UNIT 56 - DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

1.a) Research the following: What are they? How do they work? Refer to examples and explain the benefits.

Communication protocols: worldwide web consortium (W3C); wireless access protocol (WAP); global system for mobile (GSM); 3rd generation protocols (3G); multimedia message service (MMS); general packet radio service (GPRS); Bluetooth; broadband (ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), cable); voiceover internet protocol (VoIP)

 RESEARCH

W3C:
W3C stands for "World Wide Web Constorium." W3C is an international consortium that includes full time staff, industry experts and member organizations. They work together to provide standards for the World Wide Web (www).  Their mission is to guide the web to its full potential by developing relevant protocols and guidelines.

 

By adopting these protocols and guidelines, software and hardware manufacturers can be sure that their programs and equipment will work with the latest Web technologies. W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who is the inventor of the World Wide Web. Since 1994, when the WWW was created, W3C has played a major role in development of the Web.


WAP:
WAP is short for Wireless Application Protocol, a secure medium that allows you to access information instantly on your handheld devices, such as mobiles phones, radios, smartphones and other communication devices. It is supported by all operating systems, like PalmOS, Windows, FLEXOS, OS/9, JavaOS...

WAP is really good when it comes to dealing with low memory constraints of handheld devices and the low bandwidth constraints of a wireless handheld network. Example site: http://shinewap.mobi/

GSM: 
GSM stands for Global System for Mobile communication. GSM is a digital mobile telephony system that is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world. It uses a variation of TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and it is most used out of three digital telephony technologies (TDMA, GSM and CDMA). It works by compressing the data and then sending it down to a channel with two other streams of user data, each in its own time slot. The frequency that it operates is either at 900MHz or 1800Mhz.

3G:
3G is a term used for third generation of mobile phone standards as set by ITU. 3G technologies allow operators to over more service options to their users due to higher communication speed. This allowed operators to give their users mobile broadband and with that came video calls and other services. 

UK's 3G providers are: Vodafone, Three, EE and others. With 3G still being used the most used network , 4G is slowly making its way to mainstream with its theoretical speeds going over 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s), while 3G is only capable of only 7.2 Mbps.

MMS: 
MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is a store and forward messaging service that allows its users to exchange multimedia messages with other mobile users. It allows you to send multiple media in one message to multiple recipients including video and audio files. An MMS message will generally cost more than an SMS to send, usually 3 times more than an SMS.

ADSL:
ADSL is an abbreviation of asymmetric digital subscriber line. It basically is a broadband through a telephone line. Unlike dial-up, ADSL can work alongside the frequencies used for telephone calling, allowing you to surf the web without having to block your telephone line. ADSL works with use of Modems and micro filters. It is that these filters split your voice telephone and internet frequencies.
UK's providers are Sky, BT, Talk Talk

 This is shown on this simple diagram.

 

VOIP:
VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol. This technology has became mainstream for the past 9 years, because it offers telephone calls over a broadband internet connection instead of using your regular telephone service. You can connect to a regular telephone line locally or anywhere else in the world, usually for a low price. 

How Skype works

First, voice is converted by an Analog Telephone Adapter or IP phone, from an analog signal to a digital one. Then it is sent over the internet in form of data packets. At the arrival it is converted back to an analog signal. By doing this your phone call can be recieved over a traditional telephone worldwide, as well as other VOIP users.

GPRS:
GPRS is short for General Packer Radio Service, a standard in wireless communications that run at speeds of up to 115 Kilobits per second.  GPRS also complements Bluetooth, a standard for replacing wired connections between devices with wireless radio connections.

 

In theory, GPRS services cost less than circuit switched service since communication channels are being userd on a shared-use basis rather than dedicated to only one user at the time.

My Product - Diamond Juice

DIAMOND JUICE FLASH BANNER

(Please be patient, it may take a few moments to load.)

MOODBOARD/IDEAS/EVIDENCE

I'm going to use Nestle's orange juice bottle design and make a new label for it.
This bottle is fairly small and compact which makes it a perfect candidate for my idea.
I believe that Nestle has stopped producing these kind of drinks and that this bottle is dis-used.

This is how the bottle looks like: 

The overall color style will be orange, and fonts that i will use are all system fonts that can be found on your computer. The logo which I designed is the only thing that stands out, because it has blue elements in it. Later i will explain how i made it.

I looked up to Tropicana and how they design their bottles. That was the main inspiration for me. They have their title, and basic information about that product (eg. With Juicy Bits), pretty clean. That was the look I was going for, and I believe I managed to pull it off.


http://www.tropicana.co.uk/our-ranges

Designing the logo was pretty easy and intuitive. All i had to do is look up some logo's on Google for inspiration and it just came together.

