In love with Lynda

I was told about this site in a recent tutorial, and then again during our flash re-cap class. It is fantastic!

At the moment I have only completed some of the free tutorials but I will be signing up soon for some intensive courses.

I know my software skills need improving and although the Vis Com course has taught me loads about design (Grids, layouts, typography, colour etc) I don't think they've taught enough software skills. Of course, the argument is that students should use their own initiative to discover more and develop their own skills, and whilst I agree with this, I think the course could have done better than 2 x 1 hour lessons on Photoshop and Illustrator in the first year. And lets not mention the infamous Flash lessons!

Anyway, this is exactly what I've been looking for. An invaluable way of learning, and as someone who likes to learn visually, for me, it's perfect. I really feel I can now put all the theory of my course together with the practical skills from Lynda.com to push my skill set as a designer.

More Flash & Work Placements

Flash Newsflash...do you see what I've done there?

Well, a week until hand in and my project is coming along at a pretty good speed. Not quite finished yet, some final scenes and a bit of tweaking to go still but I should make the deadline without too much worry. Had a bit of feedback from other students and Jon (Flash teacher) and everyone really likes the stop-motion and mask effect on the opening scene and the shark fin. I've had a few problems using the software but am actually quite pleased with how much I've been able to do. Really need to practice my software skills as I think this project would have been easier, quicker and looked better if I knew what the hell I was doing with CS3! I found some online tutorials at www.entheosweb.com/Flash that have come in really handy. I have also been introduced to www.kuler.com which I think will be invaluable for the remainder of this course and in industry.

I have emailed Imagine Publishing about a work placement but not heard anything from them yet. I was told the person I needed to speak to was on holiday until Tues, so I hoping they will reply by Fri, if not I'll chase them up.

DKLW emailed me to say they are waiting for some people to get back from shooting an Ad in New Zealand and will let me know something in a week or two.

Flash project update

Had a PAL session this morning and went over ideas for our Flash projects. I heard some really good concepts from other students and Luke, George and Viki were encouraging in their feedback and suggested ways around problems for some people. I think their main point was to try and keep it simple and storyboard everything before hand, otherwise it gets complicated.

Taking this on board I have radically "dumbed-down" my ideas. I was happy to do this really as I was starting to go into far too much detail and was getting concerned how I was going to present the project, but now I aim to go for a simple-but-effective approach. It will mostly be appropriate typography with the odd animation to highlight the point.

Am going to start storyboarding it this week and get a narrative for the piece completed by next week.