While thinking of what to make for my final project, I turned to an old project from some years ago. For about 5 years, in the early aughts, I filmed well over 100 concerts in and around the Atlanta area. I aspired to make a documentary capturing the scene I spent time in. As the years went on, I keep recording but my production skills at the time weren’t quite up to snuff. As a result, the “documentary” stalled. I’ve decided to revisit the footage anew nearly 20 years later. I realized the material was maybe never suited for a feature film but certainly works as an archive and document of the scene and that era. A document that truly I only have access to.
I have been kicking this idea around for a while. I started a YouTube channel a while back so there was already a solid foundation and some media available. However, I realized that explaining people what I plan to do with the footage was rather obtuse. The channel (or wherever the videos live online) really needs and explanation and what better way to accomplish that than with a front-end website.
What you see on this website is just a sampling of media that I drew upon from numerious hard drives, from several computers. I revived a G5 Mac Pro to find the fliers! Pulling out and re-installing 15 year old drives to find files was both thrilling and terrifying. I've got so much media I need to back up! That said, scrapping the surface, and reviving these old files has given me newfound inspiration to truly archive them properly.
I have been kicking this idea around for a while. I started a YouTube channel a while back so there was already a solid foundation and some media available. However, I realized that explaining people what I plan to do with the footage was rather obtuse. The channel (or wherever the videos live online) really needs and explanation and what better way to accomplish that than with a front-end
While I had some very modest HTML skills years ago (which are embarrassing, should you find the link to the wayback machine), it’s been ages since I challenged myself in creating such a website.
Just about every aspect of the course came in handy while working on this project. The theme I choose uses elements of HTML5, Bootstrap, and even Java. I chose this theme because I felt like it fit what I envision in my mind – a single website page, simple nav, and the ability to show off various media formats.
I spent much of my editing process working with Chrome, making sure the site was optimized for all screen formats. In hindsight, I’ve not come to realize the importance of checking multiple browsers. I discovered today that the website does not preform ideally in Safari. I have been quite able to track down the bug but I have reached out to help from the theme’s editors. For some odd reason, Safari wants to translate the page to English. So, obviously some code somewhere on the index is borking it’s functionality. Oddly, Safari works flawlessly about 25% of the time. I’m curious to dig into this more!
Thankfully my successes were outweighed as I’m thrilled with the overall design and functionality. The video header is something that I wanted to spend a great deal of more time on as my main skill set is video editing. So, for the time being, that is a placeholder for something much nicer in the future.
I’m most proud of the media section. It works as a really nice gallery for a variety of media. I didn’t have time to take full advantage of it as I would have like to have built out a few more rows with additional assets.
With that in mind, our Bootstrap project was integral to my understanding of not just my chosen theme but more importantly objects like the media gallery. If you dig into, it’s really clever! It took me a while to get the hang of the code, but in brief, it’s a visual nav bar!
This quickly turned into one of the more time-consuming aspects of the project as each individual “piece” of media is retrieved from its own website. Again, clever, right? The images on the index are small versions of the actual media, which is hosted on another page and loaded into the frame.
I’m thrilled with the progress I’ve made this semester and delighted by the fact that I’ve been able to use this new knowledge to build out both a professional portfolio as well as rekindle a former passion project. My hope in starting the EM program was that I would be able to experiment and hopefully creating meaningful and practical things for my personal and professional life.