Walk-through Day!

After one particularly nerve racking morning of last minute preparations for the game I found myself seriously doubting the success of our group, due to a lack of communication we found we were missing some reasonably important parts to our information namely the missing page of the case file showing the list of the deceased and how they were killed also we were having technical issues trying to upload the Case File onto our website which was frustrating. It really didn't help being the first group to go up either as my nerves were really getting the better of me as the start of the walk-through was drawing closer.

Linking it Together

Having this information available was all good and fine, but we needed to find a good way of leading our players towards it all. It was important that it was clear to the players what they needed to do but also required a fair bit of thought behind it as well. We put together a folder with all our research in and highlighted articles in a way that suggested points of the conspiracy and the deaths involved with the Urewera case. We had photos of security cameras all over town but underneath all of them were one or two pictures of body bags and officers carrying of casualties. These things were made to have an impact on the viewer which invokes a sense of curiosity as well as  a darker undertow behind the game. Included in the folder was a QR code leading to the website where there would be our password protected case file. The folder also held the key to unlocking the file as on the back of the flap was the password, encrypted using a pictorial style code which would be solved using the key that was found on Chris's blog. The folder was going to be kept in my locker which was padlocked and supposedly Reuben would be given the keys for safe keeping. Reuben being the only one left would lead the players to the locker to find the folder with all the information within.

Link to website - http://civildefenceservice.weebly.com/

Chris Lee's Blog - http://hyunzoo.tumblr.com/

Executing the Idea

Now as we had an idea for our conspiracy we had to establish the way in which we were going to portray it to our audience.We needed at least 4 interactions with our players, 2 physical interactions and 2 Digital  interactions. We already  knew that  one of our most important interactions was one that needed to portray the conspiracy the government was covering up clearly and we needed a clear path to make it easy to find but was also important that we made it look professional. We decided an interesting way of learning this would be through a password protected .pdf file containing brief notes on the progress of a case being worked on by our antagonist group called the Civil Defence Force. Included in the case file would be notes on the killings (only minimal) and a small amount of information on some of the group members near the end. We chose the .pdf format because it was the only file we really knew how to password protect with a considerable amount of flexibility in terms of design qualities meaning we were able to try our best to make it look like an official case file.

Dexter came in then as well so I thought I would task him with getting that done as I felt he needed to contribute to the group more. I also told him that we needed him to be in studio more often as we were struggling to put it all together well with so few people.

Reuben was then given the task of creating a government website that would be hacked into that would hold the case file. I showed him a few of the NZ govt websites particularly the NZ police force website (http://www.police.govt.nz/) for him to base the web design off and he set off to work.

Urewera Death

After looking through a bunch of the articles on the NZ Herald website I looked into some of the more subtle parts of the case rather than the widely important pieces. This was because these are things people might skip over quickly and are more likely to forget. This meant that as we brought attention back to them they possibly realise they already knew about this but maybe missed something quite crucial about it.

Luckily one particularly article had exactly what i was looking for.
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/unlawful-filming-led-urewera-charges-being-dropped-4404835

This article was found on the TVNZ website and right near the bottom of the page you will see the following statement.

"One of the original 18 charged, Tuhoe Francis Lambert, died earlier this year. Charges against him have been abandoned."

This was perfect for me as it instantly gave me the idea of using this piece to start off a conspiracy of the government unable to get justice through the court take measures to extremes by executing those involved.

Brainwave and Change to Conspiracy

Me and Reuben were the only ones there one morning when i had a brainwave. For the past few days i had been feeling that our game lacked much drive or anything that would make the players question whether or not they were in a game world and truly immerse the players. I wanted to make the world more personal so that our players could relate more easily to what was going on as well as become more immersed in the reality in order to be affected by it on a more emotional level becoming more stimulating as an experience.

Using our first idea of using surveillance i thought that we could twist the idea of always being watched to be used in a way that whilst doing this project and looking into the surveillance, the group itself was being watched. Developing the idea a bit further I thought of the Urewera case that happened recently and thought we could use our research into that to create a conspiracy that we had uncovered. Unsure what kind of cover up we could use though i have decided to do more research into it.

The lack of group members available everyday is really starting to frustrate me. At any given time there is a maximum of 4 people from the group there and i am yet to have a day where everyone turns up. I feel like i constantly have to give people things to do in order for anything to get done as certain members take no initiative when it comes to helping out in the group.

A good start at least

Once again half of the group didn't turn up, we had heard nothing from either Dexter or Savi and communication with them was limited as no one had Dexter's number and Savi just wouldnt reply. We had a few more ideas to work with but a lot less than i originally thought we would have after the weekend, we ended up working with my idea as it was the strongest one we had. Basically we were dealing with the idea of surveillance and playing with the idea of being watched constantly by someone even if you dont know who. It lead to ideas of the government monitoring and storing information on everyone and anyone caught on security tapes or heard on hidden microphones or cameras that we were unknown to the general public. Though this was a good start we still had a lot of work that needed doing and the idea still needed to be developed into a stronger environment, i found myself getting slightly frustrated at the slow progress, i know everyone is already quite spent with all the work we have been doing but its only one last project to do before the end and we just need to pull together and get the work done.

Ideas

Got in the next day to find that not many people in the group showed up, Shams was late and it was just me Reuben and Chris until about 11oclock trying to get a solid story together for our reality. We discussed things like a world without certain resources or opposite worlds, like a communist NZ and worlds dealing with current fears like the depression and wars, danger, being watched etc. When Shams arrived she didnt exactly have a lot to offer other than a few barely thought out ideas like time travel scenarios or "people being chased by something"...

Not long afterwards people had to leave again and we were left with another day of making very little progress. I told everyone to really think over the weekend about ideas and really get some solid stories down to bring together and develop.

