Final Cut Pro Editing

Sioned, Ian and me enjoyed a 3-day training coures in Final Cut Pro last week. Cyfle arranged the course and Richard Atherton was the trainer. Richard was fantastic, and I felt the course was extremely worthwhile. I now feel much more confident editing in genral and know my way around FCP really well. I particularly enjoyed learning about effects, color correction and compositing. I'm really looking forward to putting some of my new skills into practice.

Out into the big, wide world

My Cyfle training scheme in interactive media has come to an end. It has been a fantastic year, crammed full of new experiences, great tuition and guidance, and brilliant work placements.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to be on this scheme. It has given me the chance to develop my new media skills and gain invaluable training and experience. I've also had great opportunities to meet people working in the industry and formed a lot of new friendships over the year. It really couldn't have been more perfect. I just hope I manage to get a job doing this stuff that I love so much (any offers - please get in touch!)

Massive thanks to Cyfle - especially Gareth and Iona, The European Social Fund, S4C, Boomerang, Green Bay, Cube Interactive, BBC Wales New Media, Unique Media, Limkokwing University College of Creative Technology, MYGO, Steve Jones, Nick Butler, Sarah Goodey and everyone who funds Cyfle. Diolch o galon.

Geting Interactive at the BBC

I finished my work placement with the Interactive Team at the BBC in Cardiff last week. Both Jo Pearce (Senior Producer) and Claire Jones (Assistant Producer) have been fantastic; briefing me on their work, inviting me to meetings and giving me the chance to get involved in the research and development of new projects. Their work includes developing interactive applications for mobile, web and eTV (enhanced TV / red button) platforms.

Andy Davies kindly showed me round Flip Factory. It's video encoding software that allows you to set up 'watch folders' so that as soon as a new video is put into the folder, Flip Factory will automatically start encoding it for web/mobile devices. It seems to work really well and the encoding times are impressively quick.

I've also been in the edit suite, editing clips of adudicators at the BBC National Eisteddfod site and interviews with sports celebrities for the Raise Your Game site using Adobe Premiere Pro.

I've been offered some more work for the Raise Your Game site for the next two weeks which I'm really pleased about as I'll have the chance to get some more valuable experience with the New Media department.

End of my placement at Green Bay

My placement at Green Bay seems to have completely flown by and it was my last day there yesterday. With a lot of hard work I managed to finish the re-design of the Green Bay website and it is now live at www.green-bay.tv.

Although aesthetically it does not look that different from the old site, technically it is now far easier to update and expand in the future. Their previous site had been built using HTML tables. Now all the design for the site is CSS-based making it easy to make changes and adhering to W3C accessibility guidelines. All the content for the commissions and news sections now comes from a MySQL database using PHP so it is easier to manage and update.

I also finished editing some promo clips of Green Bay programmes for the UK Indies Pavilion at Mipcom 2006 next month.

I've really enjoyed my time at Green Bay and will miss all the lovely people there but hope to stay in touch with them in the future.

dConstruct06

Last weekend Ian, Mei, Sions and me enjoyed our last glimpse of summer by going down to the seaside in Brighton for the dConstruct Web 2.0 conference. It was a great excuse to catch up with each other before the end of our course and the conference was excellent.

Almost all the speakers were fantastic, delivering informative and entertaining presentations. 'Mashups' was definitely the running theme of the day, with plenty of examples on the web at the moment and advice on how to develop your own using APIs. A web 'mashup' is basically an online application that pulls in existing information from two or more other web services (e.g. Flickr and Google Maps info). Here are a couple of interesting examples:

• Flickr/Yahoo Maps mashup - the link shows you all the photos that have been geotagged on Flickr as having been taken in Cardiff, not many so far but it was only launched a few weeks ago so is sure to gain popularity and gives you a different way of exploring photos.
• Chicago Crime Map - Here a mashup of crime statistics and Google Maps allows you to identify the locations of criminals and reported crimes in Chicago!
  

What I found particularly interesting is how much the likes of Yahoo, Google and Amazon are now encouraging the development of mashups and other applications that use their APIs even for commercial use (although you usually still need to get permission).

Another hot topic of the day was 'microformats' with Jeremy Keith very passionately encouraging their use.