This is the logo which I was inspired by:

After a couple of minutes of trying out many combinations i came up with this:

Pretty slick, eh?

I made the logo in Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor, which is often used by professional graphic designers to make logos, graphic posters and other.

Here's a screenshot of me making the logo.

Basically what i did is, I downloaded the diamond image as .svg file from the internet, this file was vector based, so it allowed me to edit it, change color etc, without loosing any quality. The font I used was downloaded for free commercial use, so I won't have any problems with copyright strikes etc. And that was it for the logo.

Next, I took the bottle design and removed Nestle's label, so i can later add my own to it.

 
I've matched the color of which i will mask the label with, with one of the corners of the bottle.

But wait! There's more!

The logo which I've created is awesome, i know.
I've placed it on the middle part of the upper part of the label.

Sweet!

Now its time for some graphic shenanigans.
I've put some oranges on it in addition to paint brush trail of some sort.
Hold on, we're getting there...

Looks alright, but there's something missing. It seems a bit dull.
Bring out the background!

Now, that's what I'm talking about!
Now, All i needed to do is to add some text and some light reflection on the bottle, which i did, in this final step.

And here it is! The finished product!

How I made the banner?

I used bannersnack.com, because it saves time when it comes to creating flash banners.
All you have to do is: import your images, type in your text and place them where you want them to be. There's a lot of transition and animation presets that you can choose from, just one click away.

This is how it looks like.

 Adding buttons is simple. Just click on the "Add button" icon, shape it to your will and put your link in it.

2.2 - Research

Research

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is all about asking people for their opinions in a structured way so that you can produce hard facts and statistics to guide your project. To get statistical results you have to survey people in a a fairly large numbers and to make sure they are a representative sample of your target market. Answers on such surveys are usually closed (they requite people to choose from a specific selection of answers). Quantitative market research typically includes customer surveys and questionnaires. These can be conducted face-to-face with a clipboard and pen, over the telephone, online and post. Research is an important first step before you undertake any marketing tasks such as: Preparing a marketing plan, product development, branding and pricing.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is about finding out not just what people think but why they think it. Its about getting people to talk about their opinions so you can understand their motivations and feelings. Face to face interviews and group discussions are the best way to get this kind of in depth feedback. Qualitative research can be valuable when you are developing new products and you want to test reactions and refine your approach. It can also help your develop your products to make sure it meets the needs of your target audience. Getting clear results from qualitative research can be difficult, because some people may be positive just to be polite. Its about getting people to expand on their answers so that you can get more insight into their attitudes and behaviour. Its all about getting underneath people's responses to find out what is drivings their decisions.

Psychology And Advertising

Advertising is form of communication that is used to persuade an audience to buy or get interested in a product. Commercial advertisers use ads to increase the consumption of their products or services through "branding", which involves associating a product name or image with certain qualities in the minds of consumers.

When it comes to Advertisements the most important aspect are colors.  Colors can really affect your mood or your decision making. For instance, color Red can increase your blood pressure, heart rate, appetite, it grabs attention and stimulates quick decision making. Pink is associated with sweetness and it is often used in sales of candy and pastries. Orange can make you feel energetic and it is commonly found in restaurants, but long exposure to Orange can make your feel aggressive. Yellow is used to draw attention since it is the first color processed in our eyes. Green is used in hospitals because people find it relaxing. Blue is often used to sell jewelry and it is the most favorite color amongst adults, it represents loyalty. Purple represents royal, rich and luxurious. Brown represents solidity and strength. Black is used to make other colors pop and it represents Formality and Power. Last one is white, it represents purity, simplicity and high technology.

 Main functions of advertisements are to:

Inform - Persuade - Influence

An informative advert gives the audience information about their product. This could be information that is interesting or useful. Detailed information about the product can clear up any misconceptions about it, or tell your audience that your product not as bad as they might think it is. They would provide the strongest pieces of information to get the audience interested.

A persuasive advert is an effort to change or influence your opinion, beliefs, or behaviors.  For example, they would try to persuade you to try their product and see if you like it, eventually leading you to buy it. They can also be very persuasive when talking to you, giving out facts and their most convincing arguments. This can be applied for influence based adverts as well, because when you persuade someone into buying your product, you basically influenced him and his way of thinking.