Unreality

For this project we were given the brief from Maggie, so before we were given the brief I had a feeling that we would be dealing with different technologies than we were used to. I remembered her telling us about her passion with augmented reality and different reality's and worlds etc. so I was curious as to whether or not some of that would be a part of this project. Being sick the day everyone was away i missed out on selecting the group I would prefer to work with which left me to reach out a little with a group of people i had never worked with before at all but we were given the brief and told to start moving. My final brief this year is to create an experience or alternate reality for our lecturers to walk through. The reality or experience had to be interactive and have a number of different ways to interact specifically 2 physical interactions and 2 digital.

The first day was really spent gathering ideas and finding out exactly what the brief asked of us as a group. It didnt take long for the rest of the group to decide to leave and come up with ideas at home rather than in studio and left rather quickly afterwards. Me and Chris stayed behind and discussed a few ideas together for a few hours before she went to work and i left shortly after.

Packaging Creation

After spending hours cutting the stickers into the right shapes and applying them to the USB's I was actually quite impressed with the way they turned out, I thought they looked quite professional  and the 5 designs matched each other quite well. After finishing those I began to develop the packaging for the devices. Because of how much the flashdrives cost me I was limited with the amount of money I could spend on materials to make them. I decided to directly link the packaging in quite a literal way to the installation. Using the material we used for the installation I recycled the wood to create a one of a kind package that not only showed the recycled nature of the installation but showed the value of the packaging because of its unique nature. Though the exterior of the box is relatively rough and recycled the interior was made to be quite fancy and valuable reflecting the valuable nature of the packaging as well as the audio as they were both "Limited Edition" creations. Because of the scarcity of the material I could use I could only make one of the boxes to house the USB's but overall I feel like I have created quite a neat way of representing everything in the project.

Below are some of the initial sketches of the lid and box designs.

Flashdrives Arrive.

When the flash drives arrived, The shape was a fair bit different than originally planned so I looked into a bunch of different printing places that I could possibly use to have my designs printed on the flash drives. I had heard an add on the radio about a company called Colour Worx that could supposedly print on anything, so I checked on their website to see if they had anything about printing onto USB's and eventually ended up ringing them. It made me laugh when I asked them if they printed onto USB's and they said no but luckily they new a person that did print onto flashdrives from a company called Logoprint. I rang them up and they told me it was going to cost me about 500 dollars and i thought hell no. Now however I have looked into sticker making! YAY! I have come up with a load of designs that will be printed onto the final flashdrives and changed and developed them to suit the new model.

USB Designing

After forking out a bit to get 5 USB's delivered to me, I began to think of the best way to design onto them. because I didnt have the physical devices it was a little difficult to design to fit the shapes, so I decided to go ahead and design onto some fairly standard shaped usb designs. The designs were intended to represent the installation in a somewhat artistic way but also to made slightly rough and sketchy at points as well. Below are some of the tests I did for the polystyrene themed design as well as a developed wrapping paper design I recreated.

YOUTHEDESIGNER - Concepts

My early concepts were based around the ideas of sustainability so I decided to look at using re-writable audio devices, either CD's, DVD's or USB's. The main seller being the fact that they could be re-used and recycled for  whatever purpose intended. It also added more value to the item which modern CD's are lacking, there is actually very little incentive to buy audio any more, most people are using portable mp3 players and getting music straight onto their computers is far more convenient for them rather than having to use CD's to upload to their computer before their device. I decided to use the USB concept partially because I spent all of highschool designing onto CD's and I wanted to do something different, but most importantly because of its portable nature as well as containing a different sense of value than that of the other discs.

Below are some of the initial USB ideas sketched out, as well as one of the other USB shapes I thought up

Project 2 - Semester 2

 The project we have been given this week unfortunately leads on from our previous project from the audio foundation.... I wasn't exactly happy with the idea of using the previous project as it wasn't what I would describe as particularly enjoyable but for this I guess I will just have to bite the bullet in order to make this work.
The brief we were given is called YOUTHEDESIGNER where we are tasked with creating a packaging system for an audio device for our previous brief, in my case the nightingale floor style installation.

Project 4 - Exhibition

Finished adding the final touches to our exhibition this morning and overall I am really happy with the way everything has turned out. Our stars are making some really amazing and beautiful music that instantly creates an atmosphere to the whole room, our video explains our device well and clearly and is very informative, everything just really ties in well. It has been designed as a walk around exhibition consisting of 2 parts, an introduction to the device with a poster and informational video, then leads into sketches and the device, the device creates an ambient soundtrack to the room with our star track  playing through the apparatus itself giving another depth to the exhibition.

Overall i think the lecturers were really impressed and i know that i am definitely pleased with the final outcome of the project. I cant wait till the exhibition is open to the public. I want to see how people react to our device and exhibition and see if it is worth taking the project further outside of uni.

Project 4 - Fabrication Process

Ryan and Jason have spent the past few days busting their asses trying to get our fabrication done in time to get some tests done before the critique this friday. The project itself is looking really good, they have pieced together the body of the observatory creating a full cylinder, added the top piece with the tilt platform attached with hinges, also mounted in speakers and created a mechanism to adjust the angle of the tilt.

Jared has finished the max patch and is now working on ways to create a nicer sound for the stars to make.

I have a chance to kick back a bit and start planning for the coming exhibition, I'm thinking possibly incorporating a mix of the old and the new into the exhibition as the apparatus itself incorporates both a victorian and very modern feel to the observatory. So we came up with the idea of creating sort of Da Vinci style sketches of some of the more technical parts of the apparatus to incorporate this into the style too.

Project 4 - CAD Design

For our group i was given the task of CAD designer as it gave me basic skills i could possibly use for 3D modelling, also i was the person in the group that had the best grip around the SolidWorks program we would be using in designing for the fabrication process. Our apparatus was going to take the shape of an observatory, fitting in the way that we were observing the stars but also relevant to the idea of astronomy in general.

I found designing the pieces to be quite easy as the majority of the shapes needed for our apparatus were fairly simple shapes like cylinders or domes etc. The part that took the longest was figuring out with the group what dimensions we wanted for the apparatus. The general opinion was that bigger was definitely going to be better in terms of appearance, I was just slightly worried about transporting the apparatus to each location because of this but i'm sure we will figure it out.

