Beginning the Market Bench project

BIG NEWS!! I'm a first year undergrad student at Applied Art in Crawford College of Art and Design as of this week! Wooo!! As a result i've bid a sad goodbye to DEIS. I've had a good 5 years here and have great colleagues. I'm really excited, also scared about money but mainly really excited.

We started our first ceramics project yesterday. Making a bench based on the theme of market. I got myself down to the fine English Market and took some snaps. I was thinking of doing a ridiculous / hilarious tacky bench commemorating the Queen's visit, covering it with fish motifs in reference to that brilliant photo, in the style of the typical ridiculous / hilarious tacky ceramic monarchy memorabilia! I've kind of gone from that idea now though, instead i'm thinking of making a giant chilli bench, bright, colourful, and I love chillies, is that enough of a reason?! Art college: you tell me! I was at Electric Picnic earlier this month and they had this great art piece in the Body and Soul, a giant table & chairs, it creates a lovely surrealness sitting on something that makes you feel tiny, so I guess that's what i'm going for with this chilli! I'm also thinking of the fab Mae West couch created by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali.

Here are some of my pictures from today, I love the market!

Ed4Life

This logo was developed for a new structured PhD on offer in CIT in the life sciences area. The client was looking for something modern, not too formal, with a strong nod to the life sciences area. The brief required that the logo work with the official CIT logo, which informed the colour palette for the logo.

Crane Fascination - Rotterdam 2010

I was in Rotterdam last week for another MEP European project meeting with the NMCI. My colleagues in the NMCI are always great company, full of interesting stories about life at sea!

After the meeting was over we went on a short boattrip around the port, which is HUGE! 3rd biggest in the world apparently, there was all this huge machinery and massive, complicated cranes. They looked amazing! Like huge steel dinosaurs, or something from a George Lucas film, deadly!

More over on my flickr

SLOOP2Desc Interim Meeting / Slovenia 2010

I attended the SLOOP2Desc interim meeting in Ljubljana (finally learned how to spell that!) Slovenia last week. It is a EU Leonardo sponsored knowledge transfer project aimed at giving teachers new skills in development of web2.0 learning resources.

We have LOADS of work to do as it is approaching the interim report mark, DEIS is the evaluator in the project so i'll be writing the evaluation report of the project so far over the next few weeks.

Ljubljana is lovely! Beautiful city, very friendly people. It was bizarre there at night time, the streets were deserted, the architecture in the centre of town is really elaborate and ornate, so it was like wandering around in some empty, overblown, moonlit stage set. I also visited the Castle while I was there, it's been redesigned and is now a really interesting piece of modern architecture, coolest castle i've ever visited! Anyway, here are a few photos, more over on my flickr.

Lisbon, Elvin Meeting

Last week myself and a colleague, Shane Cronin traveled to Lisbon to attend the third ELVIN (European Languages Virtual Network) project meeting. ELVIN is a European Union (EU) Lifelong Learning Programme Project aimed at creating an informal social network to support and facilitate language learning.

DEIS has developed an online social network which will be opened up for piloting on the 1st of November (stay tuned for a link!). This meeting concentrated on developing pilot action plans for the upcoming usability tests.

In the meantime myself & Shane got to enjoy Lisbon, it's a fantastic city! It reminded me of an Edinburgh in the sun, it's very old with layers and layers of old streets and arches, quite the labyrinth! One of the highlights was spotting the Blu and Os Gemeos murals I blogged about a while back. So exciting to see them in real life! I'd love to know the process behind doing something like that. The black silhouette photo above is on the building next to the Blu and Os one. It's very striking as it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still under development. Here's a few photos from the weekend. More on my flickr.

MAI Animation Screenshots

Just finished a first pass of the MAI animation, there's a lot of camera movement in the animation which is nice, gives it some fluidity. Have to find a backing track now, aargh! It takes ages to go through the stock music sites.

