Author Archives: digitallyrosemary
Week 12 – Rose
This week was spent fixing up the aesthetics on the website, ensuring hyperlinks were correct and opening in new windows. All of the final content is currently being uploaded, which includes not only video, but audio.
I wound up choosing the Georgia default font scheme as it came with a few fonts that made the headings look rather grungy, which suited our topic and its default font for the main content looked nicer than Times and was easier to read. Hopefully the font size isn’t too small when viewing on a bigger computer (I developed the website using my laptop, which it looks great on). Harry and Anna both tested the website on their laptops and computers and gave me the all clear for everything functioning the way it should be.
I had trouble trying to set up the Lightbox for our Flickr, however, I figured out a nifty way to include a snippet of our Flickr galleries, by the use of a Flickr Slideshow. This came in handy as I was able to scatter our galleries, aka “sets” into specific areas that related to the photographs in the website. It also saved a heck of a lot of time that would have been wasted if I had hand coded a gallery, which is what I did at the beginning. I also found that embedding all these social media accounts was quite easy to do and Dreamweaver did not argue with me once.
I also wound up creating our own Social Media Icons as I could not find any on the web that really matched the aesthetics on our website, social media pages and our development blog. It took a bit longer than expected to create, but I think it has been worth it, as the main page does look pretty great.
Overall, I’m really pleased with our project and how smoothly it has run over the semester. The content has substance and we hope our viewers enjoy navigating their way through it and learn a few new things about the Melbourne Music Community along the way.
Week 11 – Rose
Over the past week Harry took some great photographs of some buskers we’ve been trying to locate all semester. These were uploaded to our Flickr and Instagram account.
The other day I had a lightbulb moment with the location photographs Harry took. I decided to create a map with GoogleMaps where pins of the buskers we’ve captured have been inserted so viewers can see where they perform regularly.
The rest of the week will be spent tidying up the website, ensuring links are all correct and tidying up the fonts as well as adding in the rest of the content.
Week 9 & 10 – Rose
The past few weeks have been a bit hectic with our group, due to busy uni & work schedules and sickness. Yet we haven’t let that us stop us and have been continually updating our project, and it’s really great to see it coming together.
Harry sent me some wonderful information about street musicians (aka buskers) that was really informative and I actually learned a few things I didn’t know before! I uploaded that to the site immediately.
Annie provided some video footage of the Dan Webb interview which looks really good. I especially love how we have taken some of the interview where Dan talks about his accomplishments and other personal tidbits into his profile page. I figured it’d be more interesting having our viewers watch our participants talking about their careers, rather than reading about it.
Over the weekend, Melbourne lucked out and we scored a ridiculously sunny day. I happened to be in the cbd that afternoon and boy was I glad I was as I was able to listen to some great acts on Bourke Street Mall. One of them was the band The Pierce Brothers, a fantastic duo who really generated a crowd.
(video courtesy of The Pierce Brother’s YouTube channel)
Grateful for obtaining some excellent video footage for our instagram account (link on sidebar), I picked up a copy of their cd (which is really good!!) and gave them a donation. I would’ve liked to give more, but I just couldn’t.
I’m really proud of the work my group has done so far.
Week 8 – Rose
After some consultation with Dean and Jonathan during Week 8’s tutorial, we came up with some alternatives for a photo gallery that will be better suited for our project.
As we have quite large photographs (even after compressing them slightly) and so many, I am going to set up a photostream using Flickr to house our photographs. Flickr’s setup is extremely simple and also gives the viewer the opportunity to view the photographs with a full screen view without any distractions from the tab it’s open in.
I’m going to have a look to see if I can use flickr to house the main documentary or whether YouTube or a Lightbox might be better suited. Lightbox or Flickr would just make the presentation of the documentary more professional than a YouTube channel would.
To keep in line with the photography topic, we are going to attempt to regularly update our Instagram feed with photos of performers and venues we happen to stumble upon as we have realised that Instagram is the best social media tool for us and our topic.
Week 7 – Rose
My focus for this weeks production development was adding content to our main portal (the website).
A mini profile of our first interview with Dan Webb was uploaded and it contained links to his social media accounts.
A behind-the-scenes feature was uploaded with a music video (produced by Annie) of Trash Palace. This behind-the-scenes feature also included some wonderful photographs of the band during this gig and in the interview after it (which is still being edited as we speak).
Another talented musician that wanted to be part of our production has a SoundCloud account with dance tracks he has produced. Links to his account (and will for other SC accounts) will be placed on the main page next to our blog updates.
Week 6: Rose
During the mid semester break, I managed to make a jump start on the website and I must say, it’s looking pretty good. Once the content (video footage etc) is in suitable formats to be uploaded, it’ll be looking even better.
Content I’ll be adding this week will be hyperlinks to SoundClouds and Updates on the main page, just so the site doesn’t look so empty. I’m also going to be getting started on the profile pages for our participants.
I also created a Pinterest page to help keep us inspired and motivated during this project.
~Rosemary
Week 5 – Rose
This week, i began to think of platforms to host our interactive website. I originally thought of coding the website from scratch and uploading it to my Opax server hosted by Swinburne. Unfortunately, I realised just how complex this would be, particularly as we had so many external hyperlinks and video footage to include.
Anna and I discovered the Wix HTML Editor, which is a a seemingly easy-to-use drop n drag style website builder. I have been playing around with websites since the mid 1990’s so I know my way around website editing platforms, however, this website editor was a complete nightmare!!!
The so called easy adding text function just did not happen. All I had to do was click on the title and add my text. I clicked on my title to add the text and no text appeared. It was extremely frustrating and I highly recommend others to avoid at all costs.
There I was hoping to get a head start on it, and the editor was a complete fail. Hopefully after our week 6 class, we’ll be able to find the perfect platform to create a beautiful and functional, yet professional looking website.
Week 3 – Rose
Earlier this week, we began promoting our documentary project to our friends and family using Facebook. We created a Facebook Group where people could post information, music videos and other links relating to the music scene in Melbourne.
As the Facebook Group is very new, and our proposal has become more solid, people have slowly begun to show interest in what we are trying to achieve. People have begun sharing our status updates and our group around informing their musically inclined friends (music students/singers/bands/buskers etc) and those involved in the behind-the-scenes aspects of the industry, encouraging them to participate in our project.
Once our project develops and we get more people involved, hopefully the group will become more active.
~ Rosemary
Week 1 & 2 – Rose
Over the past 2 weeks, I have been keeping an eye out for buskers and thinking of what we could include in our documentary.
Recently, I discovered information about buskers that I’ve never known before and has made me think about their lifestyle in a completely different way.
Street entertaining – busking.
It turns out that buskers on the streets of Melbourne’s CBD requires permits. These permits vary in terms of what kind of entertainmnt the busker is providing and where they choose to claim as their territory. The City of Melbourne offers a comprehensive guide to the permit prices and locations.
digitalmelbmusic.wordpress.com 