Four Steps to Filmmaking

While waiting for the Introduction to Cinematography lecture, I spoke to one of my class mates comparing notes on how we are coping with our assignments. Because I have made films and 2 community television programs, I am well aware of the task that awaits us and the need for commitment to complete our assignments.

To help filmmakers understand the four steps of filmmaking:

1. Pre-Production
2. Production
3. Post-Production
4. Marketing

I have started writing articles taking you through each step from pre-production through to marketing. It is hoped that you will realize the mammoth amount of work you need to do to be prepared and organized in making films.

I would also suggest you download Celtx which is a freely available pre-production software application that will help you:

• Write a screenplay
• Create a storyboard
• Break down your screenplay
• Create a shooting schedule

You can download Celtx from here.

Link to my first article: Four Steps to Filmmaking

References
Celtx Website: http://celtx.com/
Celtx Download: http://celtx.com/download.html
Four Steps to Filmmaking: http://www.fandangle.com.au/how-to-make-films/148-four-steps-to-filmmaking.html Read more Entry>>

Production Diary - Tuesday 4th August 2009

This is the start of my production diary for my University studies in Introduction to Cinematography.and Editing Sound and Image Last week we familiarized ourselves with video camera settings e.g.

Manual Exposure (apeture)
Neutral Density Filter
White Balance
Color Bar
Manual/Auto Focus
Setting color, brightness and contrast for camera monitor
and a heap of other settings and tripod setting up.

This week we learned about three-point lighting(key, fill, back light) Uni is great because the lights are provided for us to play with. Mmmm-more toys.

I borrowed 1 book on cinematography and 2 books on lighting. The subjects I'm doing for this semester are really heavy and a lot of details to learn and master. But besides these issues it is really cool. I am learning so much and studying intensely.

More to come Read more Entry>>

Joomla 1.5.12 - TinyMCE Doesn't Work

For those of you who have a website using Joomla CMS (Content Management System), you may have upgraded to version 12. If so you may have noticed that TinyMCE, which is the text editing tool for Sections, Categories and Articles isn't working properly. After investigation, I have found a way to deal with this issue and have written a tutorial to assist those who don't understand the answers that have been given on the internet.

Tutorial to fix Joomla 1.5.12 TinyMCE not working Read more Entry>>

Free - Website, Application and System Icons Creative Commons License

If only I could have some icons for my website. Well you can access over 300 website icons under the creative commons license (Free!!!).


Here is a wiki with a list of icons under the Creative Commons License Read more Entry>>

Exam is Completed

I just finished my exam for Network Media Production this morning. Yesterday I was in a panic not knowing what we are in for with the exam. I took the afternoon off work to revise my lecture notes and researched the internet to refresh my memory.

Got up early this morning and did the same. Went to the exam and yes no one else in the course knew what they were in for. Well I must say the first question threw my mind in a spin "What is a Blogroll?" Blogroll, I don't remember being taught about a blogroll. We were taught about blogs and blogging. So I thought it was a trick question and discussed in my answer what a blog is.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised when I finished answering all the questions with 15mins to spare. I know I had 15mins because a lady walked passed with a sign saying 15 minutes to go. I read through my answers to make sure I covered everything. Glad I did because I added information to some of the answers.

On reflection, I am very pleased with my answers and most of all it is over. No more butterflies and worms in the stomach.

Hope the rest of my class did just as well. I looked around at those who were doing the same exam and noticed we all finished at the same time, waiting for 10am to get out of the examination room. I also noticed a few smiles. This told me that yes we were all taught well.

Congrats to our lecturers and tutors they did a fantastic job. Thank you guys!!! Read more Entry>>

My Final Blog

I know this is a late post, but I asked Michael Honey for an extension which he approved.

We have reached the end of our journey(studies for Networked Media Production). I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I have. I have learned a lot of useful knowledge and things I had never heard of. So yes this subject has proven to be amazing. I give it 10/10.

The lectures and tutorials were motivating, captivating and informative. I couldn't wait to get home after the lectures and tutorials to research the things we were learning.