Storyboards - MAI

Storyboard samples from MAI animations i'm working on at the moment. It's mad colourful (as you can see!) because the logo is so colourful, and the software itself is all colour coded. Parts of it are quite similar in style to the Sigtec animations I did last year (eg, the industry icons), this is because they are actually partner companies. This first one should be finished by the end of the week, HOPEFULLY!

Am simultaneously managing the development of an animation for AIB and the social networking project we have at the moment, so a lot of juggling!

Nairtl Screenshots

Wow, so i'm just back from Dubai almost TWO WEEKS late due to the Icelandic Volcano God.

I'm tearing busy, lots of lost time to make up for, some niggling adjustments to the Nairtl promo (screenshots above) plus I have a lot to prepare for the Sloop2 meeting in Romania next week. First time going to Romania! Am intrigued.

And to finish... best volcano joke i've heard so far... "yo momma so fat, when she was cremated flights in Europe were cancelled for a week!" Ahaha!

Self-Indulgence!

This is a very self-indulgent post, but then that's what I guess this blog is about!

I love doing colour palettes for projects, they just give me so much satisfaction and I love looking at them for some reason (I know - NERD!). So on that note, here's one I did today for a NAIRTL marketing animation.

Lovely colours, lovely squares, satisfaction!

Visualising ELVIN

I’ve been working today on visualising the ELVIN social networking platform, the different interactions and the different tools etc that will hopefully pair learners and learners as well as learners and content. We have a skype meeting tomorrow with all partners so hopefully these will go a long way in making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about!

There’s a lot to work out but visualising the process really helps!

Here’s an example of one of the diagrams.

BCO Asteroid Chaser

In DEIS we’re involved in serious games research. We designed, prototyped and piloted a game last year in partnership with the Blackrock Castle Observatory. More about it on my website here. We’re now modifying that game based on the pilot results and further feedback from the astronomers at Blackrock. My role involves designing all the graphic elements of the game and producing cut-scene and in-game animations in flash, which basically means drawing and animating spaceships and meteorites, nice one!

This storyboard panel was produced using illustrator, photoshop and poser3d. I used a nice and very simple comic book effect on the figure and the neon effect in illustrator also came in handy!

ZAPA Tag Marketing Animation

Last week was the handover date for the ZAPA tag marketing animation. Due to the short turnover time of the job we subcontracted a graphic artist and animator, Pearse Cullinane, to animate the piece. I supplied him with full storyboards, audio and image library and happily, we made the deadline! Here are some of the storyboard panes. ZAPA have quite a strong existing corporate ID, the line drawing style, and much of the line drawings themselves, were taken from the existing ZAPA identity.

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.

New Essential French Demo

Happy New Year!

So here are some stills from the Essential French demo I was working on before Christmas, again the demo was made in aftereffects, a mix of vector graphics and stock photography. The course itself was developed by us in DEIS using a mix of articulate studio and flash. In terms of design I concentrated on colourful, chunky, fun graphics to appeal to the secondary school target audience. As part of the design I developed icons for the three sections of the courses; Listening, Reading and Vocabulary, and Grammar, you can see these in the screenshots above. We worked closely with the Essential French grind school to develop an online moodle portal populated with French language lessons. The lessons were informed by the schools face-to-face experience as well as our own expertise in the area and feature a mix of accessible learning resources (such as mp3s and vocab lists) as well as interactive, self-corrected exercises with intelligent feedback and step-by-step introductions to key grammatical points.

DEIS also developed a site for Essential French, see; essentialfrench.ie

Sloop2Desc kick off meeting + Essential French Demo

I'm just back from Sicily and the Sloop2Desc kick off meeting, we're evaluators for the project. I've never worked on evaluating an EU project before, so I guess i'll learn as I go along! I'll get a lot of help from my boss in DEIS, who has evaluated plenty of these projects. The project is based around developing an open source learning repository of reusable scorm compliant objects to help IT professionals achieve EUCIP qualifications. EUCIP is a new EU wide industry standard that was developed as part of the EQF.

