Planning the video

Since we had the research from the leaflets, we can now plan the writing and filming of the video. This involved thinking of locations, actors, and of course writing the script. We decided that me and Jon will take on the role of this stage, and Becky and Helen will work on the website together. We will report back to each other, with each other's developments.
I originally had an idea to include two characters in the video, with one character as the presenter, and the 2nd character as a bad example of a student in Portsmouth. The bad example student would do everything wrong, and the presenter would tell him he's doing it wrong, and show him how to recycle and where to recycle. I created a script and sent this to Jon, Helen and Becky, to see what they thought of it, which they liked, but in the end we thought that sticking with one character may just be best, and we can still include all of the information I wrote in my script. I also created a storyboard, which I will scan in at a later date. The script can be downloaded here:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/2f258b/n/Script_doc
Planning the video, we decided on these options:

Character
Quirky presenter

Location
Student house (we will use Jon's house as it is closest to the Uni)
Bottle Bank (to show to recycle glass)

Props
Recyclable and non recyclable materials, recyling bin, lab coat for presenter
Sound Old style music (1950's etc) to match the style of the video

Time
Day

Titles
Using editing software - hence it will be graphics

Camera Angles
Mostly long and medium camera shots, few close ups

Other
A tripod will be used to keep the camera steady during filming

These may change in the future, but for now, we will base it using these decisions. Now the decisions were made, we could start writing the script to be used, using proper script software.

Recycling Leaflets from Council

Leaflet One
This leaflet describes how to recycle garden waste. Although it is recycling, we are more focused on the Portsmouth Recycling Scheme, and although it is not mentioned on our video, we have managed to research it. Also there is little time to cover everything recycled on the video, but it maybe should have been said at the end, as to what cannot be recycled from your home. We decided not to use garden waste, as you can recycle garden waste no matter what you want, and we are more focused on home recycling collection. This leaflet would still be benefitial to the people of Portsmouth, as it says where to take the garden waste, and when the composting centre is open. We also did not decide to use it, as student houses don't usually involve taking care of the garden, since time at the houses are limited.

Leaflet Two
This leaflet was one of the most useful to us, because it describes the Pompey Recycling Scheme (the home delivery scheme) used to collect recycling from houses such as student houses. We used this leaflet, as well as the website, to find out just exactly what you can recycle from the house. This leaflet was also useful because it tells you where you can recycle other materials, such as furniture, fridges, electrical items, glass, books, and clothes. The only material useful to students would of course be glass, as glass is used all the time, for food and drink. This is why we have decided to include a scene in the video with where to take and recycle glass bottles and jars.
The other thing noticeable and very useful to us with this leaflet was the recycling facts at the bottom, as little things like these would help make our video quirky, in the style we wanted.

Leaflet Three
This leaflet described the process that happens after food and drink cans are recycled. This was interesting to know, as many people often wonder what happens after recycling has been collected. But since this was nothing to do with home collection, then the information was not needed for our video. What was useful about this leaflet though, was the little facts, which meant that they could be used on our video, to appear as quirky facts, and we would try turn these facts to make them funny and interesting.


Leaflet Four
This leaflet was similar to leaflet two, so didn't really benefit us in any major way, as it just describes what you can and can't recycle. It does mention other items that wern't mentioned in leaflet two, like not being able to recycle yoghurt pots. Since students will be eating yoghurts, this is essential information to them. The main good point about this leaflet is the quirky facts again, and this would be perfect for us to use. Since this leaflet is mostly based on tin cans, it describes facts about cans, which is useful, to students who want to recycle cans. We decided that we will not go into detail about each item recycled, but just mention them, and in that way, we hope that it will benefit students to an extent.


Leaflet Five
This leaflet we found pretty interesting because it described what kind of things you can and can't recycle at Christmas. Since Christmas was coming up, this would be great information for students. Although, there was no chance that we would be able to finish our work in time for Christmas, we had an idea to make a section on our website for Season Recycling. In this section, we could include this information, and students or people in Portsmouth will know what they can put in their recycling bins in the seasonal holidays. Although the seasonal items cannot be included in the home collection scheme, it is always good to know where to take these additional items, and this will be included on our website.


