anyone is not familiar with.

Work Experience - Day 5 (23rd February 2007)

Beginning of the day, I was involved in a meeting which was about Wire Frame with Phil Murphy and other Sequences staffs. So what is Wire Frame? Wire Frame is all about representing the look of the website by using visual representation. It is a way of communicating to the client through using visual aids without having to give them documents and documents to read on the look and feel of the website.

The software used for producing Wire Frame is Microsoft Visio.

Rest of the day I did testing on Sell4wales websites and was looking into the back end of the MyHR system of the functionality aspect.

Work Experience - Day 4 (22nd February 2007)

I continued with the Gwagle research. This time I fully documented it in Word document with several more ideas.

I was testing a CD rom which was produced for WJEC. The CD contains projects produced by schools and colleagues along with student profiles. My job was to test the CD Rom with MAC & PC.

I was then involved testing the email system of the Business Eye website.

Later on the day I was introduced to the backend of the MyHR. The introduction allowed me to see how documents were created using the CMS. Basically in the CMS, you have a form which allows the user to enter their variable and later called that variable like mail merge style e.g. {Employee Name}. It allows user to create own documents which can be used by HR.

Work Experience - Day 3 (21st February 2007)

Day began by continuing with the bug testing for Buy4Wales website.

My next task was then to bug test an online system developed by Sequence called My HR for www.myhrdept.co.uk . It is a system which allows a simple way of producing HR documents.

After that, I was bug testing the Business Eye website. I was testing the emailing system.

Work Experience - Day 2 (20th February 2007)

Day 2 began by attending a system analysis meeting with Phil Murphy (Sequence Director) and one of the clients Sequence is working with, along with Richard Baker (Sequence Director).

The meeting was very interesting; I was given opportunity to participate by sharing thoughts and ideas to the system the client was proposing. The system the client was proposing was a SMS based website. The website is about quitting smoking. Using mobile phone, the smokers can register to the website to join a quit smoking scheme, where their smoking habits are monitored for 6 weeks. The communication is down via SMS, but users will have chance to logon to the website to add or edit information.

After the meeting, I had another short meeting with Phil Murphy along with the same client. It was about a website called Gwagle, which is bit like myspace. It is a community website for medical practitioners and Doctors. By next week meeting, my task is to come up with some ideas of ways to enhance the Gwagle website by researching into features of web 2.0.

My final task of the day was to do bug testing on Buy4Wales website by following a test script.

Work Experience - Day 1 (19th February 2007)

Day 1 began by introduction to Sequence. I was shown around Sequence and met with Sequence staff.

I was introduced to the Diablo website which Sequence developed. It basically allows users to create their own websites by using a CMS. The developed of the CMS looks sophisticated, but it does a great job. The CMS allows to add/edit/delete webpage. It also as allows changes to be made to the look and feel of the website by moving the navigation, menu tool bar and changing the overall colour of the website. The best thing of the CMS is, you don’t have to worry about any code! Yes no coding.

The web link to Diablo is here if anyone is interested: http://www.community.sequence.co.uk/


My first task was to produce a website using the Diablo CMS. Check it out on: http://cyfle68.community.sequence.co.uk/ . It’s not fully finished.

The 2nd task of the day was to write a mini user guide to one of the features of the CMS for a client.

Happy Chinese New Year

Like to wish all the blog readers and everyone on D10 a happy and a prosperous Chinese New Year! Gong Hay Fat Choy! Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu! Sae Hae Bok manhi Baduseyo!


End of D10 for now, time for Work Experience

We just finished our D10 for now for work experience. Looking forward to the 2 weeks work experience with Sequence. The things I am hoping to do is testing, wire frame, attending analysis meeting and data architecture.

Hope you all in D10 have a nice work experience.

Leo from Sequence

Leo gave a presentation on Flash games from his experience. During his time on Sequence, Leo worked on several Dr Who games. His role at Sequence was a designer. Seen some of the artwork and it was mind blowing.

I found the presentation very beneficial as it gave an insight into how briefs are tackled within a new media industry. Leo had given us some advices regarding future production of Flash games.

Thanks Leo! Wish you all the best on your new job.

Bluetooth presentation

The Bluetooth presentation was given by a person called Rob Light. It was very interesting presentation because it addressed how technologies are used for marketing purpose through use of Bluetooth.

One of their projects was a rugby match in Cardiff Millennium Stadium. Each corner of the stadium, a Bluetooth centre is put up where the fans can in there and can have a Bluetooth message about the latest scores and promotion.

Rob Light was saying that in future, when you walk past shops in city centre, you will be asked from the shops whether you wish to receive a Bluetooth marketing message. This is the new way of sending marketing pronominal advertisement to mobile phone rather than making users subscribe to premium text message for a marketing promotion.

