Stella Rimington Animation

Here is the start to an animation for the introduction of our location specific performance. I have made changes since but this is the most recent version I have exported to a flash file. The animation uses themes of dectectives, secret agents etc to send across the secretive MI5 lifestyle of Stella which will play a big part in our production.

LINK: http://www.guiblin.com/chris/uni/stella%20rimington/stella1.swf

Stella Rimington Project

We have been set a new group project of creating a live performance piece on the theme of a person with a connection with Nottingham and we were given Stella Rimington. From research we have found some useful information about her life, she attended Nottingham High School for girls and went on to become the director general of MI5 in 1990.

Since her tie with Nottingham is her attending the girl's highschool we dicided this would be a perfect place for the performance to take place and so took a visit down there to see if this would be possible and have emailed the school with our proposal and are awaiting a response.

We have each got different tasks to work on for the project and I am working on some animation/cartoon graphics work which will be displayed on a projector screen at different parts of the performance. I will also be narrating the piece and providing a lot of input of ideas and helping organise the

group and our tasks. We are also each working on our own version of a brief script for friday where we will get together and collaberate on a final script, perfecting it and getting all our individual parts ready for monday spending the rest of the week practicing for the date we will perform on (Monday 29th).

Some of the images I have created for the project can be seen on this plog post. I am currently working on an animation that will be used at the start of the presentation to introduce Stella Rimington very briefly and introduce the secret agent/MI5 theme of our production.

Images ©Chris Guiblin 2007
http://www.guiblin.com/chris

Film Showing

Today we went to the Broadway Cinema in town to watch each groups videos on the big screen. Seeing our own video with everyone elses made me pick out lots of things that were wrong with it, such as sound syncronisation, clip length and speed, etc.

Some of the other videos were very impressive and made good use of music, humour etc, especially two videos which were quite similar, the life of a post-it note and one about a rejected pair of trainers, both showin inanimate objects falling in love. Our video did use humor slightly as the cubical walls closed in on our character, but this didn't come across as succeful to the audience as parts of some of the other videos.

There were some other interesting styles used such as still drawings/animated drawings, a comic book style video and a couple which were shot in first person. Each video had its own interesting parts and it was enjoyable seeing what everyone had created.

Ere be dragons

We had what I thought was a really interesting seminar today. A woman had come in who used to go to Nottingham Trent Uni who started a company with her friends and are currently creating an interactive game called Ere be dragons which uses a mobile device (currently PDA but lookin into smart phones now) with a GPS adaptor to show movement and mapping out a world with different scenery of which the appearance changes depending on the heart rate of the player (measured using a plug in heartbeat sensor.

Although I thought some imporvement were needed to the game (such as improved graphics and sound) I thought it was a very good idea and got me thinking of games in a new way relating it to real life and got me thinking of different ways similar technology could be used and is something I find very interesting and would enjoy looking further into and possibly working with in the future.

I think a good direction to take such a project into would be to make the game more cartoony to appeal to kids more and this would help getting younger people out and about instead of sat infront of the TV or computer screen all day. The game could use elements from games such as pokemon and other games where some sort of collecting takes place to collect different objects/find different characters by exploring parts of the real world and finding characters in the virtual world.

The Role Play Game style of random battles would work very well in this sort of interactive game. You walk around in the real world until you face a battle in the game and must win that battle to continue. This is an interesting new way of looking at computer games integrated with every day life.

Flash Animation Basics

I have made a few very basic animations. The first one simply shows a ball falling, squashing, unsquashing and bouncing back up, easing in and out to make the ball faster the nearer it is to the ground. LINK

The second animation is the same as the first but the lighting changes as though a light is shining from the centre of the left hand side of the screen. This is done by using the gradient tool and moving it differently to the movement of the ball. LINK

The third example shows the ball bouncing towards the screen, getting larger and then disapearing. LINK

Finishing Things

Been another week or so without doing this blog! I keep forgetting. I have mostly been finishing things off, such as bringing the narrative project to an end, completing my interactive narrative (though I'd pretty much finished this in my last post) and writing up a report on the Narrative Project.

I have also been creating a range of basic flash animations using the shape tween tool which I had not used before our lecture. I will keep creating these animations, gradually making them more complex to help myself learn further skills in flash.

Variousness

I havn't posted anything on my blog this week which isn't very good so I thought it best I wrote and showed what I've been doing.

This week I have worked on my Interactive Narrative project as well as helping edit my groups Narrative video and creating some flash animation for it. Since I was ill on the monday and tuesday I couldn't get in to work on my Interactive Narrative so I started it again from home using drawn graphics and photographs. My website seems to be down at the moment but when its up the project should be accessable at http://www.guiblin.com/gibbo/uni/IN/hallway.html

The flash animation I created for the computer screen is also on my website so hopefully it will be back up soon! The address for that is http://beta.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=35738175

Last week I also created a quick animation on flash which I uploaded onto YouTube.

