Character Identity

During one of our projects for Contemporary Media Issues. We discussed the different ways in which we can express ourselves using the internet. I suppose it is a way of being stereotypical in my point of view and having the power to judge different people on the way they look and what they do. Ways in which this can be portrayed are sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We were asked to design a character using these websites and update them regularly and come up with different ideas on how you can express different people judging on where they are from and what they are like. The character I chose to create was a girl called 'Isabella Roswerth'. I have print screened a picture of her facebook below to give you a better idea.

My character is a person who can connect with nature and understands the danger that animals can be in, she is free spirited and just loves to care for animals. Isabella is a very clever person and enjoys spending most of her days fighting for animal rights, shopping with friends or hanging out at the beach. I struggled to enjoy this task a little bit as I didn't feel right pretending to be somebody i'm not. It made me understand just how easy it can be to forge being somebody else using the internet. Which scared me a little bit but also gave me a better understanding of what it would be like to live as a completely different person and a different personality. That part I did enjoy quite a lot.

Museum Project (Spurtles, Photography)

During creativity and concept, we were set an assignment to come up with an idea for an exhibition for the museum of Liverpool. We were all each given a topic to work on and asked to go away and think of our own exhibition and then present a 15 minute presentation at the end of this. The topic that me and my group were given was Photography. Which I was very happy with because of how big my interest is with this hobby, so I was really looking forward to creating this exhibition. We all went away and came up with separate ideas that we could do for this exhibition and also created a spider diagram filled with ideas that we could use.

Once these ideas were created, we started to narrow them down to one whole idea that we could easily work with. The type of idea that we decided to go with was an old fashioned/vintage photography exhibition using Lomography cameras and fish eye lens's and old fashioned cameras and new up to date DSLR cameras. We thought it would be a good idea to compare the two different types of photography and express how times have changed with cameras and pictures. We also thought it would be a good idea to try and create vintage photos using Photoshop and compare them to original vintage photographs. All of these ideas were then jotted down onto another few pieces of paper.

It wont let me rotate the picture. Me and my group were so pleased with how everything was coming along, before we knew it , it was time to present our ideas to a panel with our 15 minute presentation. I thought it would be a good idea to bring in a collection of old to new cameras that we had at home to set the mood as well as having fish eye lens's and different sized lens's. I was so pleased with how well our presentation went considering how nervous we were thinking we would have to talk for 15 minutes straight! A link to our presentation we gave is shown below.
http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/lsshmacb/University-Life.html
It won't let me upload the PowerPoint document and so all you need to do is click this link and then click on 'Photography Presentation' link shown at the bottom.

Digital Media Tools - WEBSITE IS FINISHED!

After weeks of me attempting to bring this website together and Dreamweaver just hating on me too much. My website is finally complete! I am so happy with how it has all turned out, again though, I decided to change the layout and start all over again after I was struggling to add pictures on to the background. It turns out I made the background into an image instead of a background, and it wouldn't let me overlap two pictures. I did start to panic that it would never be finished. However, after hours of trying/ failing/ rearranging. It finally all came together. If im honest, I was hoping for it to look a little bit better then it does but there is always time and room for improvement if I want to change it or start all over again. I was struggling to work the HTML codes, and kept deleting parts of the codes that I needed. Overall I am pleased with the outcome of it and the fact it is now all up and running smoothly. The link to my website is given below.
http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/lsshmacb/

Digital Media Tools - Creating A Website (Updated)

After I realized that I really didn't like the layout I had produced, and I wasn't getting anywhere with it. I had another brainwave and thought a good and unique way of creating my layout for my website would be to design it on an A3 piece of paper and upload this onto Photoshop to edit, change the size and make this design into my homepage. Which is exactly what I did. The picture below shows the design that I had came up with for the layout of my website. I decided to try a different route from it being a vintage/old fashioned design and decided to go down the lines of it being edgy, new and creative.

It wont let me rotate the picture. After this had been created I decided to upload this onto the computer and enhance it to make it look sharper. I changed the writing slightly but I was really impressed with how it all turned out in the end.

Contemporary Media Issues - Wikipedia Assignment Number 2..

During our Contemporary Media Issues lecture, we were asked to create another Wikipedia page based on how social networking is employed to engage audiences. For this project, we were each put into a group and each given a topic to discuss that involves the aspects of social media. The topic that our group was given was the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. We began to research into what this was and different ways in which it affected the media. We were each asked to talk about a different topic relating to the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. These topics included:
- The creation of communities
- Social networking as a market and distribution mechanism
- Social networking and identity
- Social networking and democracy
- Collective Intelligence
The topic that I discussed for this project was Social networking and identity. I felt that this was an interesting topic to discuss for the nuclear disaster because I started to discuss about how quickly the news spread and the ways in which it did over the internet. These ways included the likes of Facebook/Twitter/Youtube as people were uploading videos of what was happening and how much damage it caused. I have posted a link of our wikipedia for you to have a look at to see just how quickly news spread.
http://contemporarymediaissues.wetpaint.com/page/Fukishima+Nuclear+Disaster/thread

Digital Media Tools - Creating A Website

I was far to excited about this part of the module, finally being able to create my own website! Which is what I have always wanted to do. I started to look at different types of layouts and styles to give me more of an idea and inspiration for what I wanted my website to turn out looking like. I wanted my website to express myself and how I am using the style and pictures that I would put on it. After looking at a couple of different designs, I decided I wanted my website to have an old fashioned/vintage feel to it to give it an edgy look. One of the main points I was struggling with for this theme was finding/creating a background as I wasn't sure whether I was able to copyright any other images of the internet. Even though I was really tempted too! My first design in my opinion failed miserably. It was a black flower patterned background with red italic text showing my name and links to the different pages. As soon as I had created it, I didn't like it. Even though I did try to make it look a lot more acceptable then it already did.

Photoshop Techniques - Creating the Unreal

I decided to spend another day messing about with various different Photoshop techniques, and came across one online that really interested me and I wanted to learn how it was done. I started to look at Photoshop techniques that would make a picture look abnormal, edgy and unrealistic. My idea was to create an image that could tell a million stories, which is why I decided to learn how the image below was done.

I am really pleased with how this picture has turned out. I shown it too a friend of mine who told me the fact they both have one wing each makes the picture look different and unconventional. Which was the type of image I was going for so I am happy. I did not mean to give them one wing each, I was just struggling to find a set of two wings that I liked online, the site I went on only gave me the option of a right side wing, which was a bit annoying, but at least it helps it to tell a story, and give different people who see it different opinions of what they think is going on, which I am happy with. I hope to learn more Photoshop techniques in the future to use for my Photography work. The two people that are shown in the image are my two next door neighbors Melissa and Sophie.