After working on my resume for an internship in the fall, I started to plan my online portfolio. Knowing that I would not be able to use my school’s host site or domain after graduation, I decided to look around for a host site for my portfolio. There are so many hosts out there it is mind-boggling. Hosting Review.com is a fairly informative site to use as a starting point. This site reviews their top ten hosts and includes video to go over all the points they feel you should consider when making a choice, such as, free domains, unlimited space, online and phone support, and cost. Once I had narrowed my choices to three, I googled reviews on all three then sifted through the online opinions taking them all with a grain of salt. This process was helpful, but in the end I just flipped a coin and went with Blue Host. I am satisfied with them though I might caution you that when a site boasts unlimited space, there is probably a limit in the size of each file being uploaded for Blue Host it is 1G, which I can live with.

One last point on deciding upon a host that you might consider, is the speed that your portfolio site loads. Sometimes webhosts might be the cause of slow loading pages, but the structure of the site also makes a difference. Google Webmaster Central Blog lists some tools along with their links, that evaluate the speed of your site. Though I haven’t gotten to try any of these tools yet as I am still tweaking my site, it is something to think about.

When planning your portfolio, it is nice to see what is out there. It can give a jumpstart to your creativity. DESIGNM.AG features 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites and updates this feature with Folio Focus. This highlight offers many approaches to a portfolio, gives examples of structure and helps to establish what information is important to include.

Deciding on the flow of your site will influence what sort of CSS template you plan to use. I found several sites useful in deciding the structure of my site. One example of free CSS templates is in fact called Free CSS Templates. This site offers everything that you would need to create your site even images, though you would probably use your own images for a design portfolio. Before you begin coding, diagram your site on paper or in a program such as OmniGraffle; this will save you wasted time in mistakes later. I can only speak from experience, if you find that you have started down a dead end road, leave it and start again. When a design is not working, it will not get better no matter how many fixes you throw at it.

You are probably planning to include images, maybe video on your site. A clean and free program for embedding and viewing images is Visual Lightbox and for videos a wizard program called Video Lightbox. It might also be helpful to know that Vimeo, an online community for storing, showing and sharing videos, now offers HD with uploads of up to 1G which can be helpful for storing Flash and After Effects movies. Vimeo itself is free, but Vimeo HD has an annual charge.

Another handy site is a web design community curated by Chris Coyier called CSS-TRICKS*. This is a great source of information for code writing offering tutorials, forums, and downloads, a definite bookmark for anyone interested in web design.

I hope that this information will save you a few steps. This is a link to my site, I will be adding to it and changing it throughout my senior year, but I feel a weight has been lifted as I get one step closer to working in the real world.

With every passing year as computers grow faster, programs become more intuitive and user friendly, and media content, platforms, and distribution trend toward convergence, we are left to ponder the future of not only CGI, but all media. More over how will society as a whole be affected by media’s evolution with mobile access and continuous connection? Much will depend upon consumer involvement as media companies scramble to find viability in a changing landscape, through inter-company discrimination of technologies and even in secret treaties hidden under the guise of anti-piracy bills.

We have covered the tech teams that emerged from the University of Utah during the sixties and seventies and the companies that these individuals started. We also visited specific works of early animation pioneers such as Max Fleischer and his development of rotoscoping an innovation that would have amazed J. Stuart Blackton founder of hand drawn animations in silent film; furthermore, what would both these forefathers think of computer generated animation feature films such as Toy Story or the very recent production, Avatar?

CGI has changed the world of media, making many different media forms more desirable, consider the first commercial games played on the television such as the game Pong, with a simple bar moving to hit a ball and then compare it to Grand Theft Auto a game with a street environment that enhances its entertainment value. The iPhone with its millions of apps many of which are free to download, have attractive packaging in the form of computer graphic images. It is not only what the app can do that attracts users, but also the visual as CGI brings color, texture, and animation to an image savvy culture.

Each new technology is built upon a foundation of the many innovations that preceded it. In the case of some technologies the changes brought lead to unintended consequences or tradeoffs, while some are a remedial result, rather a solution to drawbacks of a previous invention. Technological change can be incremental as in the case of the Phoenician alphabet from the pictogram system or revolutionary as in the case of computer graphic and digital innovations.

We are left wondering what will be the future innovations and how will our culture change due to influences that men choose to embrace or unknowingly experience without anticipation. Professor Paul Levinson in an interview on Blip TV with Mark Molaro was asked to predict the future of media and its affect upon our culture. Levinson is a strong advocate of innovation in the media field. He believes there is no such thing as too much information. The problem of the vast Internet is not the amount of opportunities for information, but rather learning to navigate through it all. He contends ‘…more damage is done by too little information.’ Professor Levinson envisions the option of media implant devices that will allow further connection, which echoes a prediction of singularity. Ultimately our choices and expectations must be made responsibly, keeping in mind that technology should meet our needs and we should not bend to the whims of technology.
Sources
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http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/ID797.html. November 27, 2009.
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Setting aside for the moment, technologies that were crucial to computer advancement as a whole, such as the vacuum tube and the microprocessor or even research of electricity that led to the discovery of electronic waves and frequencies, for all these inventions were obviously necessary for computer graphic imagery to be possible. The innovation of CGI has been influential in bringing convergence to the realm of possibility and probability. Computer graphic imaging technology exists in every medium today making media seductive and addictive; without it interactivity of devices would be similar to black and white Kansas compared to Technicolor Oz. This technology due to its visual imagery attribute, which helped to establish a user-friendly interface, has attracted mass appeal, an attraction, which has revitalized many traditional media platforms through audience interactivity and creativity. Such change and refreshing of existing technology, is welcome if not inevitable, but at the same time new innovations bring with them consequences, tradeoffs, and new media, that will upset traditional business models.

