YouTube Blues...

Well my Youtube problem is still bugging me. When i go to watch clips I just get a black box and I hang with s.ytimg.com in my browser loading bar. So i went on the hunt for Youtube alternatives!
I took a look at Vimeo which seems like a pretty decent video hosting site.They target High resolution video users supporting HD video in full 1280x720 resolution! Requiring a broadband internet connection if you wish to keep your sanity.. most people have adsl or better these days anyway.

Another video host i looked at briefly was Blip.tv. But i havent had enought time to full evalute it just yet so ill come come back to this tomorrow :P

Screw you... s.ytimg.com

Well I had a fun evening. I was playing round with the webmaster options on my Blogger/Google account. Then noticed that after I had set myself up as a webmaster video clips weren't loading up on YouTube. In the bottom bar i could see my browser was getting stuck on s.ytimg.com. So i went on the hunt!! What was this s.ytimg.com that my browser was getting stuck on!
One guy called Keith has dedicated a large part of his blog to this s.ytimg.com but i dont know how accuarte his information is, he sounds a little to much of a conspiracy theorist for me to take too seriously.

Anyway.... How could I stop it from screwing up my Youtube. I found a few threads with people having similar problems mainly on the Yahoo Answers.com. Nothing about it being linked to enabling Webmaster tools on my Google account though. But I was sure that it must have been linked. All the responses to solving this error had been "Delete your cookies!" so that what i did..and nope, still wouldn't work.

So i went about removing the webmaster tools i had enabled on my Google account! after looking around on my Google account options and searching the web for answers i came to the realisation I had to Delete my Google account! That will fix the problem.. Wont it?..

So that's what I did, I then realised that It deleted my Blogger blog, My igoogle set up, my Youtube account,My Reader account, and probably some other stuff that i haven't remembered to check yet. Lucky for me I had my forum posts backed up to a word document :)

However Now my blog has been remade, renamed and updated.. Its now named NoobTube!

Gumby a distant cousin of Wallace&Gromit?

My last post was a about a short clay animation I found on YouTube. Clay animation looks fun and interesting. I know in this day and age i should probably be focusing on computer generated animation instead, but im pretty sure that clay models are still scanned into computer to help aid the fabrication of 3d computer animation anyway. An old and well known animation is Gumby. Gumby was created in mid 1950's and is a good example of early clay animation. Heres a short clip to jog the memory:



A more recent example of clay animation is Chicken Run. Made by Aardman Animations. The same studio that produced Wallace and Gromit.

If you click this link you'll see a great list of animations dating from 1955 too 2006 which include alot of different works produced by Will Vinton who ill cover in more depth in a later post.

A few starting places for people interested in clay animation are: The Clay Animation and Stop Motion How To Page, PT3 and Clay Animation Station.

Clay Animation

I was browsing youtube looking for some of the most popular youtube vids of all time, this one popped up. I'm not sure why as it doesn't have nearly as many hits as some but it was excellent.
I loved the clay work and has inspired me to try some of my own.. at a later date :P

Project A Rational

I chose to curate an online gallery. I used 10 untitled pictures taken by my brother who is a professional photographer I did this for 2 reasons

1) It made getting permission to use the pictures a lot easier for me as I could simply phone him and ask.
2) I thought if I was going to curate an online gallery the least I could do was promote my brothers work!

I tried multiple site builders and blogs as my platform like adobe lightroom and wordpress.com. In the end I settled for blogger.com for my platform and Flickr.com for my image host.
I mainly used these two sites because of their ease of use, and because I could upload my images onto their servers without having to host the site myself or use a paid service.

The site is made up of the following:
A header with the title of the exhibition, and the artist’s name. I used one of the photos I liked and felt represented the exhibition title best. I did the editing for the header in Photoshop and inserted it through the layout settings in Blogger.

On the top left is an Artist bio, giving the reader a background on the photographer.
Next I created a RSS feed display. The last 3-4 comments made on the photos below are displayed here. This is to encourage people to make comments on the photos and interact with the site. Its also a quick way for people visiting the site to see what others think about the pictures without having to view the individual comment box from each photo. Next to that is a RSS link so that people can also add a RSS feed to a personal RSS reader if they have one.

