Back before Christmas, I was asked (with my friend Dom) to design and produce a promotional video for the Southampton University Christian Union upcoming Events Week in February 2012. There was not much of a brief to go by, so we took some inspiration from a Willow Creek video advertising the Leadership Summit 2011 (watch this here).

I then brought together some initial concept ideas for the video in Adobe Premiere – including text, images and backgrounds from various free sources (such as this one). The idea was to have some sort of storyboard of ideas that could then be developed further into the final video.

To do this I used Adobe After Effects CS 5.5, which I spent a couple of hours learning through their tutorials as well as using tutorials on YouTube of how to achieve certain effects (such as typing). One issue was that we were constrained by using trails of the program – in total we got through three trail periods on three different computers!

After multiple revisions and the addition of a Hillsong backing track (With Everything), which Dom had chopped to the right length and added extra instruments and effects in Garage Band, we had the final video produced (see below).

This was a great project to work on as I gained my first experience of creating a video in After Effects, as well as learning to listen to a lot of different criticism from many people, and sifting through to choose the comments I wanted to take on board.

So I’ve entered the world of WordPress. So far I’m really impressed. The ease of setup and install is amazing, and should allow me to post more blogs, more easily, more often.

For a section of my first year programming coursework, we were asked to create an application to draw fractals based on theMandelbrot and Julia sets. You can download a jar file of the final product here. If you have any questions, or want access to the source code, mail me at dh7g10@soton.ac.uk.

Recently I’ve been getting into the world of virtual instruments, music interfaces, digital audio workstations and more. But I’ve found finding out the best software to use for my purpose – especially as a PC user – has been very difficult. Should you go for cheap/free software, or shell out for expensive industry standard stuff? I started off thinking that free was better, but soon realised that to get decent instruments – money needed to be spent.

I went through all the major software types: Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio and Komplete/Kore. After trying out all the different options, I looked more into Native Instruments Kore 2 as this seemed to be geared towards live performance and appeared very powerful.

The only problem was the price. Kore 2 costs around £300 new (including external controller) and this was just too far out my price range. The free kore player was great, but it lacked the features of layering sounds etc. Native Instruments did not explain why this was, and I only discovered after a while that this was because Kore 2 was a DAW (Digital audio workstation) – a complete musical environment package, and Kore Player was intended as a plug-in.

After realising this it meant that I could layer sounds, simply by using the SONAR LE software which I had received with my UA-1G music interface.

Review of Komplete 7 Elements

Having understood this, I was then free to go ahead and purchase Komplete 7 Elements which claimed to give me access to a wealth of instruments including a concert grand piano, for a fraction of the cost of Komplete 7. At the time of writing, no-one had done an interview of this software, so I decided that I should do one. Below is a list of the included instruments you get with the product:

• Best of Absynth 5 – 200 pads/soundscapes - great collection, some very weird soundscapes but some brilliant high quality pads. Accessable through the free Kore Player.
• Best of Massive – 200 synth leads - Again great collection, more than you’ll ever need. Accessable through Kore 2 Player.
• Kontakt Elements selection - Including an upright piano, 2 electric pianos, a concert grand (great instrument – although I’m looking into the New York Concert grand soundpack), 4 organs, guitars, VSL strings, 7 pads, drums and world instruments.
• AbbeyRoad 60s Drums - Priced at 99 euro seperatly, this drum kit is apparently very high quality – although I have not used it much as yet.

So overall a great product. You also receive a 50 euro voucher to purchase sound packs which is a great added bonus.

For the programming project part of my A Level Computing course, I was given the task of desiging a project that could be used as a learning tool. I chose to create an application that would teach machine learning through a demonstration. The user would be able to provide the computer with simple images of shapes, and over time the comptuer would begin to learn and recognise simple shapes, based on the number and size of the angles, length of sides etc.

If you would like to see ALFIE in action, you can do so by downloading the application here as an EXE extactor, or you can download a zip of the files here if you are on Unix. And if you would like to understand the image detection process that ALFIE goes through each time is processed, you can download/view a PDF here.

The ZQ-770 is a PDA that was manufactured by Sharp during the 2000′s. While it is not a powerful machine, it perhaps paved some of the way for modern day smartphones such as the iPhone and Android devices, with its expansive SDK (Standard development kit) and ability to write applications in C, Basic and Z80 assembler it allowed for powerful programs to be written by developers and downloaded onto the device.

I invested a lot of time at one stage writing applications for the device, and even publishing them on the website: MyWizard.com. My ZQ-770 is now safely stored in the loft, although I managed to get hold of an emulator for the device which allows you download and run the .wzd files avaliable from MyWizard.com. You can download the emulator here, you can download a section of my favourite applications in a zip file here and you can even download the C SDK here. Enjoy!

Welcome to my new website. I’ve been into web design since I was about 14, but I haven’t really done much for a couple of years, and felt it was time to give my prescence on the internet a fresh look – especially as I lost my login information for my old website… :$

I’ve always been passionate about clean CSS/HTML web design, and love nothing more to edit my website other than a nice text editor and web browse I’m hoping I’ll find the time to keep this site updated, but as I found with the last website this is often hard, so I won’t be making any promises! Also, if I do ever start a blog – this is where you’ll find it

To the right you can find links to all the sites in my library, although they’re all out of date and havent been updated in over three years! The other links the sidebar link to my Facebook and YouTube profiles respectivly. The links at the top of the page will take you to the different parts of the site Although – these are currently still in development. Enjoy!