Promo Cymru Brief (Flash Game)

The Promo Cymru project was based on a Flash game which was created by me and my colleague Gareth (D10 trainee). The project was open to new ideas. However, whatever we produce, we have to address some of the 10 commandants (the 10 entitlements) which address some social aspects as well as educational. The 10 commandments basically is a sort of list of rights each of the youngster are entitled to e.g. right to education, right to employment, right to making decision etc.

What we decided to do is to produce a game which will address those commandments in more of fun away by creating a Flash game based in Cardiff City Centre. The theme of the game is about aliens invading Cardiff and trying to make human work for them by not allowing them by invading their rights. We named the game Cardiff Attacks.

The game kicks off by a youngster coming out from Burger King (in the game named Burger Queen due to copyright) in Cardiff City Centre. The youngster embarks to the Public Advice Centre to get advice on employments, education, financial etc. The problem is aliens are preventing him from reaching his destination. Then the confrontation begins in order to win the rights back.

My part in the game was to work on the graphics and the background of the game. We took pictures of the Cardiff City Centre, then using Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool, I had outlined the background so in end it can have the cell shade effect.

[Screen shot coming soon]

Mygo Brief

Hi everyone!

Apologises for updating my blog after very log time. Been very busy. Right, let’s get on with what I was doing for the last 6 weeks.

I was involved in the Mygo Interactive TV game with Aled, Zoe, Lindsey and James. I was very excited about this project because it was my first time of participating in this kind of project. Mygo is located in Malaysia, we communicating with them via video conference.

It took us some time to come with the actual idea and theme of the game, because a project of this kind was new to all of us. Our theme is based on a house, where each window holds a letter to an anagram.

The way it works is by the player sending a text message to register with his/her nick name and mobile number. Then the player will have to choose a window by voting in a number which corresponds with the windows. After the text messaging session, all the votes are counted. The window which has the most votes will open with a scroll displayed by using animation. The scroll will display a letter from the anagram which the player will have to guess.

Once the user finds out the answer, he/she will have to text the answer.

When we tested with the D10 trainee, they all loved it, but it required some tweaking. The end product of the game was excellent.

Working on this project has been one of my best experiences out of all other projects previously I worked on. It was a great opportunity to work with Mygo and to take part in Interactive TV game.


Screen shot of the design to the game is shown below:

Happy New Year :)

Happy New Year to everyone. It was a good New Year, had a get together with family and had lunch. The weather messed up the mood for celebration. It started to rain at 12:10am, but before then got to see some good fireworks display done by my streets.

Later it was very stormy with thunders and hail storms. In some cities, they had to cancel the New Year celebration party, which was very disappointing. New Year only happens once in a year, so I guess they will have to wait for 2008 :(

Any New Year resolution anyone? :)

Flash project done!

Forgot to post this before holiday. Sorry!

The Flash project went really well. I was in a group with Zoe working on a Flash quiz for Sequence. It went on quite well up until I got to the part of doing the quiz using dynamic coding and XML.

XML was quite tuff. The way I was coding at beginning was not very effective, because I was hard coding most of the things. Then Neil helped me to understand the dynamic way of coding.

The client was very happy with the Flash quiz. The end result of the quiz was successfully, although smaller tweaks would have made it better.

Chat Finder

Last week we had two guests (father & son) who came in to give us a presentation about their business. They came with the idea of Chat Finder. Chat Finder is about using a type video camera for video conferencing. It’s a clever website, because it helps you to search for anyone who is online with that camera.

It’s a great way of integrating with people around the world. This is a unique idea.

Flash Training

Had flash training last week by Neil Jenkins. His really good tutor and I learnt a lot in 3 days of flash training. It was brilliant and learnt new things. What I always wondered was how do they do the loading page using percentage bar before an animation or flash movie is loaded. I learnt that during the flash training and it was interesting.

I learnt how to integrate video, mp3, animate pictures, creating animation, action script etc.

But near the end of the training it became quiet difficult when we got into deeper coding. But I think it’s a good package and a lot of things can be accomplished using Flash.

Sound Training (Using Reason 3.0)

The sound tutorial was very interesting and exciting two days for me. We used Reason to create & edit existing midi files. I was bit disappointed to learn that reason takes only midi files rather than mp3. But it was interesting to learn it allows you to create music with your way by choosing instruments.

Reason is professional software used by music producer. Its an effective software and powerful for creating musical beats. For more infor on Reason, visit [http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/]

I think the way to master the Reason software is to get some experience of using the actual hardware of sound production. This will help you to have better understanding when you use the software, because within the software you are produced with variety of virtual hardware’s.

