Food Miles

After researching into possible topics for my animation I decided to base it on food miles for a number of reasons.

What are food miles - 

• Food miles (or food kilometres) describe the distance that food is transported as it travels from producer to consumer.
• In the UK, our food travels an amazing 30 billion kilometres each year. This includes imports by boat and air and transport by lorries and cars
• Food transport is responsible for the UK adding nearly 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. Over 2 million tonnes of this is produced simply by cars travelling to and from shops.

Why I am basing my project on food miles - 

As I said there were a number of reasons I wanted to use food miles for the theme of my project. First off I initially liked the idea of using food as the theme but I had very little ideas around this, and ways I could make an interesting animation on this. After researching however food miles seemed like the right idea as it has an element of transport which I thought gave me more freedom to come up with ideas. 

The other reasons I decided on food miles as I had little knowledge on the topic and it was not something I had really considered. So I thought it would be a good topic to bring to peoples attention. 

Research Climate Change - Transport

I also researched into how transport affects climate change I looked at a number of topics such as airmiles and the idea of using eco-driving. For the animation I started to think of ways I could use these topics for my project. 

Airmiles - With airmiles causing a massive carbon footprint I could base my animation on ways to reduce this and cut down on airmiles in general. I could promote local holidays or possibly less holidays  but this may be a hard topic to promote and encourage.

Cars - Cars are a massive cause of co2 emissions and there are many ways I could promote to cut down on this. One possible route would be to promote walking and cycling where possible to reduce the amount of unnecessary car journeys. I could also promote using public transport where it might be cheaper or easier than driving. Finally I could make my animation about electric cars, using biofuel or the idea of eco-driving all of which would help reduce the co2 emissions that come from the use of cars.

Research Climate Change - Food

One of the themes that stood out from the brief was food and the way this effects climate change, I decided to research further into this and found some topics which would work for my animation. 

I used two main sites for my research - 

Environmental protection agency - http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/agriculture.html

Sustain web - http://www.sustainweb.org//foodandclimatechange

The main topics I found whilst researching were - 

Food Miles - This is the term given to the emissions involved with transporting food, this includes the importation by boats and planes and the transportation by lorries and cars. Food miles cause massive CO2 emissions and food in the UK alone travels 30 billion kilometres a year. Reducing food miles could have a dramatic effect on reducing CO2 emissions and the impact the food sector has on climate change. The solutions to this include buying locally and in season as the food does not have to travel as far as well as growing your own fruit and vegetables.  

Impact on crops - The impact that climate change has on crops is another topic I could cover these effects include and increased CO2 concentration in a large amount of crops.  Higher temperatures can prevent the crops from growing as can droughts. For my animation I could highlight these impacts but I would also need to show a solution. 

Impact on livestock - The animals are affected by the heat waves caused by climate change as well as the droughts. Climate change may also increase the chance that the livestock will suffer from parasites and diseases. Similar to the impact on crops I could highlight these issues in my animation. 

Impact on fisheries - The fish are also affected by climate change as the oceans become warmer and more acidic. This threatens the structures of sensitive eco systems in the oceans as well as directly harming the fish such as shellfish. The temperature change in the Oceans could also affect the timing of reproduction and migration which could have an impact on the sustainability of certain fish. 

Food waste is also a massive factor in global warming however I think this has been covered and highlighted as an issue enough so I decided not to focus on this. 

Year 2 - The New Brief

Today I started my second year of the FDA course and received a new brief to start the year off, the brief is a project on Animation where I will have to create a 20 to 30 second long animation. The subject for the animation is climate change awareness and the brief lays out a clear message that the animation has to convey based on a few different themes. 

These themes are -  

• The General Message 
• Food 
• Transport
• Consumption/Lifestyle

The brief also gives and guide for how the tone of the animation should have basically saying it should positive rather than negative. Also the animation must feature a mixture of music, sound effects and a voice over. 

Like previous projects I will need to follow a design process including research the brief gives two pieces of research that must be done to start with these are the principles of animation and examples of existing animations that persuade and inform.  This is a good place to start and I think a strong understanding of animation will help me to generate ideas for that answer the brief. 

As well as this across the blog and sketchbook I must also show my idea generation, sketches, storyboards, mock-ups, scripts/music and an animatic. The Animation must be made in After Effects the artwork can be created in photoshop and illustrator.  