Leaflet Six
This is the other side of leaflet five, and again very useful for us in our Seasonal Recycling section on our website, as it will benefit students what to recycle in the seasonal holidays.

Leaflet Seven
This leaflet explains the importance of storing waste, and must follow the duty of care law to keep waste safe. I didn't really understand this leaflet, as I didn't know what the duty of care law is, but this could be useful to students, as they need to understand this law, and must abide by it. We wern't told about this law when we moved in, so it may be useful to make this point clear on our websites, as it is a pretty essential point to mention, as if the law is broken, then a fine will be charged.

These leaflets have been benefitial in some way to our artefact video and website, and we will use most of the information in the leaflets to inform students how to recycle, where, and when, so students can be aware of recycling, and know just what they can and can't recycle. Now the research has been done, we can now start on planning our video.

Artefact Production - Stage One

Once we knew our topic of creating a video to teach the students of Portsmouth about the Portsmouth Recycling Scheme, then the next stage was to plan it.
To be able to get information for the video, we would need to ask the council for leaflets, etc. Helen nominated herself to be the person to email them. After a couple of days, we recieved an email back from the council saying:

Dear Helen

Subject: Recycling

Thank you for contacting the City Helpdesk at Portsmouth City Council.

I have put a selection of leaflets in the post to you today. You might wish to also look at our website which has a lot of information, I have provided the following link for you. http://www.portsmouth.gov.uk/AtoZ/891.html

Should you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards

Customer Service Advisor HHS855
City Helpdesk

Within a week, Helen recieved the leaflets, and brought them to our first planning session, on Monday 24th November 2008. We benefited from these leaflets, because they contained information we did not know about the Portsmouth Recycling Scheme, and this would be brilliant information to use for our video. Even better, they contained quirky facts that would work well in our film. I will post a new blog describing and analysing these leaflets.

Data Compression

Data compression is 'the process of encoding information using fewer bits'. This results in the file being compressed (or shrunk down) to a smaller size. This is useful as it reduces hard disk space, or bandwidth (if used online). The disadvantage of this is that the 'compressed file data must be decompressed to be view or heard,' and require extra processing. This means that to decompress a file, an expensive piece of software may have to be used to decompress data 'fast enough to be viewed'. There must be sufficient storage space for the decompressed video to be stored.
There are two types of compression, lossless and lossy compression. Lossless is where the file is kept exactly the same after compression, and lossy is where a tiny bit of data is changed but not noticed the the user. Lossless data is reversible as it is 100% exactly the same, so original data can be reconstructed but since a small change is made for lossy data then it makes the task of reconstructing original data much harder.
Lossless data is data is benefitial to businesses as their work in spreadsheets, text, programs etc cannot be changed even a single bit and must not be tolerated.
Lossy data can be used in digital cameras to increase their storage space, and keeping almost a perfect quality.
In the end, unless it is really necessary not to change the data for certain reasons, there is not much difference in the end. In my opinion, I would prefer to use Lossless data, as it is 100% exactly the same as original data, even though it may need more expensive software to do this. It is better in a sense, as it can converted back to the original data, if needed to, whilst lossy cannot do this, making it harder to work with. Although lossy data does produce data that is a smaller file size, as detail is removed, but if nobody notices it, then lossy data is successful.They are both benefital in their own ways.
SOURCE: Data Compression (hand-out). Retrieved 23rd November 2008.

Limitation Factors of our Streaming Artefact

The factors that limit streaming include:
Hosting costs
Importance of aesthetics
Purpose of media
Bandwidth of audience
Content of media

So applying this to our artefact:
The hosting costs will be provided for us by the University.

Aesthetics will depend on our website. We will be converting our video to high quality, medium quality and low quality, but hopefully we will be able to upload the high quality video to our website, even though this will take longer to stream. This and other versions will be available to download. I have learnt that the quality of a downloaded file is always higher, as it is not being streamed, and doesn't depend of bandwidth or Internet speed. People may prefer to download the file if it is taking too long to stream.

The video will only target students in Portsmouth, will require funding from the Council to advertise the site, and make it public, so the students of Portsmouth can find it easily. Possible funding could also come from the University, for them to advertise and make our video aware. Since the number of students coming to Portsmouth is now 19,000, that is alot of potential students who do not know about recycling.