It was a really great day and I left with a greater insight into the current trends in the web industry and some new ideas for future projects.

Where Did The Summer Go?

Everything has been so hectic over the past few weeks that I haven't had a chance to blog at all. So here's my attempt to catch up on the last month of my Cyfle course.

BBC Placement

I had a meeting this morning with Jo Pearce, Luke Surrey and Claire Jones from the BBC New Media Department in Llandaff, Cardiff. It was great to meet them and I am looking forward to my work placement there which starts next Monday. I'll be splitting my time between the BBC and Green Bay for the last month of my course. They are working on a wide variety of interactive projects at the moment, and I am looking forward to getting some experience working with video for mobile and web platforms as well as red-button television.

Kuala Lumpur Documentary

Here's the short video we shot of our trip to Kuala Lumpur...

Sioned - I didn't choose the screenshot, Vimeo seemed to like you!



Cyfle in Kuala Lumpur on Vimeo

Green Bay Board Meeting

I was invited to give a short presentation at the Green Bay board meeting today. Attending the meeting was Green Bay's Creative Directors John Geraint and Phil George as well as Finance Wales Investment Executive Bethan Cousins, Corporate Development Expert Elizabeth Coffey, Business Manager Gareth Fisher and Gary Stone.

I spoke about the recent agreements between PACT and the major broadcasters that gives independent producers greater freedom to exploit new media rights. I also discussed the various new media technologies available at the moment and different methods by which production companies could think about developing alternative revenue streams through these new platforms.

d.construct
September 8th - Brighton Corn Exchange

Just managed to get a ticket for the d.construct web conference in Brighton. The line up of speakers looks great and it coincides with the last week of our course, so will be a good way to finish off our training.

Last Monday we had a chance to show the dvd of our trip to Kuala Lumpur to S4C's Chief Executive and Chair of Skillset Wales, Iona Jones. It was a great opportunity to chat to her about our experiences in Malaysia, as well as our work since then in Wales - particularly for the Urdd Eisteddfod.

Later that evening we attended a graduation ceremony for previous Dimension 10 students in the Millenium Centre. There was a really great turnout with over 60 guests from the industry, so it proved to be a great chance to meet people and discuss what we have been doing on our course.

On Tuesday we had an Exit Strategy careers day organised by Cyfle. It was a really valuable day with some useful advice on working as a freelancer, tax issues and CVs from speakers from the industry. Our course finishes on September 15th so it was helpful to get some career advice as the time for searching for employment is fast approaching.

Back at Green Bay I have been working hard on a new CSS-based database-driven version of the website using php and MySQL. I also had the opportunity to brief the staff on new media issues today and am presenting a short paper at the board meeting tomorrow morning. It was great to have the chance to share my knowledge with the other members of staff here and hopefully it will lead to Green Bay developing ideas for interactive content in the near future.

Le Webcast à Paris

Caernarfon...
London...
Kuala Lumpur...
Ruthin...
Llandovery...

Paris...

This course has been great for travelling so far, and I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to travel to Paris this week with Unique Media.

Jon Stethridge kindly invited me to help with a live webcast for Hewlett-Packard. It was a long journey each way by car due to all the kit that we needed to take along, but well worth the effort. The crew was Simon, Chris (both pictured), Jon and myself. We set up all the kit on the Monday evening, ready for the live webcast on Tuesday.

The webcast was broadcast to hp staff in dealerships across France and lasted about an hour. It was a two-camera shoot and was streamed in Windows Media Format. There was also a back-up phone number staff could call to listen to the audio if they had any problems with the webcast.

Jon was very helpful in answering all my questions and I learnt a lot about how the webcast was set up. I also helped change the slides on the webpage in sync with the webcast. It all went according to plan and appeared to be a success with around 170 unique log-ins from hp dealerships across France. I gained a lot of knowledge from the experience and getting the chance to do the job abroad was a definite bonus.

I'm back in Cardiff at Green Bay now and working on a new CSS based template for their website.

In other news, three staff from Lim Kok Wing in Kuala Lumpur are arriving in Cardiff this Saturday. Amongst them is Eugene Foo who taught us After Effects while we were in Malaysia. It will be great to get the chance to catch up with them again and show them around the sites of Cardiff.