Who am i?

So for the new year we'll be starting our new projects on identities, one of which is to start a secondlife character to online to show (to what i'm lead to believe) what our other side is like, for example we could be a very outgoing person on the outside, but on the inside we could be very lonely or angry or any other types of negative emotions.

I will be setting up a secondlife character once

a) i figure out how to do it on my home computer as it is not allowing me to do so.
or
b) when the university has updated the computers to allow students to do so at campus.

I have however been involved into online gaming, as i am at heart, a big kid.

The game is FINAL FANTASY XI online, created by Square enix and is a very well established company and has over half a million of the population are regularly logging in each day.
So far in my online experience seems to be of an interesting on as communicating with people that do not actually speak a word of english seems kind of insane, but with Square Enix's programming you can use something called an "Auto-translate" key to communicate simple words to others.

My character is named "Ragingmonkey", was a spur of the moment thing as i did not think i would participate too long into the whole online addiction. But 2 years later i'm still around from time to time.

It's your average MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) like World of War craft. Missions, Storylines, Socialising and having fun seems to be the most part of this game, once i gather more information on "identites" i'll post more on here to let you know my experience with my "second-self"

snowboarding is cewl!!!

So heres something i've been playing wih on flash,

i played around with it on illustrator and flash, what i did was got a random snowboaring cartoon from google, put it onto illustrator and changed the file into a PNG, then messed around with it on Flash. Took about an hour to do, but it seemed like a fun outside project for me to do as it got me to play around with flash abit more.

You'll need to click on the link below to view it as i did not know how to update the thing onto Blogger >.<

file://homestud-01/8$/N0108780/outsidework/snowboard.html

ONE SHOT, AND I'M DONE!

So it's finally here, my one shot film has been completed...



It was a fun piece to do and enjoyed the filming very much, we did have a few issues with the lighting and seemed to have casted alot of shadows on the walls as you can see throughout the film, but hey, it was our 1st try at this so i'm sure in the future it can only get better. There was alot of things that i wanted to do with this but had limited time to do it as i had very little experience with preimere. One of the things i wanted to test out was to make the whole movie in black and white but still keep the colour Red in for the colours of the cards. I was told it was possible but no one seemed to know what the effect was... i guess ill read into it sometime and test it out on this to make it visually more interesting.

The casts..

I've created my character for my interactive narrative piece, since the narrative is revolved around drugs and the outcomes of it i have decided to create pills for the main character and have filled in the colours differntly for differnt characters and also resized them. Heres a screenshot of what it looks like from flash

So here is the main character which is what the narrative is based around on him having choices on taking drugs and what will happen to him when taking drugs. This i find is a very fun character which may appeal to children and could be used as a learning activity for kids to understand the outcomes of taking drugs.

Urika...

After thinking for days on end (this is no joke) of this prjoect for interactive narrative, i have come up with my narrative. I have decided to make my interactive narrative an educational piece on drugs and the fundamentals of its outcome.

Next on my to-do-list is :

Draw images/take images
Plan on how to structure my work on flash

Daddy, whats a narrative?

So we've been set our final brief for this term which is heavily focused on narrative, and after hearing from Jools that our previous 2 projects did not follow the breif in showing a narrative to the pixialation and one shot film i began to ask myself, what is a narrative?

So i looked to find out what the definition of narrative is:-

"A narrative is a construct created in a suitable medium (speech, writing, images) that describes a sequence of real or unreal events. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled".[1] (Ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root gnō-, "to know".[2]) The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative", but can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. A narrative can also be told by a character within a larger narrative." - Wikipedia

"Narrative is a specialised form of communication resulting from an attempt to record and transmit information in order to explain" - Benford and Tallyn (2005)

From what i have read and heard from Jools that the basics of a narrative is a series of events that has the whole cause and effect placed in the story.


Interactive Narrative

Our final project given to us by Jools is to do with Interactive Narrative which is mainly to do with the consumer's choice and control of what they want to happen to the object/people in the story. A good example of interactive narrative would be related to role-playing games on computer's, many of which you can choose which path you wish to take or how you wish to act will lead you to different paths in the game and have different endings to it, this may be one of my ideas into making my project but i still need to think of a narratve that will work well.

Visual aesthetics

I have chose to discuss the visual aesthetics of the Wii controller, as a owner of the Nintendo Wii

i must say that this is a very interative entertainment system with it's exciting visual effects and their new family games that have been introduced and targetted to the older generation of the public. The look of it is very simplistic yet amazingly visually pleasing with its clean white look. Also with a well designed grip for the consumers with a strap that has been introduced to prevent the consumers from losing grip of the Wii and hitting their televisions.

The controller can be held upwards like the 1st image or it can be tilted so that you can hold the control on both ends like your original console control. There is a sensor that is to be placed ontop of your television so that it can detect the motion of the control to send the signal to the console on where the gamer is moving their control towards.