A factor to consider would be internet speed/bandwidth of the audience. Because everybody might have different speeds/bandwidths, then it will affect everyone, but as long as students are patient and wait for the video to buffer, then it can be viewed by all. It is also proven that at night it is better to watch streaming content, as there is less users on the Internet to watch the media.

The content will only be aimed at students, no matter if they're interested in recycling or not. If they are interested in recycling, then this video will benefit them more, but even if students aren't, then it may gain the interest of those viewers. Hopefully the content of our video will be interesting enough for students not to get bored, but to be entertained and educated.

Regards to using what media player to use, I will need to research into the different types. There will be problems no matter what, so I will post a blog on this.

Week Six - Group Four

This group's discussion was about the relationship between file quality and size. Before now I'd realised that video or audio can be broadcast at different quality, and the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality. I learnt alot from this last week. This group developed on that, by saying that for higher quality media, it takes longer to buffer, and to stream, as the file size is bigger, meaning there is more to load. There were some things I was confused about, compressors, and pixels, but I did learn that lossless compression is useful because no matter how many times a file is compressed, it still remains the same quality. I learnt that there are quite a number of factors when discussing this subject, and when it comes to streaming our artefact, it has now made me think, how the media will be affected by the things I never thought of. I have learnt alot from this presentation, and will now help think of factors when streaming our artefact. I will post a blog considering the factors of this.

Presentation Meetings

Every week before our presentation, our group met up for meetings to discuss what we had our done for our presentation.
The first week, we met up and decided that we should all go off for a week and research as much as we could about webcasts, multicasts and unicasts. I managed to find a little information but most information was difficult. When i reported back the following week, I'd also found out that everyone had been the same. We'd also got very confused about the topic, because, us ourselves, didn't know what was meant by the terms, webcasting, unicasting and multicasting. We all produced different definitions of these. We decided whose definition was best, and started to write this in our presentation.

For the following week, we split off into separate directions. Hel to research webcasting, Becky to research Unicasting, and Jon to research Muticasting. My task was to create diagrams for each, and explain each of them. I was also given the task to cover the introduction and conclusion.
We met up the next week, each with different pieces of information on our targeted subject areas. This meeting we got more confused than ever on what was what. We didn't know any differences between the two, and we thought that webcasting was the same thing as multicasting, and unicasting. After a lot of confusion, and researching, we finally found out that webcasting was the main way of streaming, and multicasting and unicasting was the ways used to do this. This made a whole lot more sense to us, and finally got us back on track to working on our presentation. I managed to find the correct diagrams and drew them out in Powerpoint, making sure I knew how to explain them. Because webcasting was the way of streaming mutlicasting and unicasting, webcasting did not need a diagram. My part was sorted.

When it came to viewing group 1's presentation, we got really scared because the group had done a half-hour presentation, very detailed, backed up their points, and even had a streaming video of examples of their work. Because we couldn't find much information on our subject at the time, our presentation was very short, and maybe lasted about 10 minutes. This scared us, so we contacted Corrine about it. We found out that we didn't read the marking scheme properly, and we had to include streaming media in our presentation.

Over the next week, each member of our group found streaming media examples for each of their areas. Youtube for webcasting, ITV live streaming for multicasting, and BBC Radio for unicasting. We implemented these into our presentation. Becky, Jon and Hel had also found more information on each of their topics, and began adding these in as well.

When we reported back the following week, each member had their desired amount of information for their area. Hel sent me the presentation, and I got to work on the introduction, covering what we would be talking about, and creating a summary of each of different areas, and finally writing a conclusion to discuss where webcasting would be going about in the future.

I realised why I'd been given the shortest to talk about, because when I pitched our idea to the class about our streaming artefact, i was shaky and very nervous. The group told me that since I was nervous, they did not want to make it uneasy for me. I was really grateful for the group telling me this, and was glad that they didn't make me say too much. I realised that the group members were all doing much more work than me, and i felt bad on this, and tried to help them out as much as possible, as i felt that i didn't want to feel like i was being left out.