Jared has spent the week working out a max patch using the downloaded youtube video as footage, and was working on getting the stars to create sound.

Overall it has been a productive week.

Project 4 - Conceptual Statement

Jobs:

Me - CAD Design
Jason - Fabrication
Ryan - Fabrication
Jared - Programming

Our main idea for this project was to use the stars in the night sky captured over a large period of time. The stars would then be spend up considerably to show the movement of the stars of the night sky, thus revealing the rotation of the earth. Once this is achieved we will use the stars rotation to create a soundtrack by running the footage through a Max patch programmed to pick up the stars through the colour difference, the height of the stars in the night sky as they cross a certain point determines the pitch of the note that is played effectively creating music from the stars.

The main inspiration of this idea came from this video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdDbjFqbU74&feature=fvsr found on youtube that showed some photography done by a man that did a time lapse of the stars but made trails from them and created quite a cool piece of art. We added to this of course with our concept of a musical visualisation but also looked into the ideas behind what we were seeing in the footage. While watching the footage we realised that the main focus is the sky, but when you consider that the camera is left in one place all night to capture this footage the focus becomes about the rotation of the earth and the star trails just a pretty effect that happens because of this. We wanted the stars themselves to mean more in our visualisation so we made them a crucial part of the audio visualisation creating a soundtrack purely based on the stars movement.

We put a lot of thought into the design of our apparatus, not only the physical design process but also on the technical side of the build. Leaving a camera out in the night for 13 hours exposes the camera to a lot of complications, for example condensation, dew and lense fog so the device needed to be able to protect the camera from the elements for the duration of each shoot. We did a lot of research into the cause of condensation and the probability of lens fog in order to achieve a clean shoot, but when it came down to it we really relied on the weather in terms of a clear sky.

This idea basically was developed using Jared's skill with Max MSP but also with our interests of which music was one we could all strongly agree on. As far as the apparatus we settled on the shape of an observatory because it was both relevant to our concept but also because it solved a lot of our practical issues also.

Project 4 - Brief Outline

Basically for this project we have to create a device that captures the world in a way that is new and different, and create a visualisation from that data that is both a live output while the operation occurs, but also can be shown as a stand alone piece and still be quite strong.

The two key components of this project are the physical construction of the apparatus, and the visualisation of the data. These components need to be developed and worked on the most due to their importance to the project.

Ideas so far: View of the city from underwater, similar to Atlantis or Rapture.
                   View of the stars in the night sky.

Project 4 - Flâneur Apparatus

This is it! The Complete mash up of all our previous project into one super amazing awesome SUPER PROJECT, of which i have no idea what i we are going to do with at this current moment! YEA! (super excited though)..

Reflective Statement

In all honesty i didn't really enjoy this project as much as i thought, i found it quite challenging to come up with an idea to work with a program i had very little skill with and i found this really limited my choice of options. In the end yes my idea was simple but i chose a more practical approach at this point to be able to achieve something from this project rather than find myself at a loss with nothing to hand in and nothing much learnt from the outcome. At least with this idea i have learnt some of the basics of max programming and have found out that programming really isn't one of my strong points. I found myself fine with the robot project as the programming involved was fairly straight forward and more visual where with max i found myself lost at more than one point in the project and had to ask others for help. I found true value in the other people in this course and realized that i can more than often ask around the studio and find help from people with a number of things which i found useful  particularly in being able to learn things easier but also explore other peoples skills in terms of choosing groups for future projects.

The Assembly

I decided to make my wearable interface themed to the main characters costume effectively making the player more in sync with the game. For this i used a plain white dress shirt which i found at a cheap second hand store, and attached my key board hack onto the back shoulder of it. A cable then ran along the arm to attach the thumb ring tilt switch to the user and the button was attached to the chest. I tested the final product and it worked so i found myself  ready for the presentation in the morning.

The Max Patch

I did struggle a bit in this area, luckily I had a little bit of help from Lee along the way as he showed me some of the key functions that he used in his very similar program. I obviously changed a lot of the things he showed me after  roughly getting used to the program as well as splitting up the parts of my video I wanted to use. I used the end scenes and adjusted them to play messages at certain points in the film at which would would then make the max patch respond to these frames and allow a specific button to be pressed only  within a certain time frame. This created my ability to either allow the player to progress the narrative or to fail miserably and have to restart. The same programming was then applied to the second switch creating either the dying narrative or the surviving ending.

Construction Underway!

I started off with the construction of my keyboard hack by soldering 26 wires to my keyboard just so i had enough wires to play with in case anything went wrong along the way. I found this process to be quite tiresome as it did take a quite a considerable amount of time attaching the wires to the tiny parts of the keyboard hack, but once it was done i tidied it up a bit using a few chocolate blocks to seperate wires. Then came the annoying part. I then found the number value for each key press combination i could achieve from my keyboard and documented them onto a grid for when it came to attaching the buttons, as well as making key presses for the max patch.

