| lecture notes | Vonda's recipe for a simple, cheap, fast, professional web portfolio without making a web page | |||||
| OVERVIEW -- Edit together work for your portfolio into one movie. -- Use the animation server to house your portfolio movie. -- Register a domain name of your very own - such as http://www.YOURnameHERE.net. -- Then email your portfolio link to prospective employers. |
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| Portfolio Movie Edit together your best work that most clearly represents your desired focus. Keep this montage under 2 minutes. You could create more than one movie to share! (modelling skills, character animation, whatever speciality you are applying for) Use the standard recommended settings for a web movie file: 360x243, Mpeg4, 15 fps, fast-start. Upload your edited portfolio movie file to your Portfolio folder on the web server just as you would an ordinary movie. |
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| Domain Name Registration There are several companies that sell domain name registrations. Yahoo, goDaddy, etc . . .Prices vary per establishment, so do your research. You can find prices starting at 1.99 up to 14.99 and more per year, depending on features. The services that usually come standard that are handy are site-redirection and site-masking. Site redirection means that your web site visitors type in "http://www.yourname.net" or "http://www.yourname.com" and once they reach this site they are immediately redirected to the actual place where your web assets are stored. Site masking means that once they are forwarded to the new location, the URL does not reveal the alternate place - which might be an annoying cumbersome URL deep in the animation area folders! Your visitors won't therefore be unnecessarily reminded you are a student. Both of these settings should be available from your host's interface control. See instructions which will be in an email from the domain registration company, once you've set up an account. You'll need to know the site URL to redirect the site to. Use the address of your portfolio movie. It will be something akin to this format: http://art-design.missouristate.edu/animation_drop/classname+semester/yourlastname/portfolio/name_of_the_movie.mov |
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| The URL Link When you send an email to prospective employers you include the link to your purchased doman site: http://www.YOURnameHERE.net . It looks very professional to have your own domain. BY ALL MEANS - email your new domain name link to yourself to test it BEFORE sending it to a prospective employer! When the email link is clicked, you'll see a browser window open and the movie will play within a blank web page. With a beginning and ending slate that includes your name and at least email, then who needs a real web page? Obviously if you have the skills and the time - by all means - making a web page is great! I often hear that students are approached by someone who says - "send me a link to your work" and then the student either spends weeks working on a page and misses the opportunity, or they send a link of a project page from the class web site (boo), You don't want prospective employers on the class web site comparing your work to everyone else's in the class - you don't want to muddy this person's experience. |
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| Options Once you've purchased a registration for your own domain and you have the power to re-direct the site, you can re-direct it any time. So in the future, if you wanted to use a different server to hosue perhaps a fuller web page - it'd be easy - without anyone needingin to know that your address "moved". Also, the same companies that sell registrations for domains usually also host web site space - which they'd give you a set amount of server space for X amount of dollars. So again, if you wanted, you could buy server space up front. |
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