 My Product

Coca-Cola, the world's most valuable brand (according to the global brand study of 2011). Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold throughout the world. The company produces concentrate, which is then sold to licensed Coca-Cola bottlers throughout the world. The Coca-Cola logo was created by John Pembertons (The inventor of Coca-Cola) bookkeeper, Mark Mason Robinson in 1885. Coca-Cola's advertising has significantly affected American culture, and its frequently credited with inventing the modern image of Santa Claus as an old man in a red and white suit. In 1942 we saw the fist use of "Coke" as a nickname and it became the official trademark for the product. They've put up a series of advertisements informing consumers that Coke means Coca-Cola.  Some of Coca-Cola television commercials between 1960 and 1986 featured movie stars, sports heroes and popular singers. In 1982 Coca-Cola (The company) purchased Columbia Pictures (American film production and distribution studio) and began inserting Coca-Cola product images in its films. After a short success during Coca-Cola's ownership, Columbia Pictures began to under perform, and therefore it was sold to Sony in 1989. The most popular campaigns were "Holidays are coming!" adverts. They used to feature a convoy of red delivery trucks with Coca-Cola name on them, and they were decorated with Christmas lights, driving through a snowy landscape and causing everything that they pass to light up. Coca-Cola stopped using this kind of adverts in 2001 because they wanted every country to have their own adverts produced locally.

Recent Coca-Cola Campaign

Share a coke with a friend campaign.

Share a coke campaign sold more than 250 million named bottles and cans in a nation of just onder 23 million people (Australia). The campaign has since made its way around the world, reaching more than 70 countries. The original purpose of this campaign was based on coca cola's ambition to both strengthen the brand's bond with Australia's young adults and inspire shared moments of happiness in the real and virtual world. Jeremy Rudge, who is in charge for running marketing in Northwest Europe and Nordics for Coke says that putting names on the packs, they were speaking to their fans at eye level. They've started with on 150 names, which were around 42% of the population. In some countries there were even vending machines that would print out your name on site, or anything your type in.

 

Most, if not all of Coke's advert images have their product in them. Usually with red or white background and gray or black text to make it more readable and noticeable. The bottles they advertise have red sticker on them and white text in Coca Cola's font. You can see that the color red plays a big part in coca cola's advertisements which brings us to use of colors in advertising. Red can increase your blood pressure, heart rate, appetite, it grabs attention and stimulates quick decision making.All of their ads look simple and clean, without too much clutter. Professional and appealing.

Coca Cola's target audience are people who are brand conscious and will not drink beverages of less known brands, those who drink coke to show their status, people who are 15-25 years old and 40 plus of both genders. People of today want to live a healthier life and Coca Cola recognized this need and begun to produce different beverages that can satisfy those customers.



Tippexperience Case Study 

Tipp-Ex is a brand of correction fluid and other related products that is popular throughout Europe.
In their viral interactive video advert they let you decide how the story should go on with youtube's annotation system, already giving you the impression that this is going to be interactive and that the user can direct the story. Unfortunately, no matter on what you click the link will lead you to Tipp Ex's youtube channel.

The video starts with the hunter denying to shoot the bear and this all happens on their channel. The hunter in the video interacts with the banner on the their youtube page and grabs some sort of Tipp-Ex product and erases on part of the title of the video. The actual interactive part starts when the user can put in anything in that erased part of the title to start a series of pre produced videos. This allows you to create your own experience and share it with your friends which can create quite a buzz amongst them. Since the video is so interesting and engaging, people want to share it to facebook, twitter etc. And this drives more and more people to their product promotion.



DoubleClick

DoubleClick is the ad technology foundation to create, transact and manage digital advertising for the world's buyers, creators and sellers.  It was founded in 1996 by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. DoubleClick merged with the data-collection agency Abacus Direct in 1998 which raised alot of fears that these two companies merged would link anonymous web-surfing profiles with personally identifiable information like name, addresses, phone numbers etc. that were collected by Abacus. 

Later on DoubleClick decided that they will not merge databases.  In July 2005 it was acquired by Hellman & Friedman a private equity firm. Google purchased it in March 2008 for $3.1 billion. Google announced that they will cut 300 jobs at DoubleClick due to organizational redundancies. Today DoubleClick focuses on uploading ads and reporting their performance.  http://www.google.co.uk/doubleclick/


                          HTC One X - Interactive Masthead 

In this advert we can see some people jumping out of a plane and taking pictures with the new HTC One. Then, the masthead splits into two images. Left side has the product information with the picture of the new phone, and the right side has a picture of a parachuter holding the phone. 