This doesn't include any sound yet but here it is anyway.



I also uploaded a different animation which I made last year which is a very silly simple animation (again without sound).

Interactive Narrative Production

With the photos I had previous taken for this project, I have been able to produce a quick walkthrough website which links between different pages. This gives the impression that the user is walking around the given space giving it an element of interactivity.

I have used hotspots on different areas of the different photographs to allow the user to click different places on each image to take the user to a different page depending on their decisions.

Here is an example of the html code which makes up the hotspot, giving the co-ordinates of the hotspot and linking it to the page '3.html' when clicked.

Video Editing

Today we have learnt about file types, codecs and different standards of video which should be taken into concideration when creating videos in Adobe Premier and other video editing software.

We have also briefly covered transitions and how to cut parts to get only the required shots.

Interactive Media

Interactive Media Photographs
For the intereactive media project I have taken a range of photographs to create a walkthrough game like application using javascript. Here are the photographs I have taken for use in the project.

Tommorrow I will code the script to put these photographs together as the first part of the project.

Storyboard Idea 2

Storyboard Idea 2
As a group we came up with the idea of a story set in an office of a guy who has been given more and more work and as he works harder his life is taken over by the work, pushing family away and feeling more closed off from the world. I have created a quick storyboard to show my basic interpritation of the story and as a group we will meet up again tomorrow to discuss our ideas and to decide the final full storyline before we each start work on drawing up the finished storyboard.

A more complete version of the storyboard (05/11/06)

Javascript

JavaScript
Last week we learned to use javascript to practise interactive website design for use in the project we have been set to create an interactive walkthrough of somewhere that means something to us in Nottingham.

This screenshot shows the selected areas of an image that will be interactive. This is using an image map to create the selected area.

This first piece of javascript code is placed within the head of the website, which runs before any of the rest of the site loads.


I have placed a form with a text box at the bottom of the page which the code will manipulate depending on what the user does. In this quick example the user can either click on Bush or Tony.

Code will then be used to change what happens when the user clicks on Tony or Blair. Here is the code I have used to change what Blair says, using the talkToMe command which was set in the 'head' code.

onmouseout = "talkToMe('')" onmouseover = "talkToMe('Bush Says: Why thank you')

As seen on the next picture, the text box changes to say "Bush Says: Why thank you" when the user points at Bush. The 'onmouseover' function is used for what happens when the user points at the object, and 'onmouseout' for when the user moves away from the object.

Storyboard Idea

This is a storyboard for an idea for the team project of creating a video on the subject of hierarchy. It is showing the heirarchy in a school, of governers, the head teacher, the teachers, the "cool" or older pupils and the less "cool" or younger pupils. The person or people in each scene who hold the power will be shown wearing suits representing their power, where as the people with less power will be shown wearing normal clothing. Black clothing on the picture = suit white = normal clothing

My Computer

A picture showing something important to me and the reasons and attributes of this item that makes it important.

I have chosen my computer because it enables me to communicate with friends and family all over the world, create images, animations and edit photographs, allows entertainment such as dvds games and music to be enjoyed.

Short Films

For a multimedia project we have been set groups to create a short film and before we make this we have been asked to research into some short films on the internet such as YouTube etc.

Not that this has anything much to do with the sort of thing we will be making which is to do with telling a story but I thought it was cool. It shows the use of film and audio and is spead up to fit the whole thing in and to make it less boring.

This is slightly more relevent in that it is telling a story.

This video uses humor to tell the story and ends with a sort of happy ending which kind of leaves the viewer not completely satisfied at the end. It uses very simple graphics giving the video a minimalistic, basic look which adds to the humour and scrap book like appearance.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/276841

This third video has no speaking and so leaves the story to be told by the actions and events that take place to the characters. Detailed flash graphics are used to make the video more attractive and pleasing to the viewer and helps move the story along.

Climbing

The multimedia course has had a difficult start, beginning with....how to tie a knot.

As a team building excercise we (and by we I mean 9 of us) went wall climbing at the Nottingham Climbing centre, which took us about an hour to get there by car, stopping at the golf centre for directions before realising it was really just a ten minute drive.

The climbing itself was pretty easy apart from when I got to the top I suddenly remembered I was scared of heights. The hardest part however was tying the knots! Me and Goober were made to stay behind about ten or fifteen minutes to learn how to tie the granny knot and were even given a peice of rope for us to take home and practice with.

This has nothing to do with the multimedia course but never mind. The first week has just finished and we have just had lectures on narratives, stories etc but next week I will comment on the actual work I have done (or at the weekend if I get round to looking at some videos and stuff on the internet).

First blog

Hi I am Chris Guiblin, I'm 18 and go to Nottingham Trent uni where I am studying multimedia. I have set up this blog to document my progress throughout the course. This is my first week on the course so I havn't started anything yet but I will update once I have something to write about!

Chris