My Photoshop Text Fx Design

Research into Market Trends

Introduction

In 2012 there is likely to be some major changes to the interactive media industry such as the introduction of various new technologies such as HTML 5 which is rumoured to become more popular than flash and cloud computing is likely to become more widely used as internet speeds dramatically increase.

Touch-Screen & Tablets

One of the trends at the moment is the popularity of touchscreen and tablets. Some of the advantages of touchscreen over other uses of device navigation are that touchscreen is very easy to use and also is the fastest type of navigation and a keyboard is not required. The implementation of touchscreen also enables the device to be smaller and more space on the device can be used on increasing the screen-size. One of the disadvantages at the moment with tablets is that they have low screen resolutions as currently the ipad2 has the largest screen resolution of 1028 x 768. I predict the screen resolutions of future tablets to dramatically increase as well as other features. 

Business Marketing & Social Media

On social networking sites such as Facebook the user is required to input personal information such as age, gender, hobbies and general likes and dislikes. This data is then used by Facebook to work out advertisements of products which would seem relevant to you based on the information which you provided willingly. This type of interactive marketing is likely to be more successful than previous types of marketing as the information provided will enable companies to target a customer more accurately in terms of knowing what they want. This method of gaining information is likely to be more widely used and widely shared. I expect Google Account information to be shared with the popular online retailers such as Ebay and Amazon to enable them to notify you on products they have for sale which you may like. This technique of marketing is likely to influence more cooperation between producers.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is likely to be to future of computing as it will enable us to be less dependent on physical utilities and not having a hard-drive on a device will enable the device to be significantly smaller as physical storage is typically quite large. The implementations of internet technologies such as Fibre Optic Broadband & 4G would enable wired & wireless speeds to be a lot faster than the existing Wi-Fi and 3G. There is also pretty much no limit to the amount of storage you can have and there is likely to be more businesses which will emerge which will specialize in the selling of online storage & security.

Cloud computing has also be implemented into the gaming industry with the introduction of On-Live which enables users to play games through a cloud network as the games are synchronized, rendered, and stored on remote servers and delivered via the Internet.

3D Movies

A recent trend which has occurred in the movie industry is the implementation of 3D. Recently directors have shot their movies in 3D this trend was ignited after the release of the movie Avatar which has become the number one grossing movie of all time. This movies success influenced other directors to shoot their movies in 3D or perform a digital conversion in an attempt to increase revenue.  The release of 3D TVs soon followed and most manufacturers have released their own 3D TVs. 3D TVs are currently the most expensive type of TV you can buy resulting in previous TV technologies such as LCD and Plasma being considerably cheaper.

Android Vs iPhone

The android operating system is becoming increasingly popular and is as close rival to the iPhone. Android phones are typically a lot cheaper than a iPhones and has a very similar app store which enables users to download third party apps. The future releases of the operating systems are called iOS5 and Ice Cream Sandwich. The android marketplace has a very large choice of apps but not as much as the iPhone. I expect that the ioS will remain the most popular as the implementation of HTML 5 on future Apple products will improve functionality when browsing. The app store last year earnt over $4.9 billion while the android marketplace only earnt $330 million. I believe developers would always choose the ioS over the android ioS as there is more profit. Although from the bar chart below you can see that the android operating system has become more popular from 2010 to 2011 while the iOS has decreased.

Paul Morris. (2012). Android Vs. iOS – How Secure Are They?. Available: http://www.redmondpie.com/android-vs.-ios-how-secure-are-they-infographic/. Last accessed 9th Jan 2012.

Future of the Mobile Os Market

Mobile computing, consisting of smartphones and tablets, has been the most exciting part of the computing landscape for the past several years and that promises to remain true in 2012 and beyond. It would be valid to say that smartphones have replaced traditional PCs as the centre of the technology market since smartphone sales overtook PC sales this year.

The new Blackberry Os which is called BB 10 OS will include support for cloud services and support for HTML 5. It will also be implemented with runtime for android apps which enable Google OS developed OS to be run on Rim’s phones and tablets. I expect Mobile operating systems to be the same on both smart phones and tablets and expect these operating systems to build up a strong infrastructure of content and features such a cloud computing and digital communication services. I believe the Mobile OS which would be the most successful would be the one which has a very easy to use interface and a wide range of features.

Operating Systems Mobile operating systems have truly defined smartphones and tablets recently, and that's likely to stay the same. The first big change for next year should be the introduction of many more phones and tablets that run Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich. 2012 will also see the introduction of the Lenovo K800 which will be the first Intel powered smartphone.

Social Media Trends

One of the new trends which large companies have adopted is how popular social networking sites are and they are using these popular social networking in which to advertise their products. The best form of advertising a company can ask for is endorsements from customers. When a Facebook user “likes” a product on Facebook this would then result in that company being able to advertise to everyone on that individuals friends list.This technique of advertising a product through an individual the audience is related to be more effective way making products appeal to the audience.

Google + will integrate social media with a search engine so that when you type stuff into Google your search results would then be personalized to stuff which is relevant to the stuff you have “Liked” on Facebook. It is likely that companies will introduce review and questionnaires on social networking sites as it acts as perfect platform in which to obtain qualitative and quantitative information from their customers.

Social networking sites can also act as a platform in which to provide a customer service to their customers and it can potentially result in the customers acting as your customer support service.

Some of the disadvantages which have been identified for Google + are that people believe that the search results which you type in would be biased based on your “Likes” & “Dislikes”. People believe that you would be restricted in what you can browse. Other people consider this personalization as an advantage as it enables you to personalize various elements of your Social networking environment so that it only displays content which is relevant to you.  One feature which Google + has which Facebook doesn’t is the ability to categories your friends into groups such as work colleagues & Best friends. You then have the option to update your status to a certain group which I think is a very cool feature because as in real life there is stuff which you would share with friends but you wouldn’t with family.

