Evaluation of Interactive Narrative

Looking back at the brief, I have produced an interactive narrative using still images, which i have put onto a timeline in Flash CS3 ActionScript 3.0, which much consist of 10 still images. This then gives the audience a choice of decisions as they go through the interactive narrative. I began doing this by drawing out plans of ideas and to see where they could take me, to see what choices I had for my audience and to see what each slide would look like. I found flash very hard as I had only used it the odd once before and it was a few years ago! I used the original template that was on the program already to start me off! This included buttons which at the time I did not know how to make. I made my interactive narrative to be aimed at the younger generation, if i had more time and i had a chance to go over this project again, I may have had more options that were maybe more exciting. I managed to add audio and made some of my buttons change colour when you hover over them which I feel has made my piece a lot more fun and interesting to play. I have also made some of my images move so it feels like you are actually going somewhere. On the whole this was a very stressful piece, however looking back at it now I enjoyed it!

Find the way out by ~CCochrane on deviantART

Interactive Narrative

After working and finishing my Interactive Narrative yesterday, I came across things in my plan that did not work very well and i thought were not needed. So i changed my plan again. Here is the final outcome which consists of 13 slides.

Interactive Narrative

After working on my interactive Narrative for nearly 3 weeks, I have changed some of my ideas, due to some pictures being too complicated and just trying to make the game not to difficult to understand.

Here below is my new design:

In the Blink of an Eye

Chapter 11- Dreaming in Pair's

• The film editor performs the same role for the director as the text editor does for the writer of a book.
• The writer goes off and puts the words together.
• In a film, the editor assembles the images.
• Once the image is described, the listener's job is to propose a imaginary sequence of events based on that fragment.
• Director= Dreamer
• Editor= Listener
• The best directors still have their limits to the imagination and memory, particularly at the level of fine detail. Therefore, the editor's job is to propose alternate scenarios as bait to encourage the sleeping dream to rise to it's defence and thus reveal itself more fully.

Chapter 12- Team Work: Multiple Editors

• Multiple editors are often employed- the advantage of this would be speed and the disadvantage of this would be a lack of coherence.
• How much do you want to achieve in the time you have available.
• If you end up with a cut per day in a film it rates at 1.47, for example the film "Apocalypse" that means that many different avenues have been explore to get the final product.

Interactive Narrative

Here is my plan for my interactive narrative game, I have completed most of the images for this using Illustrator and Photoshop. As you can see I have posted some of these up already on my blog. I'm hoping that putting it together in Flash will not be too hard!!! We shall see!!

Hiya,

Today I have been working on more of my images for my Interactive Narrative. I have also been working on my essay i hope its right, I've found it so hard, I have nearly finished it so we shall see!

Here are some more images I have created on Illustrator and Photoshop for my Interactive Narrative:

In the Blink of an Eye

Chapter 9- Misdirection

• As film editor, you should put yourself in the place of the audience- what is the audience going to be thinking at any particular moment? Where are they going to be looking? What do you want them to think about? What do they need to think about? What do you want them to feel?
• "Misdirecting"- Sense of wonder- getting the audience to look the other way.

Chapter 10- Seeing around the edge of the frame

• The film editor is one of the few people working on the production of a film who does not know the exact conditions under which it was shot and who can at the same time have a tremendous influence on the film.
• The editor, on the other hand, should try to see only what's on the screen, as the audience will.
• The director is the person most familiar with all of the things that went on during the shoot, so he is the most burdened with this surplus, beyond the frame information.

Interactive Narrative

Well today I have started my new project called Interactive Narrative, my idea is to create a game based on a spooky house and you have to go explore so that you can find the key to get out, otherwise you'll end up being trapped forever. I Have created some of the pictures and here are a few to show:

The Meal Project

Last week in my tutor group we decided to do this project called the meal project, where is it a collaboration between students at Nottingham Trent and Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.

Today my first task is to take photographs of every minute for each hour of my waking day. However everyone realised that would be nearly impossible so we are taking relevant photographs for the things we do in one day, otherwise we would end up with too many images of the same thing.

In the Blink of an Eye

Chapter 7- Most with the least

• You can never judge the quality of a sound mix simply by counting the number of tracks it took to produce it.
• Always try to do the most with the least! - attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer's mind by the least number of things on screen.
• You only want what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience- suggestion is always more effective than exposition.
• The more effort you put into wealth of detail the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants.
• Film is cut for practical reasons and film is cut because cutting that sudden disruption of reality can be an effective took in itself.

