Faith is head of a church school (and a Rev., to boot!), Mike isn't even Christian which, perhaps, added a little extra creative frisson to the partnership. We have never met nor spoken on the phone; all our communication, so far, has been by email.
Today, the 16th, Faith's school is presenting a musical, written by Weasel, which is called "Hallelujah Christmas". One of the songs in it speaks about church bells and Faith was keen to use bells as the theme of our "door". She began by searching the web for ringing bells. Mike took the hint and did likewise. Between us we found a variety of stuff which we sent to each other for consideration. Faith suggested the ideas, found the bell sounds, decided on the text and generally acted as creative editor. Mike drew the door, animated the bells, edited the sound file to make it smaller and constructed the webpages. The Door was drawn in MSWord. The holly leaves came from one of the sets of festive letters on the Broderbund ClickArt Collection. The Animated Bells: were made from another graphic on the Click Art CDs. The original .wmf file was transferred to my Acorn A5000 and converted into a Drawfile using a PD program called WMFtoDraw. I then reduced it in size and made copies which I modified by rearranging the bell's clapper. The screen images of the three bells were then captured using Acorn's !Paint and combined into a single spritefile of 3 sprites. I used !Paint to make the background transparent and then converted the spritefile to an animated .gif using the PD program InterGif 6.02 by Peter Hartley. The gif file was then returned to the laptop, where I used Animagic to adjust the timings of the animation and to make a second bell gif with the frames in a different order - hence the 2 bells out of phase. The Scrolling Text: is a marquee added using Microsoft Front Page. (It was Mike's wife, Judith, who suggested that the text should scroll).
Producing this advent calendar contribution has added to our skill and understanding of the use of these machines.
Faith says, "Being able to share in creating this Advent calendar has been really interesting and I have learned a lot from Mike and from working things through".
If you want more information about the construction of this site why not email Mike at mikef@icteachers.co.uk
You can follow this link To Mike's Home Page