Introduction

This course is an introduction to creation of multimedia works. It will focus on five parts: Photos, Graphics, Audio, Video, and Websites. Because of the huge scope of these topics, each one will only be covered in an introductory manner. The goal of this course is to give the students enough of an introduction to the topics that they could go on and learn more advanced concepts on their own.

Section 1 - Intro
Section 2 - Free Software
Section 3 - Conventions
Section 4 - Attribution
Section 5 - Design

Material Resources

The following are places you can go online to find resources (generally creative commons licensed) for use in your projects.

Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org - All the photos, video, audio used on wikipedia and the other related sites.
Flickr Creative Commons - http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ - Photos on the photo sharing site Flickr licensed under creative commons
Google Usage Rights - http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?&answer=29508&hl= - Search with google for open works
Creative Common's Search - http://search.creativecommons.org/ - Site setup by the Creative Commons organization for finding works
ccMixter - http://ccmixter.org/ - Audio mixing community
Free Sound - http://www.freesound.org/ - Sound effects
Featured Films - http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Films - Films featured by Creative Commons
Open Clip Art - http://www.openclipart.org/ - Lots of Non-Photographic graphics
Creative Common's Directories - http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Directories - Lots more links to places with CC material.

Vocabulary

Free Software - A software program that was built with the freedom of expression in mind. You are free to copy, modify, and distribute this and any contributions made to it will be available to the community.
Open Source - When the source code for a program is available for you to look at, copy, modify and distribute.
Propritary Software - Software that you can use, but you may have to pay for. It is owned by another company or individual.
Bit - The smallest unit of data that can be stored. It is either true or false, represented by a mathematically as a 1 or 0.
Byte - The typical storage unit of computer data. It is 8 bits in size, giving it 256 different possible values.
Decimal Notation - The typical number system we use in day-to-day life. It uses the digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.
Binary Notation - The number system used by computers. It only has two digits 0 and 1.
Raised to the power - When a number multiplied by itself a certain amount of times. 2² (or 2^2) = 4, 2³ (2^3) = 8, 10² (10^2) = 100.
Kilo Byte (KB) - 1,000 Bytes
Mega Byte (MB) - 1,000,000 Bytes
Work - Any creative creation. Paintings, books, essays, photographs, songs, movies, etc.
Attribute - Acknowledge that you are re-using the work of another author.
Copyright - The right to distribute a creative work. This is automatically given to the author when he/she creates a new work.
Creative Commons - A set of licenses that allow works to be re-distributed with certain rights, without having to contact the copyright holder directly.
Fair Use - A limited set of rules that allow for some uses without having to ask the copyright holder for permission.
Public Domain - When a work does not have a copyright, it is said to be in the public domain, and is free for all to use.

Exercises

Convert the following to the nearest prefix for bytes, using the correct abbreviation

Example) 283,187,122 Bytes
A) 283 MB

1) 1,000 Bytes

2) 54,000 Bytes

3) 20,820,000 Bytes

4) 100 Bytes

5) 943,286,276,100 Bytes

6) 4,882,300,000,000 Bytes

What are the general uses for the following open source tools:

Example) VLC
A) Viewing Videos

1) GIMP

2) Inkscape

3) Audacity

4) Kdenlive

5) Kompozer

6) Firefox

Go online and find one example of each of the following, and attribute it here:

Example) Video
A) Big Buck Bunny, Blender Foundation, http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/, CC-BY

1) Photo

2) Non-Photo Image

3) Audio

4) Video

Attribution