I linked my RSS feed to Googles FeedBurner which shows that at the start of this blog I had 4 subscribers and at the end it increase to 7. Here is a picture of the stats














Analyzing the stats from my Project B assignment, since writing articles for this blog the statistic have proven to be a successful way of generating traffic to my website. It is evident by the hits from Australia increased during the time studying Networked Media Production.

This subject has sparked an interest in researching Social Networking and finding new ideas to add to this new world wide web phenomena.

So for now this is a sad farewell to all my fellow students, lecturers and tutors.

The 3 blogs I have chosen are as follows:

We Are The Web
http://machinimamadness.blogspot.com/2009/05/we-are-web.html

Creative Journey
http://machinimamadness.blogspot.com/2009/03/creative-journey.html

Infomatics and Data Visualization
http://machinimamadness.blogspot.com/2009/05/inforgraphics-verses-data-visualisation.html Read more Entry>>

Project B Rationale (NMP)

This article is a rationale of my University of Canberra - Networked Media Production (NMP) assignment. Which I have decided to be Data Visualization using raw data to analyze any patterns or trends in the traffic flow of people visiting my website www.fandangle.com.au

Why I choose data visualization for this project.
If you have a website, it would help to know who is visiting you and what has attracted these visitors to your website.

This article will explain the advantages of using data visualization to monitor the traffic that flows to your website. It may even reveals trends and patterns that you didn't know about.

The Data
Most ISP's provide CPanel which is a Control Panel or file management system accessed via a web interface. Normally CPanel allows a website administrator access and permission to download Raw Access Logs of all visitors to their website. The logs record information such as IP address, date and time visited, browser used, pages, files and images accessed etc. Unfortunately my ISP at this stage is unable to provide access to the Raw Access Logs. Not to be put off, I have created a visual basic program to extract data from the awstats pages via CPanel.

Here is an excellent article explaining how to gather and analyze the Raw Access Logs - Harvesting cPanel Raw Access Logs

Joomla 1.5
The content (articles, images and videos) on my website is administered using the Joomla 1.5 CMS (Content Management System). Joomla is an Open Source CMS which has a large international following.

Searching the Google Trends service which will gererate graphs of the popularity of certain keywords used in the Google search engine. This graph shows the growth of some popular open source CMS applications such as: joomla, drupal, wordpress and typepad
















As we can see from this data visualization Joomla is the most popular CMS closely followed by Wordpress. Google Trends is an excellent tool in seeing graphically what the popularity or trends are for keywords.

Joomla 1.5 is an excellent CMS for people who are not don't have programming skills such as HTML, CSS, PHP using MySQL(Opensource Database), Apache(Web Server) and Linux (Opensource OS -Operating System)

Those who do have programming skills can create website templates(how the website looks) as well as extensions for Joomla(modules, components and plugins). I fit into this criteria and have created a module that will allow website administrators insert Google Adsense Ads on their Joomla website.

What am I looking for?
Remembering the basic rule of economics "Supply and Demand". I needed to find out what is the demand of my visitors in relation to the supply of articles I write. The only way I could do this was to analyze the statistic logs from my website and use data visualization to see if there were any patterns or trends. By following this method of analysis I can then experiment and develop constructive strategies to see if there is an increase in the traffic flow to my website.

Now I must admit I am not proud of the traffic my website is getting so far, which is around 1,000 hits a month. The website is only in it's infancy (10 months) so pride put aside the questions that come to mind are;

1) Who is visiting my website
2) What are my visitors looking for
3) How much and what type of traffic flow is the website attracting
4) What events, actions or changes have affected the flow of traffic
5) What strategies can I implement based on the analysis

Now that I know what I am looking for I can look for a way to visualize the data that may reveal some traits. The visualization tools I chose to use are the Google Visualization API's. They are free and simple to use. The great thing about the Google Visualization API's is you can store your data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet and link the data in the spreadsheet to the API of your choice. Which means if you add more data to the spreadsheets, the Google Visualization API's will reflect those updates because they are linked to the spreadsheets.

