Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network

Introduction

Video content is a well established media form. It combines motion or still graphics with sound. Its uses are unlimited, from instructional online tutorials to interactive DVDs. The same principles of working with sound and images apply in this medium. For example, always work with a high quality master file and compress only at the end when you are outputting your final file. Similarly, there are different factors to be aware of when creating video for web and for DVD.

What You Will Need

Introduction

Podcasts have become a very popular trend in web technology. They are inexpensive and easy to distribute and you don’t need to be a sound expert to create your own. You can develop your own custom podcasts and upload them to your website for your audience to download and listen. Follow the simple steps below to create and upload your own podcast.

What You Will Need

Recording equipment: a microphone, headphones, digital recorder or digital camera, a computer with an internet connection and audio editing software. Audacity is a popular free software program for creating podcasts and can be downloaded at:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Introduction

Before final art is sent away to be professionally printed, there are certain steps that must be taken. It is important to follow these carefully and double check everything. If not, you risk having it come back from the printer with a request to do it properly, or worse still, receiving an imperfect final product.

DO proof-read everything carefully. Check the spelling, punctuation and layout. Have someone else look it over. Sometimes having worked for a long period on a layout, we can become blind to the little errors in the document.

Introduction

Typography is the art of working with type. Used effectively, it will engage and inform your audience. Type also has aesthetic value and can be a strong graphical and architectural element of a design.

Good design always has carefully considered typographic elements. The type is never used arbitrarily or as a last minute thought. This doesn’t mean that it is rigid. Type can be a hugely creative and artistic element and still remain effective so long as the designer remains aware of the fundamentals of the art.

Introduction

Used effectively, colour can be one of your most powerful design tools. It can convey mood and emotion and successfully engage your viewer. Your colour choice can create an environment of warmth and serenity or one of clinical coldness.

While you have freedom to develop your own project colour scheme, there are some basic rules guiding the formation and use of colour.

DO familiarize yourself with the colour wheel. This is a basic colour tool designed to help the user make successful colour combinations. The most common wheel uses 12 RGB colours.

The primary colours provide the building blocks for all other colours. These are:

The secondary colours are a combination of the primary colours. These are:

The tertiary colours are a combination of each secondary colour with its corresponding primary colour. These are:

DO learn the basics of colour combination. Within the colour wheel, there are warm colours and cold colours. Warm colours evoke life and energy while cold colours are calming. Staying within one palette is a safe choice. You may use different colours within that warm or cold palette,

You may also achieve more subtle results by working with different tints and shades of the same colour.

There are also established colour harmonies. Some are shown in the diagrams below.

Complementary Colours: These are colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel. They tend to create vibrant colour combinations and are effective if you want an element of your design to stand out.

Analogous colours: These colours are found directly next to each other on the colour wheel and usually create a calming, harmonious effect. Make sure that there is enough contrast between the colours when using analogous colours.

These are just two of the established colour schemes. Try not become too preoccupied with technicalities as it is also important to have fun and experiment with your colour schemes. Bear in mind that your choice of colour, as with images and type, must always support your content and help convey your message. When using colour with type, make sure it doesn’t detract from its legibility. Consider your audience and their experience. The aim is always to enhance the communication and not make it more difficult.

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide the user with the basic vocabulary needed to develop design projects as well as a checklist of the key elements necessary to complete a project. It will also provide a guide to the ethics and protocol of design and content sourcing which will include the issues of copyright restrictions and giving due credit.

STEP ONE: Who, what, where

Sometimes an interest in oral history is sparked through meeting or hearing about a remarkable person in our community. Other times it grows out of a curiosity about some aspect of local culture or history.

Having arrived at this page, you have probably already decided that the story you want to record has significance for a larger audience and/or is likely to shed light on an event that would be of interest to future historians.

STEP ONE: Equipment and Setting

EQUIPMENT

Depending on your skill and resources, there are many choices of equipment. Among others, there are laptop computers with built in microphones, video camcorders, digital cameras with video functions, small tabletop cameras that can record up to two hours of audiovisual material, and digital audio recorders of varying sound quality. Recordings made with all of these can be edited on the average home computer using free sound-editing software. The following questions may help you to decide which equipment to use.