Over that right image there is a link for you to click "Try it yourself" and when you click on it it expands the masthead showing the clip of them skydiving, with a phone in the middle that lets you capture certain frames of the video as if you were taking pictures with the actual phone. The pictures that you took are placed just below the masthead, and when you click on them it leads you to HTC's website. The whole thing is put together by layers and video footage and it is quite intuitive.





                                                                         Buzzman


Buzzman is an independent agency founded in 2006 dealing with advertisement campaigns. Buzzman is responsible for the making of Tipp-Ex's interactive youtube adverts and many others. The one that I like is the MirrorBallMan where due to some laws in France advertising for alcoholic beverages is very restricted Buzzman created an Icon which will represent their client J&B as a disco ball men or as they've called it The Mirror Ball Man. Its a costume made out of a Yellow suit and a disco ball on the guys head. They wanted this costume to become a Party Icon in France. The ad begins with a video where this DJ ruins the party and you are left with 2 choices.

 One was to kill the DJ, second one was to save the party by uploading your own song in .mp3 file. This would generate a fully costumized video clip which reacts to your song. For instance, if the song is a club song, the crowd in the video will go crazy and dance. And if the song is slow, or even classical, the crown will lay on the floor like they've fell asleep. Rock songs will make them jump into pools and so on... This campaign was very successful with over 100,000 visitors and 3 minutes average time spent on the video. 15% of the visitors have returned. 

Home Learning - Making animation interactive

 Action Script

Action script is a programming language that is specifically designed for Web animation. This programming language that is originally released with Flash 4 and then later on enhanced for Flash∆

ActionScript makes it possible for developers to create onscreen environments that can respond to user input through the keyboard or mouse.

    







Thasiohjdoashjfoiasjf D: Yes

Task 1a - Digital Video Technology

DIGITAL VIDEO TECHNOLOGY IN INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Task 2.1 Flash Banner

You are to create an animated, interactive masthead to be placed on YouTube for a new soft drink.  This masthead is advertising space.  You may choose the product to be advertised but make sure that it will allow you to develop and show off your skills as a web animator as much as possible.  It must:

●      target a fresh audience group for the product

●      created in Photoshop and Adobe Flash

●      follow a conventional YouTube in-page masthead size (970x250)

●      contain at least 2 interactive elements

●      contain some vector animation

●      be a completely original campaign, however you are allowed to include the product’s logo, company logos and any imagery associated with the product so long as you address the legal implications in your planning notes

 

 

 The Final Banner

 

Get Adobe Flash Player. Embedded with the help of embed-swf.org.

Web Animation Technology

Ways to create:

Adobe Flash  £15.59 (included in Adobes Creative Cloud)
Flash, probably the most popular 2D animation software out there, used to be owned by Macromedia, but when Adobe saw its popularity explode in the early years of internet, they've decided to buy Macromedia. Flash is vector based program and very intuitive to work with, but it can also manipulate with raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings and still images. 

It also allows bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture microphone, mouse, keyboard and camera input. In addition to animation, Flash is also used for creating games, and rich internet applications(RIAs) that can be viewed via Adobe Flash Player, which is usually integrated into your web browser.




 Adobe After Effects £15.59 (included in Adobes Creative Cloud)
An interesting choice for 2D animation. AE gives you a great control when creating 2D animation. It is primarily used for video editing, but it does great in motion graphics.
After Effects is a layer-orientated program software, which also mean that individual media objects like video clips, still images, audio clips etc. run on their own. One of many great things about After Effects is the "Puppet Tool". Using this tool enables you to quickly add natural motion to raster images and vector graphics, including shapes, images and text characters.

It works by deforming part of an
image according to the position of the pins that you place and move. These pins define what parts of the image should move and what parts should remain rigid. You can also select which part will be in front when parts overlap. With that being said AE is definitely worth a shot.


Photoshop - £15.59 (included in Adobes Creative Cloud)
We all know Photoshop, that great image manipulation software that offers versatility and convenience, but who would think of it as an animation platform? Well, Photoshop is not exactly made for animation, often skipped when it comes to animation software, but the reality is that this is one heck of a product for frame by frame animation. Photoshop's new timeline functionality lets you animate by drawing frame by frame, using the same onion skinning function as seen in Flash, and its incredibly robust.

With all the tools Photoshop offers, you can create some stunning stills and thats what made it popular. Now, with the addition of onion skinning, a whole new world of possibilities has opened. Take those life-like drawings, put onion skinning on it, make a couple of frames and you have yourself an amazing piece of work (if you can draw that is). Lets sum it up. The best tool for image manipulation out there plus animation capability? What else can you ask for? If you have the time, and you know how to draw in photoshop, you should definitely go for frame by frame animation in Photoshop!