Who is visiting my website
I choose the Geomap to display what countries were visiting my website. I created two Geopmaps:

GeopMap Bandwidth of visitors
The bandwidth shows what countries have visited the website and the intensity of the color refers to the lowest to the highest number of bandwidth in Bytes or downloads.

Link to the Geomap Bandwidth of Visitors
















GeoMap Hits
The hits in this Geomap relates to how many pages were accessed by visitors and what countries they came from.

Link to Geomap of visitors Hits














What are my visitors looking for
This was a tough job extracting the data from the statistical web page HTML. I created a Windows Application using visual basic 2005 to make the job easier for future use.

Here is a table of the Most Popular pages

Pages Visited	Number of Hits
fandangle.com.au/index.php	6948
fandangle.com.au/	3723
fandangle.com.au/component/yvcomment/	1610
fandangle.com.au/downloads/mod_fandangle_adsense.zip	1153
fandangle.com.au/joomla-tutorials.html	773
fandangle.com.au/about-fandangle.html	645
fandangle.com.au/how-to-make-films/92.html	578
fandangle.com.au/joomla-tutorials/88.html	562
fandangle.com.au/machinima-films.html	546
fandangle.com.au/contact-us.html	495
fandangle.com.au/radio.html	451
fandangle.com.au/daryls-films.html	442
fandangle.com.au/fandangle-adsense.html	435
fandangle.com.au/fandangle-sitemap.html	413
fandangle.com.au/what-is-machinima.html	409

How much and what type of traffic flow is the website attracting
To see how much and what type of traffic my website is generating, I used a Motion Chart comparing Bandwidth to Hits and the chart animates the changes over a time period of 10 months. This chart proved to be very interesting because most of the countries had low hits but high downloads. But what interested me most was that the United States had the most hits and low downloads and Australia beat the US with the highest hits.

Link to Motion Chart

















What events, actions or changes have affected the flow of traffic
Having seen the results of the Motion chart I choose a Time Chart that focused on the hits from the United States compared to Australia.

Link to Fandangle Hits Analysis Graph











With this Time Chart I was able to note when the peaks in the time line happened.

A) I activated my website(put it online)
B) I created a Joomla 1.5 module that would insert Google Adsense Ads on a webpage
C) I started writing articles for my blog as part of my University weekly assignment
D) This was the peak of writing articles for my blog

What strategies can I implement based on the analysis
From the analysis of these Data Visualization tools I was able to ascertain information that has show what I need to do to generate more traffic.

Write, write and write some more
write at least one article a week for my website and my blog.

Get the word out there
get the word out there via blogs, forums etc, build more Joomla 1.5 modules that for free download on the website, and get my website links on more websites.

Monitor my results using data visualization
Keep analyzing the traffic flow of my website with these tools to see if I am making progress in generating more traffic.

Conclusion
I have realized, thanks to this University assignment that using these Data Visualization tools to monitor my website traffic is a far better approach to generate traffic rather than guessing and flying blind .

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References
Fandangle Website: http://www.fandangle.com.au

Fandangle Data Visualization Charts And Graphs
Geomap bandwidth: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/123-geomap-to-monitor-website-downloads-traffic.html
Geomap Hits: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/124-geomap-to-monitor-website-hits-traffic.html
Motion Chart: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/122-data-visualization-motion-chart.html
Annotated Timeline Chart: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/125-annotated-timeline-graph-to-monitor-your-wesite-traffic.html

Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Google Visualization API's
Visualization website: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html
GeoMap: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/geomap.html
Motion Chart: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/motionchart.html
Annotated Timeline Chart: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html

Harvesting cPanel Raw Access Logs:
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/05/28/harvesting-cpanel-raw-access-logs/
Example Raw Access Logs: http://cpanelguide.net/RawLog.txt

Content Management Systems (CMS)
Google CMS Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=joomla%2C+drupal%2C+wordpress%2C+typepad

Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/
Drupal: http://drupal.org/
Wordpress : http://wordpress.org/
Typepad: http://www.typepad.com/

CPanel: http://www.cpanel.net/

Read more Entry>>