Chapter 8- The Rule of Six

• Film is all about how the audience feel/
• EMOTION- it is true to the emotion of the moment
• STORY- it advances the story
• RHYTHM- it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and right.
• EYE-TRACE- it acknowledges what you might call eye-trace- the concern with the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame.
• TWO-DIMENSIONAL PLANE OF SCREEN- it respects planarity- the grammar of 3 dimensions transposed by photography of two.
• THREE-DIMENSIONAL PLANE OF ACTION- it respects the 3-dimensional continuity of the actual space.
• Never accept less when more is available to you.

Evaluation

One shot short film

As you have seen earlier on in my blog our tape for our group got destroyed by the machine, so we were unable to do anything. As an outcome of it we had to go and re-film and here is the real stuff! It was a good thing and bad thing that we had to re-film, bad because it is time consuming and we were thinking oh no we wont have enough time to edit it! it was also a good thing due to listening to the first video before it was eaten and the sound was very poor and the overall lighting was poor. In our 2nd footage we ended up not needing to use the microphone and just using more light. I feel this project went very well, all of our team members always turned up and we never argued, we all had ideas and all shared them and made it into one amazing piece.

TEAMWORK!!!!! =)

In the Blink of an Eye

Chapter 5- Why do cuts work?

• Every other theatrical film is made up of many different pieces of film joined together into a mosaic of images.
• In the states, films is cut which puts the emphasis on separation.
• In Great Britain, film is joined with the emphasis on bringing together.
• Film is being cut 24 times a second, each frame is a displacement from the previous one.
• European film makers tend to shoot more complex master shots than the americans.
• The longer the take, of course, the greater the chances of a mistake.
• We would want to cut even if discontinuity were not of such great practical value.

Chapter 6- Cut out the bad bits

• Editing is STRUCTURE, COLOUR, DYNAMICS & MANIPULATION OF TIME.
• Editing if cutting out the bad bits, what are bad bits?
• When you are shooting a home movie and the camera wanders, that's obviously a bad bit, and it's clear that you want to cut it out.
• Information in the DNA can be seen as uncut film and the mysterious sequencing code as the editor.

Research

Oren Lavie

I had found this video by looking onto other people's blogs and when

I watched it I loved it! It has made me realise how much work goes into

advertising, I mean when I did my two pixilation pieces one was about

340 images and the other was about 864. I can not even imagine how

much work went into this project. It's weird how its really a simply idea

thats turned out to be great, I mean the setting is not amazing but all the

little bitsthey have put together has made this a very interesting piece.

This piece was created by a man called Oren Lavie, this man is a very

creative person and has a lot of talent he is a singer, songwriter,

playwright and theatre director.

Pixar

Lifted, For the Birds & Presto

These 3 short films above, I found very funny and interesting.

Pixar has some amazing talented people one whom is called

Gini Santos, she is working for one of the biggest animation

studios known as PIXAR. She is the one who started to work

on the video below called Lifted and ever since that she

has been working on every single Pixar piece. Santos at the

beginning studied advertising however this did not fulfil her

enough so she went back and studied animation in New York

and she sent her final work to the following companies Disney, PDI,

Blue Sky and Pixar. Where she received offers from 3 of them, she

choose to go with Pixar. She was also involved with the amazing

film Ratatouille.

Billys Ballon

Don Hertzfeldt

Hertzfeldt is the creator of many short animated films,

his animated films have received over 100 awards and

have been presented in over 1000 film festivals and venues

worldwide. I really enjoyed watching Billys Ballon, the drawings

are not great they are very childlike, however the simplicity of it

makes it work and makes it humorous.

DISASTER

Well after myself and the group did a amazingly great one shot short film, we went to our class on tuesday and as you can see the tape got destroyed! the machine had literally eaten it! So to our distraught we had to leave the class as we could do nothing about it and had to go re-film the next evening. This was a good and bad thing due to being pushed for time and it being a general pain but then we got a chance to go over it again and make it even better!

Hiya,

Well today I am meeting my group to edit are one shot short film, which will be interesting and I cannot wait to post it up here to show you guys =)

Meanwhile I have started that book I mentioned earlier in my blog called

In the Blink of an Eye, I have read the first 4 chapters and made notes:

Chapter 1- Foreword

• The conversation and The Godfather Part 2
• Return to Oz

Chapter 2- Preface to the second edition

• 1995- was a watershed year in film-editing
• It was the last time the number of films edited mechanically equaled the number of films edited digitally, every subsequent year, the digital number has increased and the mechanical number has proportionally decreased.
• Saving Private Ryan- 1998
• The English Patient
• Touch of Evil and Apocalypse Now- Edited digitally.

