BTC640/Assignment1-Winter2013

Due date: 15 feb

Late penalties: 10% per day

In this assignment you will be practicing your basic (HTML/CSS) web deveopment skills, recording and editing audio, and creating an original video.

This assignment is individual work. You will be allowed to use several external resources (the template, the news text, the background music, a couple of images), everything else must be created by you.

Get Website Template

Find a free, professionaly made website template. If you search for "free website template" online you will find several providers. Pay attention to the source's requirements about credit and use. Using it for homework should be no problem, but most of them will probably demand that you retain a link to their website as a visible credit.

To avoid the possibility that more than one student will pick the same template: once you choose the one you want to use - list it in this wiki table.

Modify Website Template

Using the template you chose as a starting point - modify it to have the following pages:

• index.html - This will contain your name, your Seneca ID, a checklist of everything you've done or not done for this assignment, and links to all the resources you used.
• news-audio.html - A page with the audio you crated in the following steps.
• news-video.html - A page with the video you crated in the following steps.

All these pages must be accessible using the navigation buttons in your template (almost any template you find will have some kind of navigation buttons).

You may find it easier to use PHP with require() instead of HTML, but you don't have to. If you don't know enough PHP - for this assignment you can use copy-paste for the separate pages.

Record Audio

Go to a news website (with any kind of news) and find two short articles you can read out loud for 30 seconds each. Typically a person can narrate 120 words per minute, knowing that should help you find something of the right size.

Read the first news content out loud and record your narration using Audacity. If for some reason you don't have a microphone you can use (most laptops have one built in) - let me know immediately.

Record the narration of the second article in the same Audacity project, in a different track.

Obviously your narration must be audible, so you might have to fiddle with the microphone settings, the recording levels, how loud you speak, and how close you are to the microphone.

If you're worried about your accent or english speaking skills - don't worry, that's not the point of this assignment and the I'll be the only one hearing the result you submit.

Remember that in Audacity you can very easily chop off the beginning and end of each recording if you need to.

Using the selection and time shift Audicaty tools move the first recording to start at approx. 3 seconds and the second recording to start 3 seconds after the first recording ends, so there will be 3 seconds of silence in between.

Add Background Music

Find a music file that you're allowed to copy and distribute. Once you find it - mention that also on the BTC640/Assignment1-Winter2013/Templates page so no two students use the same one.

Import that file into your Audacity project. The music has to be about 20 seconds longer than your two recordings combined. That means you'll have to delete a good chunk of the song in Audacity.

At this point if you play the entire thing - you will barely be able to hear yourself speak, since the song will be pretty loud.

Final Audio Mix

Use the Amplify effect on the music track to make it less loud (find the right negative amplification dB to match your recording and music track levels).

You want to keep the music loud when you're not speaking (in the beginning and in between the news and in the end) but more quiet while you're speaking. The amplify tool will apply to whatever you selected in whatever tracks you selected.

news-audio.html

Export your track into whatever audio format Firefox will play (that's what I'll be testing it in).

In your news-audio.html page add your creation using an audio tag. Have also in there a header with the title of the news and copy-paste the news text in there too.

Create Video

Using Windows Live Movie Maker (or another video editing tool if you prefer) create a simple video for your news. It will contain:

1. A title screen with your name. It will be displayed for the same amount of time as you set in Audacity for the gap before the first news item.
2. An image for your first news item, and text over it with the title of that news item. Duration the same as your first news item.
3. A screenshot of your index.html in a browser, and some overlay text telling people to go to http://wherever_your_page_is to get more news.
4. An image for your second news item, and text over it with the title of that news item. Duration the same as your second news item.
5. For the sound track add the same audio file you exported from Audacity earlier.

news-video.html

Convert the video your created into a format that will play in Firefox. Then add it to your news-video.html using the <video> tag. Do not use YouTube or another online video service to do this step for you.

Submit

Put your entire website on Matrix, under ~/public_html/some_random_folder_name

Make sure that the permissions on your public_html are correct. You can use the command chmod 711 ~/public_html so that people won't know where your assignment is.

Submit a zip file named yoursenecaid.zip to Moodle with the following contents:

• A text file with a link to the webpage on Matrix
• The Audacity project file
• The Windows Movie Maker project file

It's unlikely that your audio/video files will fit in the zip file, since Moodle has an upload limit of 10MB. The project files themselves are very small.