The theme chosen for this assignment is based on Reading 1 that sounds "Cyberspace…your information superhighway." Cyberspace is a virtual world or space of information transmission. In cyberspace, information is converted into electric signals and is transmitted via electrical circuits. This information can be available to users within seconds. It transcends all the limitations of space, time, cost, races, nationality, laws, knowledge and boundaries. Just by a click on the mouse or by typing a few words people will be able to view the information that they want in just a few seconds. Therefore, cyberspace is like an information superhighway.
The animated gif basically consists of two scenes. The first one is the interpretation of cyberspace. As we know, eye vision is one of the ways in which we can view the information from the computer. At this time, computers are still the main channels for users to get access to and view the information. Therefore, it is not hard to comprehend why an eye and a laptop were placed on this first scene. The rest of the things for example human being, spaceship are just objects that can represent the kind of information a user can get access to in cyberspace. They are floating in the space in which is interpreted as a cyberspace. Obviously there is much more that can be include in this first scene to convey the message that cyberspace is able to transcend the limitations of space, time, boundaries and so on. But as you can see, the scene itself is pretty much crowded. So it is better to keep things simple. I have selected "Haettenschweiler" as the font face for the word "Cyberspace … " because it looks more technical and gives you more sense of modernistic.
The second scene is set as a continuation of the first scene to resume the theme "… your information superhighway" with the same font face as the previous scene. In this scene as people can see, are binary digits that travel on different routes and different channels, just like cars travelling on the highways or the road system. Only here, I used binary digits to indicate the transmission of information.
These two scenes were selected after much consideration and modifications of my initial designs. To complete this animated gif, I started off by creating the images that are needed to use in these scenes such as the human beings, the spaceship, the eye, the laptop, the binary digits and the highway. These images were created mainly using Paint, Paint Shop Pro 7 and Microsoft Word. They were initially saved as bitmaps to preserve their original pixels and colours. Then a series of required sizes of frames was created in Paint Shop Pro and being applied with the background colour.
Following that was a lot of copying and pasting of images, sharpening and blurring, resizing the images, applying sunlight and illumination effects and placing of text. These were done more in Paint Shop Pro 7 and Adobe Photoshop. All that was required was a lot of times, efforts and detail. A lot of switching from one application to another had been done to modify the images and add the effects onto them. As those frames were completed, the next thing I did was imported them to Jasc Software>>Animation Shop 3. Tasks completed at Animation Shop 3 were the setting of delay time for each frame and adding the transitional effects between both scenes.
The whole assignment took approximately three weeks to complete.
As each frame was quite big in size, the original animated gif ended up twice the size bigger than the size required in the assignment. Therefore, some of the frames have to be edited. All the transitional frames were discarded. Also, I've discarded many other frames as I can to make the file size small. Ended up with an animated gif of 87 Kilobytes in size. I guessed that's the smallest I can do. This causes the movements of the images to be less spontaneous. Somehow, the idea was still there. So there were frames that had to be rebuilt. But because all the bitmaps were converted into jpeg to reduce their file sizes, as they were copied and pasted onto the background frames, a lot of retouched had to be done on those objects in order to produce what desired.
One of the problems that were encountered during the production of these images was the switching of image file from one application to another. Some applications produce certain effects or perform certain tasks but do not support a certain file format. Therefore, some of the images have to be saved as different file formats. However, things get easier as I got more used with these applications.
Another problem that was encountered was to learn what each application could do best. This again requires a lot of effort and times for trials and errors. Several times, the images ended up more badly than what I have done before. As a matter of fact, they have to be recreated.
There are a lot of things that I learned from this assignment. I learned that Paint is easy to use when you want to draw your original images. It is also very useful when you want to paste an object image (in bitmap) onto a background image. In order to be able to perform this copy and paste task, we must save our original images as bitmaps. The images as appeared at the final frames can be saved as jpeg to reduce their sizes and still preserve a very good look. Since the images that I've produced were not in flat colour, I was advised by the lecturer to save them as jpeg. I found that the frames, after being saved as animated gif have varied in terms of pixels' colours.
I also learned that Adobe Photoshop is very useful in order to create effects. But sometimes one is required to save the image in psd or pdd format. This can be very annoying when you want to transfer the image to some other applications that do not support them. Paint Shop Pro 7 is just as useful as Adobe Photoshop but it's not that easy to use especially by new users.
It was also a great challenge for me to fulfil the requirements of the assignment that is to maintain a smaller file size. In order to achieve the requirements, sometimes there is a lot to sacrifice such as quality of the images.
In my opinion, this whole assignment was designed to give us an idea of how to create graphics and how to composite them to create an animated gif. In terms of graphic, it's not something as simple as viewers can see on the screen. It requires a lot of works to be done before we can get the right one. I definitely think that this is something relevant and very helpful to me if I want to create any graphics in the computer or on web in the future.
As a conclusion, it was worthwhile trying on various available softwares to create images and effects that were sketched by hand. This assignment really helps to enhance ones skills to create images in computer.
To complete this assignment, some of the following magazines were referred to get some idea:
Anderson, Alun. (May 2001). New Scientist Magazine. London: New Science.
Anderson, Alun. (November 2001). New Scientist Magazine. London: New Science.
Clarke, Jim. (January 2000) Web World. Victoria: Nuance Multimedia.
Oldham, Joe. (June 1999) Popular Mechanics. New York: Jay McGill.