Chapter 3- Preface

• Ignor Stravinsky loved expressing himself
• Hilary Furlong( then of the Australian film Commission)

Chapter 4- Cuts and Shadow Cuts

• The average ratio for theatrical features is around 20 to 1.
• The more film there is to work with, of course, the greater the number of pathways that can be considered and the possibilities compound upon each other and consequently demand more time for evaluation.
• Few films combine such qualities and aspirations.

Evaluation of Pixilation Project

Here is my second Pixilation piece, where it is about drugs and its effects. I prefer this video to the one above due to it having a meaning. My first pixilation project I was getting used to the program and did not really know what to do or how to do it. So this time I had a better grasp of the software and was able to think harder for a better story line.

I had researched what drugs do to your body and in this video it shows the following symptoms:

Chilling

Relaxing

Excited

Puking

Munchies

Being Paranoid

Hallucinations

Evaluation of Pixilation Project

Well after lots of hard work and some help from certain people thanks by the way! I finally have my two viedos for my pixilation project here. This is the first one which is called The Crumpet Journey, which is based on my friend Hannah doing some dirty laundry and ends up finding something very peculiar in her washing being crumpets and ends up going to eat them Yummy! I really enjoyed making this video it was very entertaining! This project at first was very confusing for me and I ended up taking my pictures the wrong was round, I had done them portrait so when I put them on photoshop and premiere pro the pictures were squashed and we had to put 2 bits of black lines either side and it just looked awful. After all of that I had to go back to Hannah and retake them because of silly me!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

hiya again with the bit below I forgot to mention the best part, as we were filming a lady thought what we were doing was real and nearly called 999!

GOOD ACTING OR WHAT! =)

Hiya

So I met with my group today at 4 and spent 3 hours trying to film in the rain not fun, but in the end the film turned out to be really exciting and great. Basically the car had broken down and you hear a few people talking in the car and then suddenly we see a dead body in front of the car. We start to panic and one of us gets out and then the two killers jump onto the guy and start to beat him up and kill him and he gets thrown across the car and the other two in the car run for it.

We are planning to meet up again and do another one as all of us had quite a few ideas!

Exciting Stuff!

Ideas for One shot short film

Theme- HORROR

As a group we have decided to do a one shot short film on the theme HORROR, we have been planning and have come out with the idea of Kidnapping or using a police man where someone has done something wrong.

So Basically with the Kidnapping, we are filming outside around 4:00pm, so it is quite dark we are using a car and putting the camera fixed onto the dash board to film.

With the police man, we would be filming at the same time with the car except we would have sirens on top of the car.

My ideas for the group would be to go with the Kidnapping idea:

We could have the 4 boys in the car, driving around listening to their music and then suddenly they see 2 girls all lost and confused, so they pull over to help and as one of them leans into the car the guy grabs her and pulls her in leaving the other girl to run. She runs down the street into the graveyard and tries to hide but she has got 3 guys on her tail while the last one is with her friend. They end up capturing her and then take her back to the car where they start to mess around and torture them till they beg them to stop.

One Shot Short Film

Brief:

Week 1: introduction to the module, you will look at the concept of a one shot short film, looking at style, shots and audio and in addition you will be introduced to risk assessment.

Week 2: You will work in your group to make a short pilot of a one shot short film during the next session. Then you will go into production as part of a group you will make a short film using only one shot.

Week 3: You will have up-loaded your film onto the system ready to get onto the edit timeline and begin editing the one shot short film. You must deliver no less than 1 week later onto You Tube.

Rules:

The one shot short film must be 1 minutes long, can be a bit longer but not exceeding 2 minutes.
The whole team has to be in it.
You must have a risk assessment form.
The whole group must take part in editing the one shot short film.
Potential alternative cuts are allowed.
Make own production notes- Blog.
Be critical and self critical.

Hiya

Well I am back now and I have taken loads of pictures for my new pixilation piece, here below are a few to show you what I have been getting up to. Fingers crossed I will be posting the video shortly and my other one too.

I have bought a book called In the Blink of an Eye- it is about a perspective on film editing and I plan to start reading that soon.

