JAMMY DODGER'S November Blog

Last week we did our presentation, I was the main speaker and I think that I did well because I performed my pitch quite confidently and improved it a little so that it wasn't 'robotic' and over-scripted when speaking. This made our pitch sound more natural and believable. I think that we improved a lot on our pitch because at the beginning we were speaking a little too fast and weren't sounding so confident, but after Mr Hind told us our errors we corrected them for the real thing. I think we did really well in our design. I designed it on the computer and I think that being creative is my skill especially on Photoshop. The final design was really original because we merged all our ideas together. My strengths are design and presentation because I find it easy to talk and I think that I am naturally creative as a person and enjoy testing out lots of new ideas. We worked very well as a group, everyone had there own roles and got on with it. We didn't communicate much because we had previously discussed what our individual roles were. We made our choices on who would do what based on each of our individual strengths. This made us very efficient as a group and we, as a team, created a very original and professional design and a great confident pitch.

In today's lesson we finished designing a final draft for the orange tree cafe. I think we did well because we all did very different designs. then we combined them together to make a compromise of all of them. We have a unique design because of this. We decided on having a border because we discovered that having one really increases the chance that somebody will look at it, we know this through scientific studies we found on the Internet. I think that we have created a really good design but i worried how we will do it on the computer. Next week we will need to do some research to see what kind of competition they're up against. From first impression it seems that lots of the competition are either high end or very low end but none of them are mediumly priced. I think that we did a good job on making the leaflet. My role was to think of the layout and help design it. We merged our ideas together, to form a really proffessional design.

last week we took some photos of food as practice for the briefing. I think our group were the best because we decided to photograph the quiches on white paper to make it stand out. I got the idea from looking on the internet for picture of food. All the best ones had a plain background. I think that if the background is to complicated and filled up it draws attention away from the food. We decided to edit the photos on Photoshop to give them even more contrast and make them stand out. we used curves to experiment with the contrast to find just the right level between too fake looking and not exiting enough. We could improve on how efficiently we worked because we spent a lot of the time discussing how we should take the picture, but i still think we made the best pictures.

Last week we were given our breif, to design a leaflet to advertise the orange trees new menu and look. Our team saw that the main colours were orange, black green and white, so we decided to base our esign for the leaflet of the that. I think that we were aiming for a kind of modern but with a rustic bistro feel in our leaflet. Also we did our research report i think that my report is getting alot better i have done some workat home and its almost finnished. Next week i want to get started on taking photos of food. I think it will be good practise for the breif. We went to the cafe for research to help our breif, this way we can see the feel of it and what style the leaflet should be. We discovered that they had alot of competion near the cafe but it definatly stands out because of its bold colour scheme.

Lat week we had to design a logo and a choose a font for a new brand of dog food called Doggie Yum. I decided to pick a modern themed design. I chose a green background because i think that it reflects nature and the outdoors. I then chose a rough font to contrast the smoothness of the background this makes it stand out and it looked really good i think. I then added a logo of a dog paw to show what it was for and for it to stick in your head. I think that altogether it looked really professional and good. After this we had to present our ideas from last week, i did most of the talking and took the lead role in the presentation of coming up with ideas and pitching them. We had a good idea of selling all the parts of the camera separately to get the most money. I think that we did the best of all the groups showing that we worked well together and that we produced some good work. For the rest of the day we finished working on our research report.

Mr H comment

Need to blog for week 2! try to include much more reflective commentary.

In the last lesson we were assigned the task to create an advertisement selling a bundle of two cameras and accessories. Our group did this by taking photos of the cameras on white paper, we did this to show the camera more clearly and make it stand out using contrast, we also dismantled the cameras to give the illusion that the camera had more parts. Our advert was an online advert for eBay or a website like it because we research that eBay receives much more viewings than adverts in papers because people tend to skip past it the newspaper whereas on eBay people are specifically looking for cameras so the advert goes to the right people rather than people that don't want or need a camera. Next lesson we will pitch our advert idea to the class and show what is good and what is bad about it. I think we will do well because we have done a lot of good research on the prices and where to advertise, so i think we should do quite well. We could improve on the efficiency which we work because we spent a lot of taking photos because our camera kept breaking down, so in future we should check our cameras before working and fix them.

Developing photos from film and editing digital photos on photoshop.

, levels are when you change the range of tone in the picture, curve is to do with the contrast of colour of the picture and clone stamping is when you want to get rid of a imperfection in the picture, so you select a part of the image next to the imperfection and copy it over the imperfection. I thought that working with digital cameras had much more possibilities than film cameras. After we had done with working with digital cameras we moved on the the film cameras. The previous week we had taken some photos, this week we were set the task to develop them. First of all we had to assemble the film holder to put all the chemicals in. This was extremely hard because we had to do this in a lightproof bag because the film was still sensitive to light so if the film was exposed to light then it would ruin. Then we put the developer in then washed it then the fix then washed it and dried our film through lunch. After lunch we had to go in the dark room to develop the film, to see how many seconds of light our film needed, we discoved that it needed 3.5 seconds of light exposure. In total we made 6 pictures all in focus and well developed, we were quite proud of it.

Mr D's comment

James, you haven't posted anything for week 2!

The custom white balance symbol

Today we experimented using white balance and exposure. We worked in groups of 3 and were each filmed talking about what we hoped to get out of CRAM. We successfully created 3 films with the correct white balance and exposure. To do this we selected the custom white balance option on the camera and placed a white sheet of paper in front of the camera.The reason why we did this, was to tell the camera what 'white' should look like in the light condition. After doing this we adjusted the exposure by using the exposure buttons on the side of the camera and we adjusted it as we wanted. When the white balance is correct it really makes a difference in the quality of filming.