Evaluation.

This year we had to make an iBook on the topic that we did for our animation in term 3 for out social awareness campaign. 

The topic of my iBook is Suicide, and it is one of the greatest cause of death in the world. Therefore, I wanted to make my book seem as serious as possible, to show that the topic is serious. For the whole visual aspect of my book, I tried to make it seem like a medical book, with the main colour scheme to be black and white. When things are black and white, they usually make the whole mood of the photo seem grave, and it helps the people see that there’s no colour, which usually associates with happiness. However, as the book goes to the chapter of help, there’s suddenly colour. This symbolises that there’s always a little bit of colour in the darkest times, just like how there’s a rainbow after a storm. In addition, the reason why I made my iBook look like a medical book was because medical books usually are used to show physical illness, but I wanted the people reading the book to know that suicide is a type of illness. Also, even though suicide is associated with mental illness, a brain is a vital part of the organ, and studies shows that there’s a huge difference between happy brain and a sad brain, thus showing that suicide is also a type of physical illness. As a matter of fact, I also added picture frames around the photos, as it suit with the overall concept of the music. The colour scheme, the medical theme and the picture frames helped in the implement of the overall grave concept behind this book, and behind the subject, suicide. 

Throughout the whole book, I didn’t really have anything that caused major changes from the idea that I proposed at the start of this term’s assignment. The only thing that I had to change was the theme, as it didn’t match with the concept that I had in mine. For example, I used the Green theme at the start, but I didn’t really like changing the black to green and etc, as it just made my book seem too pop art and blocky. It was just a minor change, but it took up a lot of my time, as I had worked on that book for more than 2 days. I also worked back on the animation that I created in Term 2, as the words kept on moving around, and I reckoned that that would break the viewers’ concentration when watching the video. I also cropped the photos so that it filled the whole screen. I however, planned this from the start of this assignment, so I don’t know if that really counts as something that I had to change while doing this assignment. As a final point, there weren’t any major changes that I made to the concept of the book that I had when I started my assignment. 

I thought a lot about on how I can improve my iBook. To be honest, I didn’t like any of my projects starting from Term 2. After reading through my book a couple of times, I realised that my book is showing a biased side of Suicide written by a person who isn’t suicidal, which wouldn’t really appeal to a suicidal person. Imagine reading a book about science, thinking that it’d help you on your science assignment, but when you read more into it, it turns out the book is written by a normal person, who scored C’s in high school, didn’t major in science, but just wrote the book based on the internet. I wouldn’t really be happy. Therefore, I believe that the project can be improved by putting some quotes from people who survived suicide and people that are present day suicidal in the book. This would show a two sides of suicide, and actually relate to the suicidal person reading the book, hopefully. I also think that I can improve the book by adding some more widgets, as I only used the gallery, quiz, html and video. I really wanted to use the interactive image widget, but I didn’t know where to use it. Next time, I might just use it to say to spot a suicidal person, but like, add the interaction to every person in the picture, saying, “You never know who’s suicidal.” In short, the only thing that I would do to improve my book is by adding some quotes from the primary person and adding some more widgets to interact with the readers. 

Something that I would definitely do the next time I work with iBooks author is getting all the bibliographical details of the images that I used. This time, I stupidly didn’t write any bibliographical details for my book, so I was forced to get them all on the last lesson of this project, which was seriously a pain. I had to take screenshots of the photos used and put them on google images search. Now I have tons of unwanted suicidal pictures on my desktop (I deleted them as I was writing this). Also, some technological issues that I had to face this time was my USB. I had to face them last term as well, but I didn’t get to buy a new USB this time, so I had to just use this one. This USB is really slow, which took a lot of time to save. I also had to live in fear of the stuff on my USB deleting before I hand it in. To summarise, there’s only two things that I would like to change in terms of my actions next time I work with this iBooks author. 

I didn’t really learn much from using iBooks author this term. Yes, it is true that I have never used it in my whole entire life, but we did something similar in Year 7 with Creative Book Builder. The only things that I learnt were the basics of widgets on this app, and how it’s really easy to make books with it. 

When someone reads this book, I really hope that that person knows better about the topic of suicide, and be aware of the causes and effects. I also really hope that no one gets seriously offended by this, because some topics in my book is controversial, e.g suicide isn’t bad. I also hope the people finish the book, because at the start of the book, it only talks about depressing stuff about suicide. Maybe I should have out the topic of help for the 1st chapter, but that wouldn’t really make sense in a chronological order. 

Next time I make a book again, I really want to create something happy. For the last three terms, I only made depressing ones. This really depressed me. Researching about suicide depressed me even more (Thanks, Mr Powell.) Next year, I think I’m going to try and focus around topics of happiness, or else I’ll be remembered in St Hildas as the depressed media girl. 

I am satisfied with my overall result. I'm also really happy about not doing blogs this term. Thank you for a great year Mr. Powell.