Here are some pictures of my new Pixilation called The day in the life of a drug addict:

Hiya

Well I have gone home for a few days and I have decided to experiment more and I am going to do a complete new pixilation piece on my boyfriend. It is going to be about drug taking and how it affects you as a person. I will be posting pictures up and later on my video. I will also be posting my first video too of The Crumpet Journey soon!

Hiya again:

As I have mentioned earlier I am still working on my pixilation piece, with how i am putting it together and choosing music to suit the pixilation piece, however here are a few pictures to show you what I have been getting up to.
My pixilation piece is called the Crumpet Journey and when I post the video you'll understand why it is called that, my piece is about a friend who needs to go do her dirty washing and then finds something very peculiar in her washing which she ends up cooking later on

here below are some of the images:

Here my friend Hannah is posing looking in her mirror










She is emptying her laundry basket of dirty clothes to sort out what needs a wash











Here her keys have appeared so she can lock her room to go to the laundry room to do her washing










Hannah is now waiting for her laundry to be done woop woop! :)










Finally here Hannah is making her crumpet mmmmmmmm yummy! :)

C.R.A.P Lecture

I have read the C.R.A.P Lecture and have a few questions about it:

1. Why does everything have to have a place with layout?
2. How can you make every bit interesting without becoming overwhelming or annoying?
3. How can you give every item a visual connection with something else on the page?

Hiya,

well my pixilation project has come to an end however I am still working on it to make it the best it can be, my design process for this project was:

1. Researching pixilation pieces on youtube to give me ideas and to inspire me
2. To do a mind map/ make notes of the ideas I liked the most
3. To go off with my camera and to start taking pictures and experiment
4. To analyse those pictures and to see what else I could do to make my piece more effective such as taking pictures in different angles/ zooming in and out.
5. To go out and take more pictures considering new ideas.

Today I have been trying to use photoshop for my pixilation piece, which has been really annoying me as i can not seem to make it do what I want it to but hopefully it will soon. I have been reading through a book called animation by Roger Noake and it says "making an animated film always involves constructing it frame by frame, when projected these frames create a illusion of movement". So he's saying that animation creates a deceiving, misleading reality, which is true, it looks very realistic yet its totally fake!

Pixelation Animation

Over the weekend I have taken lots of photographs for my new pixelation piece and I am currently working with them on Photoshop and I will be posting some on my blog soon! I recently took out a book called Animation by Roger Noake which seems very interesting and I am currently reading through this to give me some inspiration.

I found this video clip which I found really interesting, i find it so clever how it all links together. I have never done Animation before and I did not realise how much work and effort goes into making say a 30 second clip. I am currently putting ideas together to make a version of my own and hoping it will work out well fingers crossed! :)

Combo; Crazy Stop-Motion Building Animation

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

hiya,

This is my first respectable post; it took me a while to actually figure out how to post something but anyway. I originally applied do to Graphic Design and sadly I got rejected, however finding half of the students doing Multimedia went through the same thing as me I feel a lot better oops! I read about Multimedia and found it rather interesting and a bit more hands on and it seems it has a lot more opportunities. I decided to give it a shot and go for it. With in my first week of introductions to Multimedia I was introduced to Pinhole camera and White board animation.

Pinhole camera

I found this fascinating that people spend a fortune of cameras and we were learning to take pictures with an emptied bear can! I could not really understand how we were going to take a picture out of a bear can! However a lot of people I saw taking their pictures out of the can had some really good images and I have a black circle which did not seem right! I seemed to have placed the photographic paper over the pinhole giving me a rather embarrassing picture, hence why this has not be posted onto my blog!

White Board Animation

I found this really interesting, I have never done animation before and I was quite intrigued with how it works. My group had a lot of ideas and at first I felt quite shy as I did not know how to do it, but as I started to tell my ideas and see my peers in my group start I slowly became a big part in the drawing and it was really amazing how it all works and comes together. I would never have know you have to take 360 pictures to make a 30second piece!

Currently I am researching ideas for my own pixilation piece, I have taken out 2 interesting books one called Digital creativity by Bruce Wands and another called The Animation Bible by Maureen Furniss. I am hoping by reading these and looking online will give me a few ideas for my own piece.

Today I had my first Tutor Session and something Simon said "what is the world of your story and it’s rules" and if you have that as a guideline it will keep everything to what you wanted to show.

Hey everyone,

my first post! I am excited to learn about Multimedia & to explore in new different areas!