Creating Futures - what the courses cover

Print Design
4 hours per week, full-year programme

Provides an introduction to image manipulation and layout design through the delivery of a number of briefs.

The specific documents the students’ design and produce can be determined by the school and may involve items such as an A3 poster, a folded DLE brochure, a multi-page magazine, a photo-montage, etc.

Examples of commonly used software are Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator, Corel Photo-Paint, Pagemaker, InDesign, FreeHand, QuarkXPress and CorelDraw.

Web Design
4 hours per week, full-year programme

Covers website construction using the industry-standard web-authoring software Dreamweaver or GoLive, or by hand coding HTML or xHTML using any text editor.

Optionally students can also learn to create and manipulate images for use on their sites using Photoshop or Fireworks. They may add 2D animation to their sites using Flash and/or create dynamic database driven websites using PHP and MySQL and/or include some basic programming with Javascript or ActionScript.

3D Animation
4 hours per week, full-year programme

Uses the open-source software Blender and covers the principles of animation; an introduction to 3D modeling; animating simple objects to o the principles of animation (weight, exaggeration, ease in and ease out, etc); and rendering animations to video for presentation on the web or DVD.

Digital Video & Audio Production
4 hours per week, full-year programme

Covers pre-production, production planning, story-boarding, post-production and video-editing with iMovie, Premier, Final Cut or Movie Maker; and post production, importing footage, adding text, animation and effects, rotoscoping, adding transparency and key effects, rendering and output with After Effects.

Game Development & Design
4 hours per week, full-year programme

Provides an introduction to game development and programming; digital storytelling; GUI design principles; interactive media production; and digitising and preparing images for the web. This course can be used with open-source software Game Maker Lite or with ActionScript 2 or 3.