There are many more animation tools to write about, but for the sake of staying sane, I will just mention them without having to write pages of reviews. So, the honorable mention awards go to:

Adobe Edge Animate: Lets you create interactive HTML animations.
SWiSH: Advanced Flash creation tool for the graphic artist or web professional.
Amara: Animation software to create web animations for your website 
Blender: Blender is a free and open source 3D animation suite.

Ways to Play

As for the ways to play all of your creations, here are the following:

Adobe Flash Player - Free
Flash Player is a free software for playing multimedia, rich internet application (RIAs) and streaming audio and video content created in Adobe Flash. It can run on moblie devices, your browser or standalone. 

Flash can be downloaded for multiple operating systems like: Windows, OS X, Chrome OS, Android and more. With over 90% of people on the internet using it, it is a common player for games, animations and GUIs (General User Interface) embedded into web pages. Flash Player can be downloaded for free as a plug in for most recent versions of web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. Each version of Adobe Flash Player is backwards compatible and it should not have problems playing older flash files. Flash player can also access certain connected hardware devices, including web cameras, mouse and keyboard input and microphones.


Formats supported by Flash:

Data formats:                       
XML, JSON, AMF and SWF.

Multimedia formats:
MP3, FLV, PNG and JPEG.

Streaming protocols:
HTTP, RTMP and TCP.

Before version 10, Flash player had no support for GPU acceleration. When version 10 came out, it came out with a limited form of support for shaders on meterials in the form of Pixel Bender API, but still did not have GPU accelerated 3D vertex processing. In version 11, new low-level API called Stage3D was added which provides full GPU acceleration. Similar to WebGL. Current versions of Flash Player are optimized to use hardware acceleration on multiple platforms to play videos or render 3D graphics.



Adobe Shockwave - Free
Adobe Shockwave is a multimedia platform that enables you to add animation and interactive content to your web pages. Shockwave player allows applications made in Adobe Director to be published on the Internet and viewed in a web browser.

Because it offers more features and more powerful tools, authors often go for the Shockwave Director combination over Flash. It has a much faster rendering engine and support for various network protocols.
Shockwave plugin is not available for all operating systems. Despite intense efforts to bring Shockwave to Linux, they were unable to make it, so if you want Shockwave on your Linux you have to Emulate a windows version of a supported browser in Wine (A program that allows you to emulate windows software.






QuickTime - Free (QuickTime Pro $29.99)
QuickTime is developed by Apple Inc. It is capable of playing various formats of digital video, pictures, sound and panoramic images. It also supports interactivity. It is available for Windows Xp or later, and Mac OS X Leopard or later operating systems.

QuickTime comes with OS X, and for Windows, it comes as a standalone installation or bundled with Apple's iTunes. There is a far more superior version of QuickTime called QuickTime Pro. While the basic QuickTime is being limited in its features, QuickTime Pro has the ability to edit clips through the cut, merge separated audio and video tracks, it has a copy and paste function, saving and exporting and so on...



This is a list of supported formats:

Audio	Video	Picture
A-law Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) AMR Narrowband Apple Lossless Au file format Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) Core Audio Format MACE Microsoft Adaptive DPCM (MS ADPCM) MIDI MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) Pulse-code modulation (PCM) QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) QDesign Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) μ-law	Animated GIF Animation Apple ProRes Apple Video Audio Video Interleave (AVI) Cinepak Component Video DV 3GP and 3G2 Graphics H.261 H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2[9] H.263 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Microsoft Video 1 Motion JPEG MPEG-1 MPEG-4 Part 2 Pixlet Planar RGB Qtch QuickTime Movie QuickTime VR Sorenson Video	BMP FlashPix Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) JPEG JPEG 2000 Portable Network Graphics (PNG) TIFF Truevision TGA TXT

 

HTML5 Video

HTML5 video element was intended to become a new standard and replace Adobe's Flash Player because it was lacking support for some video files formats, and that's when HTML5 came into place.

If you want to embed an HTML5 video on your website you would have to do the following:

• Upload your video clip to your webspace
• Copy the URL of the video
• Paste it into the code of your website

Here's a little fragment of code that explains how to do this.

 Your video link goes where it says ""movie.webm", and your thumbnail (optional) goes to "movie.jpg".

You can also have multiple sources of your video in different formats, because some of the browsers do not support certain video formats, so you can do the following:

Source elements represent your videos, you can add as many sources as you want.
Every line should contain a different type of video (different format). Your "poster" (thumbnail) can remain the same.  And that's about it, you can later on add the position and size of your video in the code.