It’s Up!

The Brown Owls online documentary is finally up and running, and can be found here.

The lovely Pip has blogged to the MM@M-related world about it. Hooray!

I’m glad it’s done, but it actually wasn’t as stressful as I’d imagined it might be. And it was a lot more fun than writing 3000 word essays for Research Strategies. Ugh.

Hopefully Dean will post a list of all the other students’ work so I can check them out too… It’s frustrating to catch little snippets of what everyone’s grappling with in class and not see the final outcome. Then again, do I need more distractions from my 9-5 workload? I don’t think so…

Back to it!

e.

Hooray for Pip!

Things are coming together for my online doco, which is such a relief. I was beginning to feel a little panicked for a bit there, but it’s all good.

Brown Owls are the topic, and I’m hanging out with founder-lady Pip on Saturday to make a start on the content. There’s a meeting on Monday night that will fill in a few more blanks, and pretty soon I should be ready to rock and roll with the Dreamweaver bizzo. I still need to find a website to base my doco on, but I’m getting there.

Pip’s also lined up some other crafty types for me to chat to, like Angela from Sew Your Own, Nichola and Justine from Mix Tape Zine and Jhoanna from One Red Robin. Hooray for Pip!

This semester has been absolutely mental so far, and the next week or so is really going to have me under the pump, but I almost feel like I’ll get through it ok now. It would be nice if I could put work and birthdays and engagements and life on hold for a bit, but that ain’t going to happen, so I’ll just have to soldier on.

Think I’m going to sleep through July.

Last year’s docos.

I’ve had a quick look through a few of the documentaries, and the one that seemed most interesting to me was Digital communication and the ‘flash mob’by Scott Markworth. It’s a pretty clean design, not too many colours, nice clear font, and no vertical scrolling, on the front page at least. The links within the pages are a bit confusing, because although they all seem to direct you to another page within the site, they don’t actually tell you that’s where they’re going. It’s only when you look at the labels at the top of each page that you realise where you’ve ended up. Other than that though, I quite like it.

I also didn’t mind Street children by Jerilee Cardoz. It’s a cute idea to link the kids to the petals on the flower, but I think it would have been more useful if there were some labels there too, so you could hover over a face and at least see their name. The site’s not very linear (apart from the home page), and I think I actually would have liked a bit more direction.

Another doco that makes me realise how important clarity and planning is, is Queen Victoria market boys by Surajate Pokmangmee. This one seems to have two home pages, which is a bit unnecessary, but also, while the ’second’ homepage looks pretty cool, it’s really hard to figure out where you’re supposed to be clicking and what you’re going to get.

Without being overly critical (and bearing in mind that next year’s students will have the chance to bag out our work!), I hope that I can come up with something a bit more coherent than most of the documentaries listed on Jenny’s site. Although I haven’t looked at them all, it seems like the key is planning and preparation. Know what you want to do and how you want to do it, so that you have time to fulfill your expectations, or at least come close.  Depending on the state I’m in by the end of semester, I might be happy with just making sure there aren’t any typos!