Project 3 - Conceptual Statement

At last i have an idea! i have decided to make my interface an interactive game situation with the film in which the player ends up with 2 different endings to the film as a whole, i narrowed it down to just the final scene from the film which is a firefight so i decided to incorporate that into my design. My main idea was to place the viewer in the position of the main character, The Wolf. While playing the game the player would have to pass "tests" in order to progress the narrative of the story thus providing an instant sense of the player actually getting somewhere with their interaction, the player MUST pass the first test in order for any narrative too continue but the second test provides an option of 2 endings. Ending 1 : The player Shoots the Pig and regains their honour. Ending 2: The player fails to shoot in time therefore dies because of this. This can give the player their own choice as to the ending, depending on how they like the character and whether or not they would like to see him punished by the end of the film or to see him succeed and regain his honour. I will have two switches involved in this interface to avoid having a spaghetti of wires and over complicating things. The first switch will be a push button placed in the centre of the chest and the second being a tilt switch that is attached to a ring that will go around the players thumb. The tilt switch will be activated when the player pulls bag their wrist towards their body which is my way of representing recoil from the gun adding the shooting element into the interaction. I drew inspiration of this project from a game i remember playing in the special features menu of a harry potter DVD a while back. Basically in that game you had to escape from fleeing spiders by choosing a direction that the car would turn, creating a maze out of footage from the movie. At this stage it was getting close to hand in and i realised i needed to really get working so that i at least have something to hand in. I had developed the idea at first from being a bunch of buttons on a sort of control pad which would have 3 or 4 seperate push buttons that would be coloured differently, each button would have to be pushed when the corresponding button clour appeared on the screen, sort of  creating a guitar hero style feel to the game. I wanted a more relevant set of controls involved with my interface to give it more character and make it feel more immersive into the films content. This is when i decided to bring in the tilt switch ring and chest button, the tilt ring to create the recoil feel, and the chest button was my way of showing the option to kill someone, through placing the button near the heart showing the option to stop the targets heart from beating (with a bullet!) Thus extinguishing his life.

Project 3 - Design Ideas

WOW..... i am having some serious trouble when it comes down to coming up with a workable idea.. i have thought about multiple ways of controlling aspects of the film like resolution, colour filters, play speed, frame jumping etc. all of these would all be cool but dont really have anything that makes any real sense to me in the way of relating to our film, also i have to come up with a way to actually physically control the film and what im going to have everything attached to. I find it really quite difficult working in the holidays as there are far to many things that are distracting me and i find myself wanting to put less and less time into this project, hopefully things pick up a bit  before the second week.

Project 3 - Wearable Interface

As we near the mid-semester break we are given a new project to work on, this time individually rather than in a group. I think this will be a refreshing change and will really test how some of us really work in this course, particularly over our so called holidays. Our Project is to create a wearable interface that we use to interact in some way to the film we made in our previous assignment, we are to take apart a keyboard and use the program MAX to program this interaction in a unique way.

Youtube Link to Final Project

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79F4DMcP4lo

Last Day - STRESS OVERLOAD - Project 2

At this point things are really not looking good, Kallum turned up with the scenes 1 and 2 finished... in 720p rather than 1080 which was what we were supposed to be handing it in as, all our posters and dvd was designed and printed but we had no way of burning the disc at that stage and we still didnt have the film at the resolution we needed, our storyboard then needed to be put into a PDF file and our script was in 2 pieces still needing to be collaberated. We had a hell of a lot of work to do over the weekend and once again distribution of those tasks was a hassle as apparently not many people had burning software, or had to much other work to do. Jim was set the task of making a playable dvd menu in Encore, I was tasked with rendering the footage up to 1080p and compiling the script, Kallum was rendering the other half of the footage into 1080p and Edrian had to scan all of his storyboard imaging into a PDF file. All of this had to be done by monday as well as all the extra analysis work of our film so really im trying to make this last blog entry quick. Will let you know how things turn out!
Fingers Crossed

Lost Days

Throughout the second week i found it quite hard to work as a group when Kallum who was editing our first 2 scenes spent his time editing at home from tuesday right up until thursday, which made things particularly hard for Jim who wasnt sure what sounds were needed for his edit, and with Edrian still working on the 3rd fight scene it once again left him with very little to do. I was really quite lucky as i had everything i needed to start adding in the effects to the footage for the 3rd fight scene and tried to show Jim how to do a couple of things on after effects, to try and keep him occupied so he didnt feel he was wasting his time. I had a total of 11 shots that i needed to add effects to so i sort of had my work cut out for me for the next few days. Though i was still getting work done, without Kallum being around i still had no idea as to what our film was really going to be looking like so i was starting to feel a little lost about just how things were going to turn out. This didnt really affect the way i worked on my effects but it must have been quite hard for Edrian while editing his part as there was nothing around for him to match his edit to, so for all we knew what he was working on could come out completely different to the rest of the film. This was slightly worrying as that sort of thing can really affect the final product of the film and i imagine that sort of thing will have quite an effect on the marks we would get overall.

Day 9 - Problems - Project 2

At this stage pretty much most of the roles we set at the beginning were sorta of cast aside, Kallum was now ediitng the first 2 fight scenes, Edrian was working on editing the 3rd fight scene, i was left to do effects and Ke and Jim were more or less left without a job. At this point we were all starting to stress a little about whether or not we were going to make it in time, particularly made obvious when Kallum exploded in my face when we had problems with getting him to make it to the filming day on the previous saturday. To be honest i have already decided that i will not be working with him again as we really do not work well together as we often have conflicting ideas and oppinions but he is never really prepared to compromise, this often frustrated me and i found him an extremely hard person to work with. He was really the only person at this stage that i have really had trouble working with so a lot of the time i was prepared to bite the bullet and just accept things werent going to be compromised in order for us all to move forward as a group. I have to say i felt a little bad for Jim again as he was once again left without a job to do to contribute to the group, so i got him to try and find some audio effects and music to add into our edits, as well as giving Ke the task to create a poster and dvd case for our film. Today was really a wake up call for us all that we still had a lot of work to do in order to be able to hand anything in and the stress at this point is really starting to get to me.

Day 7 - Saturday Morning - Project 2

After organising with Ke and Edrian to film at my place for saturday morning, i had organised a friend of mine to come round and bring a few extra guns, as well as act as a couple of characters in the scene.This allowed Edrian to remain in control of the camera while i acted and directed the scene. I found that filming went a whole lot smoother when we had less numbers and starting in the early morning gave us time to wake up a bit while waiting for the sun to rise, allowing everyone to really switch on and work effectively and efficiently to get the scene done. We started filming from about 7 o clock as we needed a fair amount of light in the scene while it also remained dark enough to show it was morning. We shot the quickest parts of the scene first and we flew through them in about an hour allowing ourselves time to think and plan out things to suit the environment along the way, We tried to avoid any overly complex shots of intense action but relied mostly on suspense to build up intensity in the scene which in my oppinion gave a more Rambo or Commando feel to the gun fight rather than an overly crowded war zone around my house. I was really quite amazed at the amount and quality of the footage we managed to get within a really short time and i felt we had a really succesful morning. We finished up filming around 10:30 and we had managed to film everything we needed to a quality we were happy with, in half the time it had taken with the previous two nights and to me that was a pretty big accomplishment.

