Creating a raised effect for a title area (or anything else you want!)

eZediaMX has a hidden treasure trove of extras you might forget to explore. In the program folder is another folder called Resources. Within that is another folder called Transparency Wells. Open the Borders well to create the effect in "Golden Skies."

1. Bring in your image and add to the background.

2. Draw a rectangle with the shape tool.

3. Edit Graphic and give it a fill color that complements the background image. I also adjusted the transparency level of the rectangle, too. You can leave the rectangle plain white. The difference in the effect is subtle.

4. Open the Transparency Well entitled Borders.

5. Choose Hard Bevel Round - it's near the bottom of the well.

6. Size the transparency so it fits over your shape.

7. Select both objects. Make sure both are selected.

8. Add them to the background.

9. This creates a raised band across the picture. Experiment.

10. You can also just bring in the transparency by itself and add it to the background for a perfectly clear raised effect on your graphic.

There are lots of transparencies to play with. Give yourself permission to explore.

Shadow effect on the title:

After creating the raised area on my title frame, I brought in a text object, created my text, chose a font and a size and then chose the color black. That formed the shadow for my text. Duplicate the text box by holding down CTRL and the letter D. Now, make the text in the second box a lighter color that will go with the colors in your frame. Position it over top of the "shadow text." If you run into troubles and need to change layers, click on the layer that you want to send to the back and then go to Objects > Layers > Send backward. That will move that object one layer back.

Once you have them in the position you like and you've saved your objects in a well in case you want to use them again later, select both objects and then add them to the background.

Cool effect, isn't it?! It's even better because we don't have to be graphic designers and spend hours toiling over PhotoShop to create the effect. We can just do it with a couple of clicks, saving our time to concentrate on the content of our project!

Here's another application of the transparency graphics to create a raised effect. What you're seeing here is the eZediaMX document frame where I'm pulling items together. To the right is the Object Well where I am storing my bits and pieces. This is one major advantage of eZediaMX. As I create the raised title bars and the raised buttons, I hold down the CTRL key and then click, hold, and drag the object into the well I have opened for this project. Later, if I want to re-create a project or alter some parts of it, I can get to the individual elements without hunting all over.  The object wells for each project are kept in the same folder as the project.

 

Now think about your teaching situation
There's another wonderful feature about the wells that I want you to think about for a moment, especially the implications for your teaching situation. You can share wells (not to mention projects). As I develop my graphic objects or my frames, there might be some things that you want to use. You can take my well, load it on your machine, add to it, take things out, and generally customize it to your purposes. The point is that you don't have to start from scratch.

Now, think about a teacher's regular day. You're trying to come up with new and more effective ways to help students understand a concept. You and a few other teachers from across the district, state, region, country, world (it doesn't matter) are passionate about a particular topic. You've worked together to assemble object wells that have the essential elements for variations on projects that can expand student understanding. You shared your well with them, they shared their wells with you. Suddenly, your efforts are magnified many times over. Teachers have been doing this for years. We've always shared our favorite teaching ideas. You might say that sharing is a general characteristic of a good teacher.

So, as you are visiting this site and looking at my efforts, think not only about how easy eZediaMX is to use, but also how easy it would be to transform your teaching situation by including multimedia authoring - building upon our traditional concept of literacy to expand student literacy skills for a digital world with global communication.

What I did to create this frame

Okay, I admit it, I was back digging in the transparency wells available in the Resources folder in the eZediaMX directory. All the transparencies I used on this frame came from the borders well.

I had a blank, white frame to which I added a picture from the collection I've accumulated on my hard drive (you see some of them at this site and eZedia .ca has kindly provided space so that we could share about 400 other photos on their website).



Why did I start with the picture? Because I tend to be rather adventurous in my color selections at times, and people can occasionally feel the need to wear sunglasses when viewing what I've created, I start with the picture so I can just match the frame color to the photo. You click on Frame > Frame Setup > Color.




How having a photo picked out helps you become more efficient
You get an infinite selection of colors which is another reason having a photo already picked out helps. Knowing that you're going to be pulling a color from the photo means you limit the array of choices. That speeds up the creation process.




Here's our frame painted a new color with the photo. You could leave it like this, but I felt the need to add more, especially knowing I could just drag it out of the border well from the transparency collection.



In this next photo, you can see the border well to the right of the document frame. I've just dragged in a graduated black transparency that is the size of the frame. Notice that it is the top layer and is laying across my photo of the boats. I'll have to fix that by going to Objects > Layers > Send to back. Look at this next photo and then look at the one after that to see how I created a completely different effect without doing anything much at all.



This next technique was an immense amount of work. Just joking - it's safe to keep reading. Listen carefully. Place your mouse on top of the transparency as you see in the frame above. Click, hold, and drag to the left to shove the rest of the transparency under the frame where no one will ever see it! It's like sweeping things under the carpet! Tough, wasn't it?! Just remember one thing. If you go really crazy and drag something under the frame to the LEFT, you may think you can't get it back because you can't open the frame in that direction as you can on the right side. I know I thought it was lost and gone forever until Lorelei Purdy of eZedia provided me with such a simple solution. "Open the Object Timer window, locate the lost object (remember that most, but not all, objects are displayed in here) and select it.  Although you can't see it, the lost object has now been highlighted. So, without shifting focus to anything else on the frame, go to Objects > Object Size. This opens the Size and Position dialog box where you can adjust the co-ordinates of the selected object back to 0x0 or any positive number (if it's off to the left or off the top, it will have negative co-ordinates). Voila! it's now back in view."

The above solution highlights an important distinction regarding eZedia. When you think you can't, you can! It doesn't seem to matter what, there is usually a way to make it happen - and no coding is involved!!

While you are developing a project, for stuff you want to get back, get in the habit of putting it in a well or put it to the RIGHT under the "carpet" where people can't see it. You can keep dragging your frame out to the right as much as you want. HOWEVER - speaks the voice of wisdom - do not drag big things like movies and audio clips over there and leave them parked. They could be set to run on frame open. You would be wondering why your presentation is going so slow. It will be because you have movies running on your frame that you can see and movies running that you can't see. Your poor computer is trying to keep up, but after a while it begs for mercy and says please get organized in a better way!

Clean up after yourself when creating a project and make sure you have all the extraneous bits and pieces you were using while developing put away in a well and in your project folder. You'll thank yourself later. I've even had a second document window open and just piled items in there and saved it in my same folder. In that way, I've used the second document as a scrapbook where all of my parts and pieces go.



In the case of this frame, I was able to adjust the transparency through doing nothing more than sliding it out of the way, so that only as much of the shaded effect was created as I thought I needed. With the borders well so handy, I dipped in again and brought out a soft beveled edge for my picture and placed it on top.



For the rest of the goodies on the frame, I just played with the techniques I discussed at the top of this page - nothing more. I drew a shape, added a transparency, masked the object, and then added it to the background.

Here's what I ended up with when I finished playing. What you can't see is that I added invisible drop-down menu objects on the buttons. Check out the page at this site that talks about creating drop-down menus to navigate a project. For the fun of it, I've repeated the graphic from earlier in the page to remind you of where we started. If you've got a photo, you've got a theme and a color scheme.

Here's where we began and the picture above shows where we ended.