Evaulation

I have enjoyed this project, But I felt that I did not necessarily approach it in the best way.  I was unable to fully understand what i-book author could produce. I enjoyed After Effects as I found elements  and skill set similar to using Photoshops. I believe I have produced a coherent and well made book. Others example have only inspire me to do more and try different things.

Crit and Useability

 Before Crit I undertook a usability test of my first completed book. I showed it to a number of people to gauge their feelings about the book. Most of the feed back was positive, people had no problems with the navigation. The interactive content was easy to understand and the liked the flow and general look of the book. However one comment did ring in my ears and that was when did James text start and the introduction end, they also confused by the headings on one of the pages.

Acting on the comments given I have removed the heading clearly stated that part of the writings different from the story is created to James. 

Small change to page

 Crit as always was an enjoyable experience. I like opportunity to see others work and how they have come up with creative solutions to fill the brief. I partially liked Lucy and Jamie e-book. They came up with ideas that to my mind fill one of the key ideas of and e-book, that is the book has to create its own world and all the elements are in keeping with that world. For my part the crit of my book was very favorable, an obvious omission was pointed out. That being a silhouette of a man in the window of the house, this being key to the story. It was also pointed out that the image of a hat was interfering with the text on one of the pages making it hard to read. Lastly an issue of one of the videos needing a slight purse in the audio. On reflection I felt that the text on the front cover was to small so I have increased it as well attending to the elements brought up in crit. 

The entire book

Since refining my e-book I have undertaken further useability test and have had nothing but good and positive response from those who have tested the e-book.

Crossing the T's and dotting the I's

As we are getting closer to crit it is time finish the videos. I have been making quicktime file to view the finished work. I have done this so I can view them out side of After Effects.

I have noticed that all of the videos seem to be a lot lighter than they appear in After Effect. I have reviewed each of the videos and made notes for each dividing them in to units of scenes as you can see from the listed below :- 

Name of video. Intro Video

 

1.Image needs to be darker. James & Mirror

2.Image needs to be darker. Cholton st 1892

3.Image needs to be darker. James & Mirror

4.Ok

5.Image needs to be darker. Pit head

6.Move bricks.

7.Image needs to be darker. School

8.Image needs to be darker. Boys in mine

9.Needs background sound

10.Ok

11.Image needs to be darker. Bricklayer image

Add fade to end of video

Scene reference

 

After I have instigated the changes I have produced a quicktime video to review again and make more changes if needed. As it turned out I dropped the second image of James, scene 3 and made the others around it longer.

Finally I have rendered my videos to a finished format. I has set the image size 1024 x 768 so it would fit the i-pad window. I used the codec h.264 and save them as a Quicktime .mov . The version 2, i-books author converts .mov so it can be played in i-books. This process I went through for all the videos I made.

The finished video