Montage!

I've been putting on my arty hat for the last couple of days and I must say that I have been thoroughly enjoying it! I have had two projects running parallel for the last week which have both been tricky but I think I pulled them both off pretty well and am looking for more to do! The first project was a poster for uni and the second a website; both of these I'll expand later.

But first! I have an upcoming conference that I'm attending next week and I'll be dabbling in some of the media aspects of it to help out, one task given to my brother and I is to create a montage each night of some of the photos taken during the day. Now creating the montage is not so difficult, generally you can just chuck heaps of photos into an iMovie template, make a few tweaks and tada! However the difficult part is finding amazing montage music! So for the last couple of nights I've been scouring the internet for great montage music, this requires listening to hundreds of songs from all over the place and trying to determine whether the song will work as a montage. I've found a couple that I like and the best one so far in my opinion is by an indie band called the "freelance whales", it's just got that kind of montage funk that I need. I also found this other song by a band called Barcelona , it's an amazing song (but probably not very good for a montage) but I can't buy it anywhere in Australia! It is so frustrating that I try as hard as I can to legally buy an album but nowhere will let me... Sanity said they have it in stores so I might pop in tomorrow and have a look, here's to hoping.
Anyway back to topic, if you know any good montage songs please let me know, even though it is quite enjoyable listening to heaps of songs on youtube to find that perfect one, it can become tedious at times...

Back to my art streak.
I managed to tick off 2 boxex on my list of things I must do in my life; making a mobile website, and a podcast. For some this would cause a great groan as you think how shallow my life is but to me it was quite an achievement.
The reason for making these two things is for this conference that I was just discussing, what they wanted was a website to upload podcasts of the talks after each of the sessions where users can either access it on their phone and listen to them there or go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast and listen there, now having never done either of these before I thought it'd be a great experience to go all web 2.0 (or are we up to 3.0?) and bust up a cool website.
If you're interested in how I did it then read on, if you're allergic to code then here's the place to skip top the next paragraph (don't say I haven't warned you)....
To begin I created a normal page with a nice looking table and a list of available tracks to download, without going into the details I managed to detect what kind of device is accessing my page and then change the css stylings (the look of the page) appropriately to match the device. It was surprisingly easy and I can put up the code if you're really easy (to be honest just google it and you'll probably be able to figure it out) but it was a good learning curve on both how to actually do it and how to make content look good on a phone.
To make the podcast was a little more tricky, first you need to make an xml document that has a list of all your tracks on there, iTunes then reads this xml document as an RSS feed and updates when you add another item, you then need to add specific tags (piece of code for those that have no idea what I'm talking about) for iTunes to read your podcast and output the correct data to the downloadee and finally you need to upload it to a site somewhere.
All in all I was quite impressed that I managed to do both of these things in a night but I was on a bit of a roll and so am now looking for what to do next!

Finally the second arty thing I made was this poster for university.

As a group project I am part of a team with 3 other people who must create an application that searches through tweets and display trends depending on what you search for. For part of the assessment we needed to make a poster about our project and we had this great idea of making one look exactly like twitter and have all of the required information displayed as tweets. I, the supposedly arty one, was given the task of making this poster on photoshop something you might think isn't too difficult. However you don't notice the really small details of a webpage until you have to recreate it exactly and twitter has a lot of little lines that you never notice until you've almost finished and then you find one and have redesign the whole thing again. Anyway I'll upload it and you can take a look, I think it turned out pretty well (if you click it, it will expand).

I'll let you all get back to your lives now, I'm not even sure if this post is even interesting to many of you but there are some of you that just read this to procrastinate... and I'm happy to help facilitate that anytime. If you want to further procrastinate then you can go and look for some montage songs for me and leave them as a comment :D

Petey