How and why the photos were displayed:

I chose to place a slide show of the photos for the first post. This gave people a way to see the photo content without having to scroll down through numerous pictures and also let me play around with embedding. The photos were hosted on a flicker account where I made a private group of images to host from. If this was not for assessment purposes I would have got the artist to create a flicker account under his name to host from so that the title on the flicker slideshow show read “Discarded from Pierre Curry on Flickr” rather than “Discarded from Anthony Curry on Flickr”. I didn’t want to be any confusion on who did the work though
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After that is the Artist Statement where the Artist has given some insight into the background of where the photos were taken and what he envisioned they would represent. (It’s also from that statement that the title of the exhibition came from).

I have placed the images in individual blog posts so that people can comment on them, I also made it so anonymous users could post comments on pictures because I find often when people are forced to create to comment on something they don’t bother. And I wanted people to be encouraged to give their opinions on the pictures.

I used a template from a template site for this and played around with the html source a little. I changed the background colour from clear to mid grey as mid grey apparently is meant to be the best background from which to display photos. I tried to edit the middle section to grey as well but had trouble finding the piece of code. I used a very handy site to find the colour codes http://websitetips.com/colortools/sitepro/. I tried very hard to get a list of thumbnails instead of slideshow but I couldn’t get one to work for me. All in all I’m pleased with how my site turned out. I think it’s simple and effective.

SquareSpace

Whilst looking for different formats to display my images for the curate an online exhibition assignment I came across a web service called Squarespace that costs 8$ a month....I know I know, $8 dollars is alot for a uni bum but there is a 15day trial for u to see if u think its worth it.

I was going to create my assessment on the trail and hope my trial lasted for the duration of the marking process but didn't want to take that risk so instead i created my exhibition on Blogger. It is alot more limited compared to Squarespace but its free!!
Here is a one of the pictures i have on display on my online gallery


You can check out the rest my Online gallery here : Discarded by Anthony Curry

Flickr Slide Show

Ive been working on a project for Network Media Production in which im to exhibit a series of photos. Im working on an embeded slideshow from Flickr. I also tried using Lightroom which works quiet well if u have your own host. Here is an example using Photos taken by my brother Pierre Curry.

HTML lesson

Ive been looking at different HTML lessons so that I can get a better grasp of it. I came across one written by Tom Schneider.

He pretty much runs over alot of the things we went through in our first html tutorial at UC.
He Explains what HTML is and then follows up with a brief lesson and explains some of the common tags.

I got left behind a little in class when we did this so its good to have a lesson like this to refere too. Easy HTML Lesson. If anyone else has found lessons for HTML or CSS, would be great if u could comment to this post with a link to it.

Ronald Jenkees

Here's a guy I found on YouTube called Ronald Jenkees. Hes a bit of a YouTube sensation and some of you have more than likely already heard some of his stuff.
Its not exactly the style of music I generally listen too, however I liked this. He is extremely talented and its pretty catchy. He is pretty goofey but very funny! One of my preferred tunes is Disorganised Fun enjoy.

World of Warcraft - Patch 3.1

The new content patch for wow should be out by the end of this month.
Along with the usual class nerfs, buffs and tweaks we will see a new instance called Ulduar. Patch notes can be found at :http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

Photo Editing Exercise

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Photo edit

Originally uploaded by Anthony Curry

This is a picture I edited for my Introduction to Media Production unit.

It was taken by my brother Pierre Curry, you can find more of his work at Focused Imagery

Birth of NoobTube

Well I lost my blog, its a long story, and one i wont bore you with.However theres been some changes! Below is my original "first" post i had the good fortune to have all my forum posts backed up on my computer. As you will see if you read below this blog use to be called "imparting life". However that name is no longer available. So now its known as NoobTube!!

Oringinal Post

"Hello everyone. My name is Anthony Curry. I am in my first year of studies in Media Arts and Production at University of Canberra. Im intreasted in gaming and animation.

I have never blogged before and am doing it for the first time as an assesment for my unit Networked Media Production. I’ll be compiling information I find intreasting on animation, games, new movies, current university projects and anything else i find along the way on my blog journey.

I chose the title Imparting Life for this blog becuase the orgin of the word animation derives from L animātiōn- (s. of animātiō a bestowing/imparting of life). Also to impart is to share, pass on and transmit information and ideas which i found fitting for a blog."