The Reason tutorial was delivered by John Paul.

DreamWeaver & Mock Up done!

Handed my Dream Weaver and mock up last week, so glad it’s done. The Dream Weaver was so hard, but manage to get the CMS working. The CMS was for the future event, which will allow the administrator to add, delete, edit and update the content.

Looking forward to sound tutorial this week, I love sound editing and into heavy music.

Down the bay they were filming Dr Who. It was quite disturbing hearing all those sounds, but I look forward to see that Dr Who episode. You’ll proberely catch a glimpse of me in there!

Finally here is the link to the Cardiff Bay website that had been produced by myself and Rob:

http://www.d10dev-studio.com/robertlloyd/cardiffbay/index.aspx

cya

Finished Maya brief

Hi everyone just remembered to upload my Maya animation. Looks plain because of the particles at the back didn’t render :(

When I rendered the animation, it rendered only the main animation, but I did not realise you got to render the particles separately.

Hope you enjoy!!!

Deadline of Dreamweaver project approaching

So far it’s going alright, although had difficulty getting my head around asp.net. Last week it was very hard working week for me, but this week, its deadline of Dream Weaver, need to put more effort to get it done in time.

The mock-up brief is going really well, that’s due in on the same day as Dream Weaver brief.

Just to remind everyone, my mock up is about a Bully website. Its called "Bully Buster Club". The website will be based on lunchtime club, where volunteers goes to local school to give support/help and information pack about bullying. Since the mock up is meant to reflect on lunchtime theme, I am basing mine on lunchtime hour club.

Project Management & Pitching

Sorry for late posting, this ment to be posted last week :P. Had a really good session on project management & pitching last week. The project management session helped to understand how to plan & scope a project.

Those helpful tips will help me to be better project manager in future :D

Dream Weaver training & Project

Had 1-week dream weaver tutorial. Now working on the Dream Weaver brief. It’s quite difficult, since I have no CSS experience or ASP. But looking forward into developing it, because it’s a new challenge. From what I read, many interactive media industry uses ASP.net than ASP. Sequence uses ASP.net, we are going to use ASP.net to develop the website.


It’s Rob and Me who are in a group. We both decided to split the design/development and then shift role around so we both can experience both design & development.

Our project is to develop a Cardiff Bay website offering new and older vistors information. The website will hold information on where to go, where to stay, what to do and future events.

Maya Training

This week was the Maya training week. Maya is software used by professional to animate and model in 3D. It used by many industries for adverts and even in Hollywood movies.

This was my first time I used Maya. It was difficult to use but I found it interesting. I wish there was more training and more time to fiddle about with Maya. The first 3D model I produced for the training was a Intel logo. Just like the advert, the writing will move around.

My next aim will be to teach myself 3D Max. Apparently that is used by interactive media industry.

Digital Story - Done!

Its Friday, just finished my 2 minute digital story telling. Found Adobe Premiere quite awkward to use.

My 2-minute video is about my education and me. It is about how I struggled with education with having learning difficulty and not having a hope of entering university.

Introduction to Digital Story

This week is digital story telling week. We must produce a 2-minute digital story using photos/images and voice over. Looking forward to it.

We had been given some helpful tips by a guest from BBC into how to go on about digital story telling. The tools I will be using to do my digital story telling are:

• Adobe Premiere - To produce transition between images and to combine both audio & images
• Adobe PhotoShop - To edit images/photos

Visit to BBC

Yesterday we visited BBC. We were given presentation by the following:

* Team leader
* Education & project manager
* Developer
* Graphic designer

It was interesting to learn what BBC's new media departed is like, and the job roles etc

PhotoShop Introduction & S4C

Had introduction into PhotoShop by Ben. Really enjoyed the introduction, learned new PhotoShop tools which I had not previously used before. I got some previous experience in using PhotoShop and love editing images.

Later on the day we visited S4C to talk to people in interactive media department. It was interesting experience of talking to people in S4C about job roles and types of project they get involved in.

Health & Safety and End of the 1st week

We had a health & safety session at West Bute Street in the morning. We were shown video on health and saftey at work.

So far this whole week was an introduction to the scheme, next week we begin the real stuff. Should be fun.

Evaluating Websites

The 2nd day to the scheme started by having an introduction into multimedia. The introduction was given by our D10 supervisor, Gareth. Later on we teamed up into pairs and evaluated 4 websites. The task involved to evaluate

· ease of use
· type of audience (whether is for commercial/educational/entertainment)
· what application or tool was used to create it

The task went really well and I fought it was beneficial to me as it acquired more knowledge. I was working with Nick for this task.

D10 Induction 25/9/06

Had Induction to D10 scheme, sounds interesting, going to be a challenge too.