Time closed in on us, and our presentation grew closer. Now our presentation was complete, all we had to do was try and learn it, and make sure we knew what we were saying, before we could have a practice rehearsal before the real thing. Final tweaks were made, and we were ready. I was actually more confident in the presentation itself rather than the rehearsal. Since I didn't have much to say, I was the person in charge of moving through the slides, and then I would stand up to say my bit. This turned out alright.

I think communication in the group was good, because we were good friends before this group, and it meant we all got along well together. We saw each other every week, and tried to be as organised as possible. We used emails to send each other information, to make sure everybody saw what each member was doing. This worked effectively, and our presentation turned out to be a success! (apart from BBC Radio One nearly not working and messing up the whole presentation! But everyone has their mistakes!)

Week Five - Group 3 (our group) Presentation

This was the week of our presentation. Because I get nervous, whilst infront of people, the rest of my group, Becky, Helen and Jon, gave me the least to say, which I was very appreciative of. We had alot of problems with our presentation, because we couldn't get to grips with our chosen topic. When we originally chose the topic, we thought it would be pretty straight forward. But little did we know that Mutlicasting and Unicasting are a FORM of Webcasting. We thought they were 3 separate things, but this made matters more confusing. Because we struggled to find information on each of the three, and finally get our heads round what each term meant, it meant that the preparation for the presentation took longer than we expected it to. We learnt that multicast server is a one-to-many server, and where the clients/users wanting to watch the content must connect to that stream to view it. This connection requires little bandwidth. In Unicasting, the server is a one-to-one connection, so each user has to have its own connection, meaning that a large network connection is required, and the bandwidth used is very high. Unicasting is the typical method at the moment, but many services like the BBC, are transferring to Multicasting. In conjunction with group 1's presentation, this added to my point of it is better to stream content online using webcasting, rather than spending alot of money and time on filming with a normal broadcast. I have learnt that webcasting has a good future.

Week Four - Group 2 Presentation

In this presentation, the group talked about codecs, what they are, and why to use them. I learnt quite a bit in this talk. I already knew about quality of video and audio, but I had never compared them until the group showed their video and audio examples of high quality video and audio compared to low quality video and audio. I never knew there was such a massive difference, buts its amazing to think there actually is a HUGE difference, and now know why codecs are used. Its because the greater the bitrate, the better the quality. The downside to this is that the file size is much bigger than that of low quality video/audio, but having a bigger filesize is worth it in the end, for the high quality that is produced.
I also learnt that Codecs are a mix of 2 words: compressor and decompressor, and coder and decoder. I had heard of codecs before but I didn't know they were used to encode and decode the digital data over the web.
This presentation has been useful to me, because i've learnt that when producing content on the Internet, to have something that looks or sounds good, you'll need a higher bitrate, producing much better quality.

Name/Logo of our streaming artefact

I originally had a couple of ideas. The main idea was: UPRS
University of Portsmouth Recycling Scheme. We decided it may not work, due to getting permission from the University, and is considered too much like Pompey Recycling Scheme.
After passing the idea round the group, we decided that UOP: Recycle It! would be the best title. As it still includes the University, and in the name, it gives a slogan of what we aim people to do...RECYCLE!

I came up with a design for the logo, and it involved combing three logo's in one. The City Council logo, the Portsmouth University logo, and the Recycling logo.This is what my design involved. My group members seemed to like this, but came to the thought of we would have to contact each company to ask permission to use their logo. Obviously the University would be pretty acceptable, but it was too complex for us to get permission from everyone. I left the task of choosing a logo up to Jon.

Door to Door Recycling Talk

The other week, a member from the council knocked on my door to talk to me about recycling, what you can recycle and what you can't. I told her about our group idea to make a short educating but entertaining film telling students how to recycle. She seemed really enthusiastic about it, and was intreiged whether we could get the film made by christmas, and they could use it in a 12 days of recycling event they had planned. It was looking doubtful that we would have it done, as we didn't want to start working on the film till after our presentation on the 14th November. She said that they could use it next year, if they go to freshers fayre, or at special student recycling talks, which of fantastic use for us, because it'd be a great achievement to get our work out there, and used by the council. This talk was very useful, and could earn us our way to get our work used by a professional business.