Rest Day

Finally had a chance to relax a little bit today just spent most of today practicing a few of the effects that i had learnt the day before, of which I just refined a little more, but also learnt about rotoscoping.which is basically a more complex way of adding layers to footage to add in effects behind objects or within a certain area. I figured this would be quite useful and found a tutorial online which showed me how to do it.  Apart from that i caught up on a bit of sleep and organised to shoot the gun fight scene at my house which was a location that the majority of the group could easily get to. Will check with everyone tomorrow about filming dates and times but at this stage i decided a morning shoot would not only make sense for the plot line but also allowed us a fairly decent amount of time without missing out on to much sleep.

Day 4 - Film Night 2 - Project 2

Got back in at 5.30 this morning and slept until 9. I really wish i was able to get more sleep but just myself awake and that was how it stayed. I figured i had some time so i decided to put it to use by getting a head start with some effects tutorials i found on youtube. i found out about a website called video co-pilot (www.videocopilot.net) that has loads of  Adobe after effects tutorials as well as access to a whole bunch of effects used in action films suitably named Actions Essentials 2 which basically consists of a bunch of premade blood, gunfire, atmospherics, explosions etc which you can add straight in over existing footage. I managed to get hold of a copy of these effects and found out a whole bunch of usefull things you can do with them. The day moved pretty quickly from that point as alot of the effects were a little time consuming, of course learning these things for the first time probably extended that a little bit more as well but before i knew it i was meeting Jim and Edrian and heading off to the shore again. In the car ride there we discussed how we thought the filming was going and none of us were really happy with the way things were going at this stage but we aimed to get far more done this time round to avoid having to make another expensive trip out to the shore. When we got to Kallums at 8 we laid down some pretty basic rules, we said that we were going to shoot the rest of this fight scene as quickly as possible and get onto the next fight scene so that we could get as much of that filmed as possible tonight as we didnt have the time to muck around making everything perfect. Kallum basically at that point decided to hand over directing to me after we finished the kung fu scene because apparently he found it to hard to film with my input as well so things then fell down to me. So we started filming at about 9 o clock and finished up just before 1. Again that was still a serious amount of time filming the equivalent of 30 seconds worth of footage.. but now directing was handed over to me so we headed to our next location. At this stage i planned to  film as much of the next fight as efficiently as possible without losing any quality of the footage. We arrived at the location and i immediately made adjustments to my ideas and the script to match our environment and got to filming straight away. We set up lights and things outside and filmed Ke walking towards the house from atop of a car that was set to roll down a slight hill (another makeshift tracking shot) and got him inside the house as quickly as possible as we knew that was where the real filming was going to start. I knew already that Jim had experience in swordplay and that Ke was pretty confident in his ability to strike without injuring Jim so i allowed them a bit of freedom as far as the swordplay went but gave them a set path to follow. I was amazed at the convenience we had at the location including a huge reference to our wolf character as he stands in front of a painting of a pack of wolves at one point before the fighting starts. To me this scene was all about atmosphere so i decided to make most things quite dramatic and the build up to be quite slow and ominous.  We used a bit of camera magic by making our area change to suit us and had this dramatic fight in front of a pool where i really wanted a sort of Kill Bill feel to the fighting. We finished up in a way that sort of left the audience guessing as to what happened to the 2nd Pig but enough to know that the last strike effectively finishes him off before a sharp cut to black as the swords strike. I finished up what i needed to film so that we finished at about 4.15 but Kallum at this point he wanted to add an identical scene from another movie into ours for another edit so in the end we ended up leaving around 5 o clock again... Hopefully this time i might get a little more sleep.

Day 3 - Film Night - Project 2

We turned up today at 9 oclock again to find that Kallum had gone home and created a new script of what we were going to film tonight, most of which conflicted with the previous ideas so we talked about it and managed to compromise things again to make things easy to shoot so we wouldnt have to spend the entire night shooting. The day was pretty much spent working out what it was that we needed to have for shooting, organising props and costume and such and figuring out location.  We all left about 2 and i went off to work and organised to get a lift with Jim when we were all going to meet at 10 o clock. Apparently they went early to start filming at 8 but didnt actually get any filming or anything done so Jim came back to pick me up before heading back again, so at that stage he seemed a little annoyed about the amount of petrol it was going to be costing him going from West Auckland to the shore and back for filming so i offered to help him with the costs, also Edrian and Ke ended up gettting a lift there as well so we all chipped in on the petrol costs. When we got to Kallums place it took us a while to get going but we started filming the first scene. We started off quite well me and Edrian got to work with how we could frame the shots in the new environment using a whole bunch of everyday objects to use for tracking shots like skateboards and desk chairs we had 2 cameras and 2 tripods to use but for the majority of the filming we used Edrians DSLR as he was more familiar with it and we could pull off some really cool shots with some pull focus using the manual adjustments on his camera which proved really usefull when making some of our scenes more dramatic. The first bit of the intro only took about 5 minutes to shoot but once it got into actually doing the fighting scene things really slowed right down. Kallum insisted on choreographing each single movement and running through the movements about 10 times before actually getting a final shot. This not only meant risking the natural look to the fight but also made a  scene we otherwise could have shot in maybe one or two hours, take us until 5 oclock in the morning and still not be finished. We kept trying to make things move slightly faster but Kallum insisted that this was the best way to do things and we slowly inched our way through the scene, i think by the end of it Kallum got a bit sick of me trying to input ideas because he was shutting more and more ideas down without really considering things. When it got to about 5 we decided we had to call it a night and chose to start slightly earlier on in the evening so we might be able to get to sleep slightly earlier. Overall i wasnt entirely pleased with how much we got done but hopefully things might take a change for tommorow.