Sicily was lovely and the partners were very hospitable! I had amazing food every day, good times!

Now it’s back to office work, this week I’m starting storyboards for the Essential French demo. We developed an online course using articulate for Essentail French last summer. A lot of work went into it and it’s very expansive, so now we need a demo to showcase the work!

As part of the work last summer we developed a new branding identity for Essential French, this image is of the new logos I submitted, they eventually choose the flag as it was closest to their original logo.

Rotterdam MEP Meeting

Preparing for the Rotterdam MEP meeting at the moment. Flying to Amsterdam at 5 from Cork, then a train to Rotterdam, i've never been there, there's meant to be amazing architecture so i'm looking forward to taking some nice pictures and seeing some cool buildings - that is if I get a chance to slip away between meetings!

DEIS is working with the NMCI on this project. It's an EU funded project, aimed at developing learning objects to be used in maritime courses. We completed one of the courses last April. It was html / css / flash based scorm module to teach learners about AIS (automated identification systems). We used reload to package the scorm modules. In my experience Reload is quite reliable, and has the bonus of being free!

The course itself was developed along a previous template we used for Citi. The template can be seen to be broadly based on Gagne's Nine Steps of Instruction, in that the focus is on providing learning objectives, reminding the learner of prior knowledge, recalling facts presented, providing opportunities for performance and feedback and priming the mind for further learning. Further learning supports are supplied in the form of links, references, etc. Articulate quizmaker was used to build learning activities for the course.

The Dutch partners are presenting their course at this meeting. It will be interesting to see what technology they used and if they are running a SCORM based course also. I'm not convinced that SCORM is necessarily superior to a straight forward html / css based course, especially at this stage of the project, where it is unclear if anyone will be tracking learners progress on the course.

We are using an LMS called Dokeos, which as far as I know is a descendant of Maricomp - a previous LMS used by the NMCI in EU funded projects. It seems to be much the same as maricomp, but there are some superficial differences in terms of labeling of tools and the interface itself. There were some difficulties with uploading the course to Dokeos. I thought it was a problem with the SCORM package itself so I packaged the course using several different versions of scorm and tested it in Moodle, SumTotal and Maricomp. The course was accepted in these LMS' but not Dokeos, it was quite frustrating and after many calls to our Dutch partners the problem was finally identified as being server related on their end. As is often the case the problem turned out to be quite basic and straight forward! The NMCI have subcontracted DEIS to develop a second course for the MEP project, so hopefully all server issues etc will be straightened out by then!

Just because a post with no pictures is a bit boring... here are some screen shots from the course we developed and packaged last April.

Sigtec Animations

Here are some screenshots of what's been keeping me busy lately,

Sigtec is one of our first innovation voucher clients in DEIS. The job involved developing three animations to represent Sigtec's main product - the Bluebox Solution.

Sigtec supplied the scripts and I began work on the images. The three animations consisted of an overview, an example of the system in operation and a run through of the benefits of the system. I developed the illustrations and icons for industries in illustrator. The photos were downloaded using our subscription to a stock images site. As the content was very explanation-driven (particularly in the second animation) I wanted to develop images in an information graphic style, this is pretty broad I know! I concentrated on developing clean, minimal images, using colour to signify the more important elements in each image.

Once detailed storyboards were developed and signed off on and voiceover was recorded, I began work in aftereffects. The animation is quite simple, concentrating on information diagrams and sequencing of images an photographs to illustrate points being made.

One of the more difficult aspects was to develop an interesting animation introduction involving the logo. After looking at a number of tutorials, I developed the 2d illustrator logo file into a 3d image using this tutorial: http://hottek.net/2008/07/advanced-extrusion-with-shatter.html I animated the logo with camera movements to produce a sweeping / zooming effect, the background was more difficult to develop. I worked with after effects presets, but problems with a slow machine, and the general unsuitability of the presets limited me. Eventually I downloaded stock video from videohive.net.