For the next three days, I’m working with a group of Year 10 GCSE Art students from Wednesfield High on a digital art/animation project. The students will be using digital photographs taken in Wolverhampton City Centre to create a short film based around the concept of a journey.

Here is the sequence of activities for Day 1 of the project:

• Using CCMixter to find Creative Commons-licensed music and GarageBand to edit it and add instrumental touches
• Mapping out key moments in the music
• Practising editing together a pre-prepared sequence in iMovie - syncing key moments in the music to changes in the visuals
• Editing images in iPhoto ready for printing for creating stop-frame animations on day 2

During the last day or our three day project, Year 10 students from The King’s School learned more advanced image editing techniques - using the Channel Mixer to convert images into monochrome, and using and editing adjustment layers to affect how filters are applied to photographs.

The students then used iMovie on Mac OS X to combine together their best images with music and text to create a video portfolio of their images.

Here are some of the finished images:

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Today, Year 10 students from The King’s School visited Wednesfield town centre and canal to take photos. Using the skills and techniques that the students had learned during Day 1 (modifying Depth of Field, ideas for composition, using focus lock etc.) the students worked in pairs to take a series of shots.

We then looked at methods of streamlining workflow, rating images on a 5 point star system to decide which images were worthy of further development and editing. Students then carried out simple image editing tasks - modifying the histogram, curves and saturation and cropping images to improve composition before uploading their edited images to Flickr.

Here are some of the resulting images:

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For the next three days, I’m working with Year 10 students from The King’s School on a digital photography project. We will be looking at the technical side of digital photography (shutter speed, aperture, using focus lock, depth of field) and at ideas for effective composition (e.g. the “Rule of Thirds”). As the students take, edit and evaluate their photos, they will publish them to Flickr and learn how to organise and annotate their photos online.

Here are the student activities for Day One:

• Mindmapping - what makes a good photo?
• A technical intro to how cameras work - aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, focus
• A shooting challenge - students shoot photos around the CLC demonstrating low depth of field, high depth of field and focal lock
• Uploading images to Flickr, adding new photos, creating sets, annotating and tagging photos
• How to compose a photo - “the rule of thirds”, viewpoint, story-telling, simplicity
• Walking into Wednesfield on a scouting visit for locations, and taking shots.

Resources

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Instructions to students

During Day 3, the final day of the project, you will continue to refine your template using HTML and CSS. You will learn the following:

• How to use CSS to add borders, padding, and to change text alignment of parts of your design.
• How to add page titles and why they are important (for search engines etc.)
• How to use the a:hover attribute to affect the appearance of links when the mouse rolls over them.
• How to control typography - font, line-height, and paragraph spacing - using CSS.

Generating dummy text (lorem ipsum) from lipsum.com will be useful in seeing how your design will look.

Once your template is complete, you will begin the process of adding content to the pages of your site. We will talk about writing style for the web. We will also look at optimising jpeg and gif images for the web.

Finally, we will create a contact form into the site using the free service at Emailmeform.com

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