Youtube Interactive Game Anaysis

Introduction: Youtube has acted as a platform in which you can upload interactive games the interactive features which I have seen in my research include simple decision making box choices and Quick time events which require the viewer to click a section of the screen within a certain time progress.

Game 1: The Time Machine: A Chad,Matt & Rob Interactive Adventure!

In this Interactive game the goal of the game is to get the main characters to a meeting without dying. The game includes a number of decision making events which occur frequently. Choosing the wrong decision would result in a "Game Over". You would then have a choice to retry the game. The storyline of the game is quite gripping so it is very likely that a viewer would keep replaying a video until they have completed it. Some ways in which this game could be better would be to implement different interact features such as quick time events which would require the user to always needing to be aware of unexpected quick time events.

Game 2: WHO'S THE KILLER?! (INTERACTIVE GAME)

In this game your goal is to correctly guess the killer from a selection of characters which get interviewed in the process of the initial video. I think the idea for the game is really good but I would of added more depth to the game such as the implementation of clues which can be clicked on which reveal an additional piece of information. This type of game could then be adapted into a series with different murders and events.


Game 3: Bboy Joker

This game is all done in animation and the goal of the game is basically to remember a sequence of the letters which then perform dance moves. The game progressively gets harder as you are required to remember more letters. The game doesn't really have much replay value and I personally wouldn't play the game more than once. The game has some cool effects with the figures and I expect the production of the game took a great deal of time.

Game 4: 2010 Shooting Range Game (Interactive)

This game is pretty much a trivia game where you get asked questions about various events ,TV shows which were relevant in 2010. The game is better than the typical trivia game because it has cool effects and transitions. The game lack questions as each topic only has 1 question. I would of added more questions to this game as the lack of questions results in the game not holding my interest for very long.

Reflective Analysis

Feedback from Focus Group

The feedback which I received from the focus group was very useful as it enabled me to understand elements of the site which people liked and also elements which people disliked. For example a number of people I asked thought that the site was very easy to navigate and at no point felt confused about what buttons needed to press. I received mostly a positive response from the focus group on the topic of “Site Navigation” which means I don’t really need to improve it in anyway. An element of my website which according to the focus group which needed editing was my page transitions as they are about 4-5 seconds long and they recommended I shortened them.

I did crop the hallway transition slightly to make it shorter but hopefully It hasn't hindered the overall effect of the transition.

The current audio clips which I have implemented into the website received mostly positive feedback so I won’t be editing the sound effects which have been added to the buttons and transitions.

I also tried to think of more content to put on the merchandise page but didn't really find anything relevant or suitable. I did also revamp some of PNG icons I had implemented on my site because some of them had small sections of white on them.

Professional influences on my website

I tried to implement some cool features which I had seen when conducting research of other websites and then tried to implement them all into my “Scream 4” website. I did manage to replicate several impressive features such as a custom mouse cursor which was also animated as-well as making my own video player skins and dynamic backgrounds. One member of my focus group suggested that my version of the “Scream 4” website was indeed better than the official version. In my personal opinion I believe some of my pages are better than the official site such as my homepage and downloads page. I believe my character bio page isn't as good as the official site's bio page but I did attempt to replicate some of its features such as the easing scroll bar. I also believe my page transitions are better than the official site's transitions.

My site includes links to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook which are in the form of buttons on the homepage I added an effect onto these buttons so that the icon would fade into a red tint once the mouse cursor rolls over the buttons. This was an attempt to make the site more dynamic as-well as keep to the theme of the movie.

To try making my website keep to the horror theme of the movie I conducted research into other horror movie websites such as “Saw” and identified unique attributes which make the site seem “horror like”.

The “Saw” website also consisted of quite dark lighting which again is a horror like attribute which I myself have implemented into my website.

There was some negative processes which I undertook during the creation of this website for example I didn't plan my page transitions during the initial planning stage which I believe would have resulted in saving time and a better end result. I also believe the obsession with making lots of dynamic effects in after effects was also quite time consuming as the process of making something in Photoshop then editing it in after effects then finally importing it in flash consumed a lot of time which could have been used on improving the functionality of the site it also increased the file size of my website considerably.

The reason for the massive file size of my project file was because some of the images which were used in my site were initially quite large resulting in them having a high file size I then re sized them in flash which of course doesn't result in the file size of the image being reduced so I would of needed to of resized the images in Photoshop to reduce the file size but I thought this would be quite a time consuming process so I decided not to resize them.

One of the parts of the site which I’m most proud of is the hallway page transition which plays when you click on the character bio page. I like it because the transition has a 3D affect to it. The movie websites which I researched such as "Saw" and "Inception" used audio quite alot so this influenced me to implement audio wherever possible in the initial stages of creating my website I would of used more audio clips in my website but was restricted because the audio I used did boost the film size significantly.

I think the Scream 4 website has elements which I think could have been improved for example the initially homepage for the scream 4 website is quite poor and isn’t very attractive. The homepage lacks any dynamic animations and the only moving part of the site is the thumbnail of the trailer which plays once your mouse cursor rolls over it.

The “Saw” website is pretty good but lacks diversity as the effects are repeated throughout the website. Adding different effects would have made the website better in my opinion. 

The movie websites which I researched didn’t have a custom mouse cursor but I decided to implement a knife mouse cursor which has blood dripping from it. My sites navigation I believe was done pretty well as the buttons is easy to identify and the links to external websites are very easily identifiable.