Day 2 - Story Boarding and Script Writing - Project 2

Today we all decided upon a bunch of Roles that everyone would be given, these were how it turned out.

Me: Assistant Director, Cinematography, Editing
Jim: Storyboarding and Scriptwriting, Stunt Choreographer, Editing
Edrian: Cameraman and Cinematography, Editing
Ke: Stunt Choreographer, Actor, Editing
Kallum: Director, Effects Coordinator, Editing

These were not definate roles and were likely to change along the way as we filmed. These roles were based on the strengths of each individual in the group and meant that alot of input was required from everyone. We tried to share out the jobs equally but in hindsight i know now that this really didnt happen as when it came down to it we had all sorts of issues preventing people from being able to work on things at home and time just wouldnt allow for us to get everything done that we needed. Anyway we started to all work on how we thought the story would roll out and Jim began to write out the script actively as we discussed the ideas as a group. Edrian at this stage started to draw out the storyboard in an attempt to share the workload to get as much done as quickly as possible (not to mention he has some serious drawing skills). Me and Kallum apparently had two very different ideas on how the film was going to turn out but we established very early that whoever was to be in charge of directing would have to listen to the ideas of the group when it came down to making the film so that it wasnt just one persons input controlling the entire film. This is the main reason i hate naming someone as Director so early on because more often than not it generally leads to problems. Personally i felt that Kallum became quite controlling very quickly and often shot down ideas in order to keep his own personal ones and only showed a little bit of compromise when it came to our main film. The majority of the group was under the impression that our film was going to be quite a serious, badass action movie but Kallum wanted to create something quite different. I often found myself disagreeing with alot of the decisions he made and often put across my oppinions when it came to making a final decision in order to get something we were all happy with. We made plans to film the next night so we left at that point and made sure to get a good nights sleep before the late night filming we knew was coming.

Day 1 - Concept and Planning - Project 2

Today we started our second project, a fairly daunting task of creating a short film within 2 weeks. To be honest after taking part in the 48 hour film festival last year i actually thought the idea was entirely achievable and gave a bit of leeway to try some new things i hadnt done before. I joined back up with Jim again and Edrian who i worked with in the previous project and also with 2 new people Ke and Kallum, whom i hadnt worked with before. I had spoken to Ke a couple of times previously and new he was somewhat of an expert when it came to kung fu. When we found out that we had action movie as our genre i found this doubly usefull and we immediately put Ke in charge of choreographing a kung fu fight scene. We had to base our Film off of a fairytale from a list of stories and we decided to go with a modern take of the 3 little pigs, of course with a few minor adjustments to the story to match our genre and appeal to not only ourselves as the creators of the film but to appeal to people that were expecting a fair bit from us as we were expecting to have quite an effects heavy film filled with gunshots, lots of blood and heavily rely upon the post production to make our film look really good. Because we had 3 pigs to play with as characters we thought of ways that we could show them as pigs whilst remaining human so we decided to make them all ex-cops and have references to pigs in every introduction to the scene. For example we planned to have our first pig character cooking bacon before the fight took place, we used a bunch of pork bones in the second location sitting abandoned on the bench and our third character would be eating some ham. We also decided we would have 3 different styles of action within our film from Kung Fu to Sword Fighting and then a Gun fight taking what we thought were the best bits from action films and mashing them up into one super film. At this point i had a really cool idea of how the film would turn out and was trying to bring in some Tarantino references as well as try and have a sort of Rambo style to the gun fight.

Reflective Statement

I particularly enjoyed this project as it was dealing with something that was really quite interesting and entirely new to me and it introduced me really to very basic programming and construction. I thought it was a very creative project that allowed a lot of individuality to be shown in our designs and our final images. We did experience a few problems while building the robot, Particularly when it came to controlling our robot with music and programming in general was actually quite difficult. Both of those things were achievable with  a bit of hard work and by looking at other works both online and from the other groups and i truly found that when it came to programming the most valuable asset was our class mates that really made working through the project a lot easier. Ideas really came from everywhere from our lecturers and our classmates to just simple mistakes that actually looked quite effective. I think the only thing i can truly say i would do different next time is try to experiment with a few different materials rather than just the Mindstorm kits we were given though with our particular design it wasnt exactly necessary. I really felt that everyone really pulled together to accomplish the task we were given and everyone contributed and developed different skills when it came to developing, documenting and building the robot. Overall i felt that our robot was a huge success and i think that the art it created was really something quite unique and interesting especially to see the proccess behind the art pulls everything together, in my oppinion making every stage of our robot the real art that was created.

Days 5 and 6 - Project 1 - Thursday and Friday

Thursday was very much a day that we used to fine tune our robot and get as many photos and footage as possible for our introductory film and involved doing a completely smooth test run of the robot entirely as it was going to be done in the  presentation on friday. We filmed everything in the darkest room we could find and took a bunch of videos and photographs from different angles, These were then given to Lee to add into the video. A link will be posted soon to the video so that you can watch it. Friday came and we really went all out for our presentation, i programmed our robot to do a little dancing movement while the video played and we set the mood of the club using our U.V Lights and a strobe as well as the backing track for the video being techno. The introduction went really well and i felt we captured peoples attention quickly and effectively to get them focused on the actual demonstration of our robots programming. Unfortunately going from a smaller space into such a large area i found we actually had less sound than in the previous smaller room so a few quick adjustments had to be made with the volume and placement of the speakers but eventually all worked out well in the end. We got some quite positive feedback from both Gabriel and Kim and i really think that our group has really accomplished making a very cool Raving Drawing Robot. Below are some of the pictures we took of our final robot design and some of the drawings it made.

