Uncategorized | . David Bird Media .

In a previous post I have discussed how we planned to get the audience involved with our programme. We wanted them to send us in videos of themselves performing magic tricks, and if we had a good enough turn out, we would use these videos for the countdown on the show. Unfortunately although I posted on endless amounts of magic forums and websites, we didn’t get a response. However a number of our crew members (including myself), sent in our videos, hopefully to get the ball rolling. By the time serious rehearsals had started for the show, we hadn’t got a response, therefore we used video clips found on Youtube and featured them in our show.

However as the time grew closer, all my endless forum posting had payed off! We received a tweet from a young magician called “Steve Bishop” aka “The Magic SB” who sent us one on his magic tricks, I then messaged him asking for permition to feature his videos on our websites and he graciously said yes. Therefore although all our efforts didn’t make a great turnout, we still had outside audience participation!!

This is when I started creating the Get Involved & Videos section of my website.

Ill discuss the Get Involved Part of the website first. The reason I am discussing this part first is because initially the “Get Involved” page and the “Videos” page were the same page.

Above is my original “Get Involved” page which features both details of how to get involved and examples of other videos sent to us. At first I thought this page was great, however as the rest of my site progressed I felt that the audience interactivity information should be more in depth and should have more focus.

Therefore I separated the pages and created the “Get Involved” section, which would primarily be the main focus for our audience participation, as it would have all the details of how to get involved with the show.

I am really proud of this page as it does everything it needs to, its informative, its magical and it fills all the space on the page. Once again the twitter feed widget features, although some people may think using this widget on more than one page is a bit too much, I just felt like it was a key element to our show and a great visual to get our audience motivated.

This then takes me on to the new page, the “Videos” section. I found that the way the videos had featured on the original idea felt lazy, unattractive and amateur. Therefore I had a look at the Wix features and found a “Video Playlist” option, which allowed the page to feature a number of videos in an organized and constructed manner. It may look like a simple page, but in fact it was probably the hardest page to construct.

The reason for this was that all the files had to be on Youtube, and seeing as all the content was spread across various peoples Youtube channels, it made them very hard to locate on the search feature on Wix.

Therefore I took it upon myself to acquire all the videos from various people’s channels and upload them onto one “MagicNetTV” channel. Sorting this channel out too around a day to do, but it allowed all of our group members to easily access the videos for their websites.

Overall I think the changes that I have made to these pages make a massive difference to the flow of the website, hopefully so the audience have a clear indication of what information they can take from where.

Magazine Analysis – Draft One

Our character we have created for our “Cabinet Of Curiosities” project has a largely intriguing past. One element of our characters past is his Professional Golfing Career. Unfortunately he had to give his career up at a fairly early age for a golfer. However I have taken this opportunity to create a range of medias that illustrate his career. This example is just a mock up. I created this layout for the magazine to give our group an idea of which direction we could take this project. This magazine front cover is just a draft, which I will present to our group when we meet, in which they can give me feedback about which elements of the layout I can change to make it look more realistic and professional. I created this purely to work out the layout of the front cover and the picture is just what I used as a template and is not meant to visually represent our character in any form. This is because we plan to produce better quality photographs, but to also photograph a different person, other than someone in our group (this is me in the photograph). I found this an interesting task to produce, as the aim was to represent to our audience that this character had a real professional career within the sport. I looked online for inspiration from existing golfing magazine, to gain an idea of how professional magazines present their front covers. I looked at the various aspects of the covers such as the mastheads, the direct mode of address and the straplines, in which I tried to incorporate in my own piece. I added certain objects such as barcodes to the magazine cover just to add a more realistic visual to the piece. Below are some of the magazines, which I took inspiration from, and you may notice some similarities between my magazine and the existing pieces. In future I will post more blogs posts on this showing my journey through this creation to show how changes were made when the piece was shown to the group and what It will look like when we have taken the more better quality photographs.