As the consumer’s role blurs from one of passivity to participatory, there has been a disruption in the traditional media business model. With computer generated software available and affordable, the established “knowledge monopolies”, a phrase coined by Professor Paul Levinson, author of the Soft Edge, are losing their foothold of power in the media industry. The mass- market attraction of CGI software has helped to diminish the exclusivity and demand of traditional media property that was previously owned even hoarded by a few powerful owners. It is impossible to foresee the outcome of technology and its influence upon the media landscape. Developers of computer based imaging, could not fully realize the extent of influence by early programs such as Sketchpad and games like Zork. Levinson contends that most successes of technology are determined by the ways in which humans process them, which he refers to as “human replay.” This also plays into his theory that information technology has a “soft edge.” Levinson believes that influences on our culture from the introduction of communication technologies are not inevitable because it is human choice that controls whether to make use of technology, however once accepted, he acknowledges, that a technology might exhibit an unanticipated consequence.

Conservation of time and money that technological innovations such as CGI have made possible, presents a change in the industry; a consequence that affects a broad spectrum of jobs especially in the film industry. A prime example would be the increased popularity for full CGI feature films, among children as well as adults. Projects such as Toy Story and Wall-E are amazing endeavors, however gone is the need for set designers, prop departments, costume designers, and even though actors are needed for audio, their creative input is limited. So that even though CGI is the answer to the skyrocketing budgets needed in film production, unintended drawbacks and consequences of its success lie in its wake. Just as the VCR then the Internet were the remedial technological answer to the televisions lack of choice and interactivity, only to cause a change in the advertising business model as the consumer gained the ability to bypass the very entity that subsidized television.

Brian Kernighan’s internal memorandum “hello world”, a groundbreaking phrase and modest herald, full of promise for a future world, has been transformed, and upgraded through image, color and interactivity. In its beginnings, computer interaction emerged as a white system font blinking on a black screen, a message on a virtual curtain announcing an upcoming show, which would bring innovations in media beyond imagination. Computer graphic imagery, its early roots in Ivan Sutherland’s 1962 debut of Sketchpad, gave foundation to the fast paced advancements of the Internet by realizing the computer’s capabilities beyond calculation; such possibilities as a medium attracting not only researchers and niche groups, but with appeal to the masses.

It is not to say that there was not interactivity before CGI, programmers created interactive text-based games during the early seventies, such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, but the advent of image based interactive applications and software brought color and atmosphere to previously undefined space of the network. Through CGI, localized networks and later the Internet, were transformed into an environment conducive for the explosion of communication collaboration perpetuated by the remix generation. CGI capabilities influenced design of video games, animation in commercials, television production as well as feature length films based on CGI, and applications for mobile telecommunication.

CGI’s influence on media emerged in the 1970’s, as movie special effects began to include some computer-generated effects. A well-known example of 3D use first appeared in the Death Star scene in the 1977 movie Star Wars; and even earlier in 1973, the production Westworld used 2D applications. Movie and television FX’s in video and film productions are more easily controlled through computer graphic imaging, where it is possible to create a setting without the expense of constructing a miniature model or elaborate set, sometimes it can be used to enhance a crowd scene, reducing the need for hiring extras. All of these capabilities open up a production world without limitations; almost anything is possible. One person can sit at a computer using this technology and produce an environment for a movie, saving the production company time and money. With the advancements of CGI in recent years, it is actually possible to produce an entire feature length film from a desktop computer.

The ability to produce entertainment with a reduced investment of time and finance has influenced media markets on a grand level, but beyond this, the availability of such programs has created a potential for the audience to evolve, no longer just consumers but also participants with contributions to content. The ability to develop sequences on a personal computer has led not only to viewer mimicry of existing properties, but also new content with twists and outlook that ignores traditional media. The fact that computer generated software is more easily accessible and affordable combined with an increase in computer memory and speed, has led production to transcend professional boundaries encouraging an Internet society of not only consumers, but creators as well.

As the consumer’s understanding of software innovations evolves, savvy perpetuates use, to the extent that computer-generated imagery is noticeable in almost all interactive media. This has contributed to the crafting of existing and new genres of interactivity and narrative. Such examples of genres influenced by CGI would be role-playing games (RPG), though they are more thought of as “real-time strategy, gaming would not have developed beyond Zork, without CGI, and from RPG content another Internet subculture developed called Machinima. Machinimators animate existing games to express a narrative as told through the use of computer rendering and editing tools, a practice that is encouraged by the gaming companies through software sold by the companies themselves. Such evidence of consumer manipulation of intellectual property as well as involvement of new property on many media platforms has created an evolving unconventional media environment.