Pictures

Day 4 – Project 1 – Wednesday

I brought in my sound system today to get some real volume for testing the robot and it worked perfectly! The extra bass added some real spikes to the volume and gave just the right amount to keep the robot going in a straight line, we started to test different songs to see how they worked with the robot and it was quite interesting to find that different songs had different effects on the robots movement. We found that the most effective to keep our robot in a straight line was a heavy metal song called Redneck by Lamb of God, we tested this song along with some other different genres from softer acoustic sounds to fast paced techno beats all at the highest volume we could get with  the speakers. We did a couple of test runs and found a few problems with the construction of the robot and had to fix a problem with the rear ball as it kept coming loose which was quite simply done with the use of cable ties but after that we decided to get started on creating our presentation which involved a demonstration of our robot after showing a video of our build process and some footage of our robot in action. We talked to Gabriel about some possible ideas for presenting and what he thought about our idea. When we showed him some of the photos that Edrian had taken he pointed out in one particular image that he really liked the reflection of some of the light off of the floor, this was a complete accident but we decided to move off of it as another way of developing our idea once again even further. It then brought about the idea of using a mirror for our robots drawing surface. As a group we realised it was going to cost too much to get a large enough mirror for the amount of space our robot needed so decided on going for a slightly cheaper version of laminating A4 sized pieces of tin foil and piecing them together into a reflective surface that somewhat resembled a dance floor or the sides of a disco ball and used that as our canvas.

Day 3 – Project 1 - Tuesday

With our Robot built by Friday it was quite nice to be able to relax a little bit over the weekend giving me time to think about ways to improve our design and play around a little bit with Mindstorm looking at different ways of programming and also looking at a few projects that other people had worked on in the past some which were quite interesting like spider-like robots with pens as legs and paint catapult style robot that reloaded automatically before flinging different coloured paint filled water balloons at a wall creating a splatter painting. Though I thought these ideas were quite cool they didn't really help me come up with any ways to really develop our idea much further. Well after we all got in we started work straight away and I immediately set myself the task of figuring out what was wrong with the programming from the previous Friday. When it came to controlling the robot through music I had set up a basic loop that showed that once the sound sensor picked up a certain volume the robot would move forward and once the music was below that volume the robot would make a right turn. Well when we were testing the robot all we could get was the robot to go in circles because the sound of the robots own engine would activate movement but not enough to keep it going in a straight line. Even when we tried playing music through our laptops at maximum volume we couldn't get the sensor to pick up the amount of volume needed to keep the robot moving straight, now my immediate thought was to drop the amount of volume needed to get the robot going in a straight line only dropping that level meant having to decrease even more the volume that could be heard when the robot was made to spin and with the robots motor already posing a problem with the amount of noise output this posed a pretty big problem. That problem was solved quite quickly when I decided we clearly needed more volume in the music and a more powerful sound system, luckily I had just bought a new set of speakers the previous week and decided to see if they would work. Lee also had taken an interest in the idea of the clubbing scene and had seen a picture of a DJ’s turn table in a club that had been photographed with a time lapse a similar idea to one of our original robot concepts so we decided to merge the two of our original concepts into one and added on a variety of different finger lights onto the robot to give us another dimension to the art we were creating. Overall we had a productive day and our robot is really becoming quite refined giving us time to work on how we will present our idea to the class for Friday.

Day 2 – Project 1 – Friday.

The day started bright and early getting straight into building our robot again before I started working on programming the movement of the arm. Basically what we wanted to do was to have the arm arc back and forth continuously at different speeds depending on the amount of light that was detected by the light sensor. This required quite a bit of thinking when it came to working around the commands that I had through Mindstorm, though through a bit of determination and a fair bit of trial and error but I came through with the commands that were needed to get the arm to function properly and effectively. Working my way through the programming through the use of trial and error actually helped me learn a whole lot about the Mindstorm program and found that I was able to pass on what I had learned and help others with problems with their work. While I was working on the functions of the robot, Edrian was busy documenting our work taking photos and video footage of our progress, while Lee, Supa and Lucy built more onto the robot and started developing more ideas. At this point we decided to blend the 2 of our previous ideas by creating a number of different mediums that either of which could be used for any one of our final images. Im actually really impressed with the progress that the group has made so far, we all work really well together and it looks like were flying ahead of the others with an entirely built robot that i can now start openly testing different commands and functions with Mindstorm. I also like the fact that we havnt tried to be too complex with our design, we are going for a more simple but effective approach with our art combining what we already know and exploring different areas of not only Mindstorm but with the way that we approached showing our drawings. Our ideas are already developing with the way our robot will draw and be controlled with the idea of using music to change the movement and light to create a larger or smaller arc. Though these were still very simple control methods they were starting to lead us towards an idea of creating an ideal environment for the robot in our case a clubbing scene.

Day 1 – Project 1 – Thursday

After presenting our kickass knocking robot to the class, we were then given our first assessed project for the semester. We have been tasked with creating a drawing robot to create art based on interactions with an environment using different sensors and such. To be honest the idea seemed quite overwhelming at first and took me a little while to come up with a few base ideas and do some small sketches of them before taking the opportunity to break off from the previous group to get to know some new people and see how working with them would work out. I grouped up with 4 others, Edrian, Lucy, Supa and Lee and we kicked things off quite quickly and began brainstorming some quick ideas for designing our robot. I felt that we meshed really well together and quite quickly we came up with a number of ideas but only two were really considered and developed. Either a robot with an arm that moved in a central arc or a robot that creates its art using a set of lights that are captured using a DSLR camera on a slow shutter speed. Deciding on the idea of the central arm we started developing the idea deciding on what materials we would use for creating the art, choosing between white or black paper and using flouro gel pens or highlighters to create a drawing that would stand out in the dark. This brought about the idea of using a U.V light as a way of illuminating the lines drawn by the pens. At this stage we started to build our robot, starting first with our moving arm then moving on to the wheels and main body before the day came to a close. Below are some of the pictures from the build process.

