Year 10 Thursday 10th September

Good morning, Year 10. Today I am on a course, hoping to get some good ideas for our class project next term. There are two jobs that I want you to work on today:

1. Consultation

For your collections project, you need to "consult the stakeholders". This means to ask questions of the person who owns the collection and anyone else who might care about it. Your goal is to understand the collection as well as possible, and to get some idea of what problems the collector has that you could help with. Good questions start with these words:

• What...
• Why...
• When...
• How...
• Where....

Please write a list of questions for your collector, either my father Frank or a person of your choice. Email your questions to me. If your collector is not Frank, you should also either eamil your collector if you know their email address, or print the questions to take home for homework.

2. Preparation for Multimedia

Next term, we will spend a couple of weeks looking at multimedia, and we will make a story using PhotoStory. You can find the story here. Your job to day is to find (or create using Paint etc) pictures that will let you tell the story. I suggest you use Google images and save the images you find (right-click, save picture...) in a folder called shark story inside your DigiTech folder.

Year 11 Monday 18th May

Hi everyone,

Sorry that I can't be with you today.

We are starting a new topic. We will be looking at

• methods of advertising and marketing
• techniques of designing and creating multimedia
• using DigiTech hardware and software to advertise and market
• what makes Christchurch special and different.

Today, please work throught these questions, recording your thoughts and what you find on the Internet in a Word document.

1. Define advertising and marketing.
2. What are the similarities and differences between advertising and marketing?
3. Make a list of as many different methods of advertising as you can.
4. For each method in your list, identify good and bad points.
5. Define multimedia.
6. Give examples of multimedia.
7. For each example of multimedia in your list, say what hardware and software are needed to (a)produce and (b)view.
8. Compare Christchurch to one other place where you have been or know about.
9. Find out about and report on viral marketing.

A story

A monstrous shark appeared at Sumner and attacked a surfer.
People of Christchurch were scared.
The lifeguards sent out their boat with stunguns to scare off the shark.
They chased the shark and stunned it, then collected it in a net and drag it into the beach.
Everyone on the beach crowded around to see the shark and congratulate the brave lifesavers.

Post script:
The shark was taken to Lyttelton to be sent to the Chatham Islands for release.

Representing nature

Waking up at Tauranga Bay south of Westport on Monday 21^st April, I pondered on the view from my bed. The picture shown here is taken the following day, and does not have the same sky. My photography skills have not captured the texture of the distant hills.

My pondering was around the idea of representing the view artistically. The sky asked to be rendered in water paint. The foreground suggested embroidery. The hills could be brocade, or oil paint. But what about the waves? They need to be video, or at least animated, because they are moving.

So the next question became, why is video always rectangular? There is an obvious and easy answer – because the screen/viewing space is rectangular. But that does not satisfy me, and when I get back to “civilisation” I will be talking to my media studies contacts and filmmaking friends about whether any work has been done on non-rectangular film.

And then, how could we create the described multimedia product – a combination of digital and analogue media is truly MULTImedia!

We could digitise the painting and collage and set it as an irregularly shaped border to our video somehow. But then the result is all digital.

Or we could overlay the water paint and collage on a rectangular screen, with just the waves showing. But I want more than that.