User group

We picked a number out of a hat and the number you chose was the position in line you were to picking what user group you would prefer from the list. We were number six and had our eyes set on going for the user group of Primary School children. And that's what we got! I was pretty happy about that as I thought it was a good user group as we could pick pretty much any topic as long as it was educational.

Myself,Amy and Ceri got ourselves on a whiteboard table and thought that we would write down as many words possible to do with our user group and what the exhibition would have to be like so that we could identify exactly who they were and what there needs are.

We come up with hundreds of words here are some of the relevant ones:
The exhibition

Educational

Entertaining
Fun

Engaging

Interactive

Useful

Memorable

The User group

Easily bored

Truthful

Energetic

Interested

Spontaneous

Young

Eager

Narrowing the words down to just a few helped us realise that we had quite a tough user group on our hands and primary school children are from the age of 4-11 so we needed to narrow that down to one class. Year 3 ages 7-8 is what we chose. We thought that it was an age were they are still eager to play engage and interact yet they can learn information and put it into practise. Another huge part to our user group other than the children is the teachers. They will be the ones who have to teach the children any information first, the people we would communicate and organise with and the people who will have the biggest opinion on the day.

Now that we know exactly who our user group is we need to get thinking of a good idea that keeps them entertained, educated and happy.

Museum of Liverpool project

We have been set the brief of designing an exhibition that we could hold in  the Museum of Liverpool to suit a certain user group. Before we were given the user group options I took myself down to the museum to have a nose round as it's pretty new to Liverpool, opening in July 2011. I didn't find the museum overly exciting, I thought it was all kind of plain, bland and straight forward. So from then I knew that I wanted to make an exhibition that would be completely opposite to he rest of the museum what ever my user group would be. The museum is free so a lot of people tend to go, this means that the user group list that we will choose from will be a very wide range of people.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ this is the link to the museums website. It gives a timetable of 'what's on' in the museum. The range of different activities and tours show the range of people that are currently attracted to this museum. I found that it was a very large and variable group. I'm looking forward to find out our user group and get going on the project.

Blogging...

For the past month I haven't really blogged about any of my work at all, which I know I should be. I've been a little overwhelmed with the amount of work and been trying to keep on top of that and taking notes as I've been going along so I could type them up on to my blog. I've also been pretty busy sorting out my change of course for September as sadly I will be leaving the media course to change to a career I have always wanted to pursue.

Anyway, here goes all of the work I have been doing lately. Each blog will be the notes I have taken ready to put on my blog, enjoy :)

It's Liverpool- Filming

Our next filming task is called It's Liverpool. It is more of a shorter film making task than the People On the Move but this didn't make things any easier. The brief included filming a short (90second aprox) film showing Liverpool. We came across many difficulties throughout this project.

We decided we wanted to do more of a tour of Liverpool, so we looked at touring methods which we could use to help us film. We contacted the Liverpool City Tour Bus to see whether we could get permission to film on their bus which would then allow us to view all the important and most recognisable sites in Liverpool. Permission was given which was a relief and we got free access to the bus. However, living in England, weather is never reliable! Just our luck, the day we planned to film the heavens were open and we had rain. Not a good a idea to film on an open bus with camera equipment so we had to re-schedule.

Once the weather was more reliable and dry we began to film. Filming went well and we got numerous shots, plenty more than we needed which is always a good thing. We filmed the bus and its journey showing all the significant tourist sites in Liverpool.

Location based narrative assignment

In todays Contempary Media Issues we looked as the start of our Location based narrative assignment. I was pretty confused at first when Google Maps were intorduced but I soon got my head around it.

We have been put into groups and given a brief with our starting Location on. St James Gardens is the point were we have to begin our location based narrative, we then have to move to 4 other places whilst telling a short simple story.

St James Garden used to be a cemetary so it has lots of grave stones, which influenced our idea. We thought we could find someone who  has a memorial there and follow their life story in five simple steps. Arthur Richardson  has a memorial there and an interesting journey so we have chosen him and his previous 5 steps in life to follow.

These are the 5 points we will follow using sound, video footage and images.

1. His memorial in St James Garden
2. He worked as a dentist in Liverpool
3. Moved to Canada
4. Joined the Army
5. Came back to Liverpool

http://www.stjamescemetery.co.uk/

We created our google map, which wasn't as complicated as I thought it would be. We tried to get as close to accurate as we could for each location, as it was history and only a general piece of information on his life we had to do more research to compare what we had found to find out the most accurate places and dates. Google maps wasn't something I enjoyed, peobably one of the least enjoyable tasks that I have completed so far. Howeve I didn't let that interfere with my work and tried my hardest. When it come to presentation we were a member short so we had to pull ourselves together on the day and deliver it the best we could.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=205884935269616984039.0004b6caca83eca681674

Prezi, final game

So, we have finally finished our game design and created a prezi which explains how our game works and its unique selling points. I am pleased with the game we have created and the way we have presented it. I have never used Prezi before so I took the oppertunity of creating it, I quite enjoyed this task and it's something I would opt to do again.

Here is the link to our Prezi explaining our game.
http://prezi.com/nxgi0tohwp_l/present/?auth_key=fmhyspp&follow=o2j8ahbrkcrf

We will be receiving feedback from our tutors and peers on our game today, I will blog about that later.

Finishing our film

We had to edit our film and have it on DVD by 2pm today. It was a stressful few hours! We captured the last of our footage and cracked on with making our film better. It actually wasn't as hard as the first time round, probably because we've got a little used to it. We added the footage inbetween what we already had and extracted some footage to replace it with other. We changed our song to 'Bad Day' as well because it went a lot better and had more of an uplifted beat to it, exactly what it needed. We started the song from the middle as the word Bad Day was sung as Tom stepped onto the mirror. Burning it onto DVD was also an easy process, went on in the matter of minute.

We shown the films in our lesson and we got a positive feedback by the looks of it. Everyone understood the bad luck being passed on narrative, thank god! We have feedback sessions with out tutors in our groups next week which I am unable to make as I am with BBC being filmed as part of a group for the new drama series The Fuse.