Category: Technology/Multimedia

For the last round of the year, we were given a three weeks project to complete. It’s an independent project, where you have the option to learn something new that is related to multimedia or improve on a lesson that we’ve covered on.

I chose an Adobe program to work on called After Effects. After Effects (AE) is known for great visual effects, motion graphics, animations, etc… It’s usually used in film making, television production and a lot more. I already learn some of the basics of After Effects, which is why I really want to learn even more about this Adobe program. In addition, I love cool motion graphics and creating animations, so I wanted to include these components in my video.

I first learned the basics of this program from my best friend and it was very helpful. However, for this particular video, I need to learn something new by watching YouTube videos. It was pretty challenging to learn it by myself, especially when I need to execute the procedures at the same time I watched the video so that I won’t forget the steps. Sometimes I skipped a step, which ends up having me to redo the whole thing again. Even though I’m learning After Effects, I also need to film the videos that I need to edit too, so a big challenge was the camera quality. The camera I used wasn’t that high quality, which makes it hard for the video to look great, so while I was editing, I was trying to adjust the graphics and the quality of the original video, in order to make my final product look great. Another challenge I faced was that this program is perfect for creating cool motion graphics, but I actually used this Adobe program to edit my whole video, which causes a lot of glitches and slow down my editing a lot. There wasn’t quite a solution for it because it was close to my deadlines for this project, so I just bare with the problem.

I really enjoy learning this Adobe program because there’s always something new that I could learn. It helps me to go beyond my limitations because we can create cool effects with combinations of different things. As I mentioned, I could always learn something new in Adobe After Effects and I’m so proud of myself, whenever I learned new cool motion graphics.

Link to my  video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l4CeFlO4JpYnkwQC3Ir7YYYS7-_UnOK1/view?usp=sharing

Have you ever played any Role-Playing Game (RPG)? One of the tasks in last few weeks of this round was to design my own RPG in Python programming language. This game that I’m working on is basically there are rooms and you need to choose to go within the four directions. This game is based on memory and luck, because the monster will stay in the same room, so your memory would be a definite help. To win, just avoid the monsters and have some required weapons in your inventory. Click here to play the actual game.

We always have struggles, while trying to achieve something. One of the challenge I had during this project was adding doors between rooms. I didn’t know how to add doors at first, so I tried different strategies to add doors between rooms. I actually tried to rewrite the code again, because maybe there’s something wrong with the syntax, but that was not the problem. My second attempt was to try to add details to the code, trying to let Python understands my code better, so besides just telling that the north to the living room is the kitchen, I added all four directions; what’s south to the living room, what’s east to the living room and what’s west to the living room. After I tried to run the code again, it worked! It’s always to add details while you do coding.

This is also one of the other project I worked one. It’s called the Team Chooser code club project. It’s like when you input names and want a totally random group, this link will definitely help you to do so. Just open the link and do the following steps:

1. Click on players.txt

2. Change the names in there and replace with any name you want

3. Click Run! (The play button on top)

We are currently learning about programming language, Python in particular. We clearly didn’t learn everything about python in just 4 weeks. We only focus on conditionals and if statements. We studied a few data type in python such as; booleans, strings, integers, etc… and different comparisons. Every language clearly has its own grammar, how you would speak or write correctly, so does programming language. Python has its own “grammar”, meaning that if you want it to do something, you need to write it in a way that it could understand in a particular format that’s created for just this particular programming language. “Indentation” is one of the most common error. It’s basically the spacing in front of a statement or condition. It’s really important, because that’s how the computer knows which code belongs to which statements, etc…

We then learned about “if” and “else” statements, it’s mainly about checking if a condition is true or false and giving a result as an output. To add on, we also learned about “And”, “Or” and “Not”. It’s like a word that connects two different statements together to check. We use “and” if we want to check if both conditions between it are both true. We use “or” when we want to check if one of the condition is true and we use “not” to flip the value around.

We should sometimes work smart than work hard, like how the “for” loop works. You could give it a fixed number for it to run just as how many times as you want. You could also use “break” to stop the entire loop or “continue” to skip to the next repetition. For even easier, you could use the “while” loop, where it continues forever until the condition is false, which means as long as the condition is true, it’ll continue to run, but you need to make sure that it won’t go forever, there should be something that would stop the loop.

Digital storytelling and photography are taught in this round in Multimedia essential. We basically learned about the story structures that could be applied to any types of story/writing. I really think learning about the story structure is very helpful for us, as students, because we will write a lot of stories and this skill will be apply to the writing. Digital storytelling is telling stories through technology. Photography is one of the visual storytelling. There are also different kind of photos, like depth, frame, symmetry, etc… Besides just studying in class, we also did some scavenger hunts, where we go around the school campus and take varieties of photos.

This is our first year learning multimedia and is also our first year learning with our new facilitator, Cindy. Our first week of multimedia, we were introduced to what is multimedia and research skills. It was very helpful that we get to learn about research skills. We could really use this skill to help us do research. We understand what is primary source and what is secondary source, these skills really help us when we are in college or when we write research papers and stuff. The following week, we learned about the adobe softwares, which includes Adobe Indesign, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. These four adobe softwares are all very helpful for us when we want to edit pictures, create posters, design a book, make a graphic designs, make a flyer and more. Below is the poster I made for the homework I was assigned using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Indesign. Although, we just studied multimedias for a few weeks, I really think it is very practical and helpful.