One shot film- Plan

As a group we have decided to base our one shot film on a poker game involving 1950's style New york gangsters. We've booked out the studio for our location and have several props our homes which we are going to bring in to increase the realism through the use of mise en scene. Through editing i can filter the color to give a black/white color for our one shot film to make it a film noir, which again will give the audience a clearer image of what the genre is.

Synopsis- so...

So like wheres all the books gone? Been trying to find books in the libary, which to my surprise most books from the reading list has been booked out or on request. Then i march towards our neighbourly bookstore "blackwells" and the 4 books i wish to purchase none are in, so winner -.-;, then finally i go towards what i think is the answer to all my problems, waterstones and again "nope, nope, nope, nope, we don't seem to have any of those in at the moment, would you like to order them in?" So my days going pretty "well" if only you can read sarcasim in text aswell as you could face to face or by the lovely tone in my voice.

So, with apologises i have not got much of a synopsis on a book as i have none to hand but have spent a whopping £73.96 on books incoming soon.

I did manage to borrow a book from a fellow class member, naming no names (thank you dave), on Basics of video production, by Des Lyver & Graham Swainson. The chapter is on "Location lighting".

This chapter details the introduction to the way we should consider our lighting depending on the location in which we choose to shoot our film. It also gives us aid on what tools and equipment would be useful to give us better lighting in certain locations. Such as battery powered lighting, which gives the lighting supervisor indendence from the mains. It does cover the pros and cons of what certain lighting techniques may have on your video production.

The chapter does cover alot of insightful things in which most of us should be paying attention to when considering making a video production. The book itself i have not covered fully but there is a number of techniques and hints of what can help us maximize our quality of work.

There will be more added once I recieve the masses of books i have ordered.

WAHOO!

At last it seems i have finally finished my stop motion project, now i'm not sure if it was just me but this project really did make me go crazy at times. If it wasn't the fact that all my kept on disappearing somehow, it was that i could not open the folder or trying to add tracks to my movie clip. But somehow, with a little patience, alot of keyboard banging and alot walking around aimlessly i have finally completed it... so yeah me *'.'*

It was a fun project shooting it, not so much editing it because i'm not very skilled at using the software, but i managed somehow and it has turned out (in my opinion) alright. A main problem that we had was our location, it wasnt the fact that it was congested with people but it was that the camera man (me) took most the photos in the middle of the road and when cars came by we had to try to re-poistion ourselves.

Anywhooo, enough of my jibba-jabba here it is, hope you enjoy

Testing 1..2..3..

Hello, been a while since I last posted on my blog so i thought i share something i've been working on recently, we've been given as multimedia students a project on pixilation and now that we've been out and about taking our random photos we need to start editing them to make them be presented the best way they can.

At the moment i do not have the original photos on me, but i've taken a random photo from google images and played around with it on photoshop, by doing this i can just take notes of what i have done to this photo and add the same effects to the ones i wish to put on in my project.

Heres the oringial photo, its a picture of the streets of San Francisco, with an elder lady walking by and a homeless person sleeping on the streets.

Now what i wanted to do with our photos is to make it look slightly more dated and set in the style of a comic book and this is what it turned out to look like..

The effects i used to edit the original photo was 'film grain', which makes the image look old and to give it the comic effect i used 'Poster edges' and by adjusting the edge thickness, edge intensity and posterization it has seemed to have worked rather well. I also used 'Photo filter' which gave me the option to change the color of the photo and allowed me to give it a sepia tone which i thought worked.



If you think theres anything you think i could have added please leave a comment of what other tools i could have used.

Whiteboard Animation

Hello, it's me again... so here's another thing we did during our introduction to Multimedia. It's suppose to be a 10 sec clip of us moving a box from one side of a tree to the other side of the tree within 120 frames as each frame is 12 frames per sec. Well enough with the technical stuff and moving on to the prjoect. Me and my groups work is abit into the clip, but you'll notice it as we signed it at the end.



I was happy with what we did, however we got abit carried away and forgot that it was a 12 frame per sec and at some point of our project we began to put speech bubbles into it, which makes it look like some scribble appeared for a moment then disappeared. I guess we'll learn from our mistakes and take that into consideration for furture projects.

My wonderful disaster with Pinhole cameras

Hey there guys and girls, my 1st post... scary! Well to the point heres my attempt of using a Pinhole camera, hope you enjoy it

There were one or two others that were taken, however I have somhow managed to misplace them somewhere. I thought the photo was not too bad, but i did ruin it by putting all my fingerprints over it. If you can't see it too well, its a picture of our wonderful building Waverley. I don't know how but the picture seems really dark compared to the others I took which seemed overly bright which was kinda weird. Well thats me pretty much for today's post, til next time. Oh! I'm Jason by the way, nice to meet you ^_^