The pitch is on Monday 14th October 

The crit is on Monday 4th November

Final deadline Wenesday 6th November 

Initial Thoughts - 

Overall I like the new brief as I am looking forward to doing animation work and learning more about it as well as gaining some skills in after effects.  As far as initial ideas go nothing really jumped out as a theme I would like to cover in my animation, I think I will need to do some research into the themes and then make a decision. I want to find a subject that I find interesting and a clear message to convey. 

For animations styles I've had a brief look at 1940s-50s retro cartoons that I like the style of I think the artwork looks good and is a style I would be able to achieve. I also think the style would suit a public information video and would suit the tone as it's easy to be positive and comical in this style. However I will look at a few more styles before making a final choice on this. 

 

Evaluation - Website

To be honest I am a disappointed with the way my website has turned out it just doesn't look like I thought or hoped it would. One of the main issues I think I have made for myself is spending more time planning and designing the home page than any other, and I think when people look at the site they will know and realise as it is so obvious more effort and designing went into it than another page. I think that if I had planned out the other pages and the ways I wanted to present the information on these pages I would have saved myself a lot of problems when designing and also got each page to a design level where I was happy with it. 

That being said I am happy with what I have learnt and can take away form this project as this was my first time hand coding a  website fully I learnt a lot on this side of the project. Coding both HTML and CSS which I really enjoyed and think will be very useful for the future, I also learnt about responsive website what makes them, how they work etc. which again will be very useful for the future. Planning and designing for a full website was also slightly different to when I last did it in a previous project. Also as mentioned above I have learnt that you need to plan all of your pages for a website and not just one otherwise it just becomes weaker and weaker as you add more pages. 

I also don't think that making as many changes as I did on the final day helped either as the changes were rushed so it could be submitted for the deadline. These changes were completely remaking the geology and wildlife page to lose the tab system and the image slider. Which I think these pages now look better but with more time could of become something I was really happy with. Whilst I know these changes needed to be made and make my website stronger I think I should have considered them and made them earlier so the pages would look a lot better now. 

Overall I am happy with my ideas for this project and what I have learnt form it such as coding, making it responsive, user testing, validating and jquery etc. However I feel that I could have made the website look a lot better in terms of layouts and structures and basically just a stronger final product. But i think making this mistake now in this project will make my next website or web based project a lot stronger. 

Validating my Website

I validated the code of my website using http://validator.w3.org/check, I put each of the html pages through the check and got a page like this one for each of the checks.  It gave me a number of error and warnings and also detailed this further down the page like this.

I then went through trying to fix the error in there code this was not difficult as the validator gave me a description of the error as well as the line number for where it was in the code. It took time to validate each of the pages and fix the errors, but at the same time it sorted out parts of the code and helped me find little errors that I otherwise wouldn't of. 

After making the changes to the code for example adding a missing close tag I revalidated each of the pages and eventually they came up green with no errors found. 

CSS - 

I also validated my CSS3 using http://csslint.net after pasting in and checking my whole CSS my results ok as seen here. 

The main issue was the 3 errors in the code so I wanted to make sure these were fixed. After going through the code and fixing the problems i rechecked the CSS and got 0 errors the warning were still there but this was mainly all around the order and the way I had written the CSS and as this was my first time hand coding the CSS completely I can take these warning forward to my next website. 

User Testing on my website

To test my website I out I did some small user testing asking 5 people 5 questions about the site, to see if they could navigate around, find information or links and also find it easy to use. 

The questions I asked were - 

• Can you find the rock types gallery ?
• Can you find the Red tailed hawk in the wildlife page? 
• Can you navigate to the wildlife page without using the standard navigation?
• Can you find the information on Erosion?
• How quickly can you navigate to the bottom of the history pages info?

I picked these questions as they tested out the pages and features of the site I wasn't sure about as well as seeing if my navigation worked and people could get round the site easily. 

The results were pretty good people could find out the information and navigate to it well and without getting lost so the basic structure of my website was working. The main issues I had was the tab feature as it did not load automatically as you click on the page this confused some people whilst answering question 1. Also the scroll boxes I had on the website did not work as well as I hoped and people found these annoying to use. 

Overall using testing was successful and gave me things to improve on before the deadline.