Thursday Pictures

Okay so ive been a bit slack...

As you've probably noticed the past few days i haven't exactly kept up to date with my blog entries but luckily, today ive got a whole bunch of exciting stuff from the past few days that i personally found was really great.

Monday 7th March
This week started off once again arriving an hour earlier than needed to our Introduction to creative technologies lecture but once the lecture started i found myself thinking a lot about what it was that made me choose to take the course, what decisions affected me making that decision? What do i plan on achieving by the end of the course? Basically what our lecturer Maggie was trying to get us to do was really start to get our minds around the concept of thinking about the way that we think and it was actually quite an intense feeling at first as it was pushing me to really rethink about why it was that i have made the choices that i have and think about possible factors that had lead to those choices, overall a very interesting concept that i think will be quite useful. After the Lecture we had our lunch break and started our next lecture, Physical Computing. Now going into the lecture i quite honestly had no idea what to expect and to be honest at the end of it it seemed like a slightly more complex version of first year electronics at high school only with the added aspect of a computer into the mix supposedly controlling circuit flow. To be honest the lecturer Julian didn't exactly capture my interest very well for a number of reasons, his body language was screaming nervousness and he seemed like he was quite intimidated by us when talking to us as a group but also he lacked a certain spark that the previous lecturer Maggie had, another probably quite crucial factor was the fact that quite frankly it was nearing the end of the day and i was feeling physically quite tired. I didn't actually feel that i got anything out of his lecture except for the fact that next week we have to have purchased a bunch of expensive equipment just so we can make an LED flash.... sure its a starter project but spending a large amount of money on equipment for such a basic project seems a little strange and my opinion the sooner we get onto projects that actually capture our interest the better.

Tuesday 8th March
Now what an amazing day that was! We spent our day working in the studio on a group of small projects designed to get us working effectively in a team whilst collaborating creative ideas to create and develop a new chess piece. I worked in a group with Jim and Sam and originally we all had all sorts of different ideas for  characters to base our piece around and often had conflicting ideas. While our ideas conflicted we resolved the issue by taking in aspects that we liked from a variety of the characters while deciding on a piece that we all liked. It made me realise how easily such a simple task can become a lot more complicated when working in a group and ideally it made us think more and develop the design of our piece far more than any of the designs of our other pieces. Our final piece was the Reaper piece which basically was the symbol of death and the fear of death upon the battlefield and when it came to rules regarding the piece we came up with a bunch that were quite respective to that concept. The Reaper was originally considered wraith like where the restrictions of our world simply did not affect it in anyway so we took that aspect and involved that in our movement where the edge of the chess board was no longer a restriction but instead the reaper would casually flow seamlessly across from one edge of the board to the direct opposite while moving across spaces in any direction similar to that of the queen only with the restriction of only being able to move 3 squares at a time as to not make the game to unbalanced. When it came to taking pieces we decided to restrict it to only being able to take out lesser pieces more likely to be affected by the fear of death a.k.a the pawns but also the figure head of the army, the king, whom almost certainly once faced by death would cower why else would he be hidden behind his troops on the battlefield. Other pieces like the queen, knights, rooks and bishops had characteristics that allowed them to withstand the fear of death, eg. the knights bravery or the bishops faith, but were also the only pieces able to remove the reaper from play. We thought it would be appropriate that the only way that the reaper could be slain was for the opposing piece to embrace the idea of death and through self-sacrifice remove both itself and the reaper from play.

After coming up with the design we were then given LEGO Mindstorm kits to use to assemble a robot that was based upon the rules of our piece to race the following morning. So for our robot we used a very basic car shape whilst also adding in a pair of claws that could supposedly grab onto other robots and through programming allow us to then fling the robot around while it span only to laugh and pursue its next victim. With the design of our robot we tried to make it look as sinister and fearful as possible by adding lots of excess spikes and other jagged shapes. When put to the test it proved quite accurate to our rules, moving freely around without restriction and removing robots, but in order to take ours out of the race other robots had to be sacrificed to bring our rampage to a halt.

Day 3

Day 3... what an interesting day. We all arrived an hour earlier than we needed to, the entire class sat around socialising for an hour which at least gave some benefit to the early start. When our lecturers arrived to talk us through what we'd be doing for the day id already spoken to a few people including Jim who id had lunch with the day before and two other girls Lucy and Alisa and during the morning we'd somewhat come together as somewhat of a group which was then solidified as we were told to then get into groups of 4 for the start of our days adventure. We were given set roles in the group and were given a set of instructions to follow in order to accomplish the task, it didnt take us long to accomplish the task but when it comes to presenting we have spent quite a bit of time on presentation so far already and a couple of us are getting worried about whether or not our project will be ready in time for the presentations tomorrow. We are all going in early tomorrow morning to make sure that it is.

Day 2!

Well as another day at Uni has come to a close, i find myself to be really enjoying the course so far. The people are great I have met a bunch of people that i can easily relate to and quite openly discuss areas of the course as well as share personal lives and all the rest and i find myself with the makings of some cool new friends. I find it quite interesting that the age factor between classmates has been tossed aside in the course as we find ourselves all pretty much in the same boat and can connect easily through the course itself which i think is actually a really cool thing that really adds to the BCT. The beginning of our day was pretty funny really as most people printing out the graphs that we had to do the day before all ended up paying different prices for the same print, in the same store. I was one of the lucky ones paying a little less than the others but i couldnt help but feel bad for the others that felt as if they were being ripped off. Anyway we got into class and started to analyse the ways that our graphs had turned out and as a group we chose the best concept graphs to develop further before heading off to the computer lab to put our ideas into action!

After we had got started we were then quickly rushed off for our induction into the 3D lab that many of us will no doubt end up using at least once or twice if not most of the year. Now when i say 3D lab i think all sorts of high tech equipment to do with 3D modelling, 3D sculpture etc etc. Sadly, this was not the case. The 3D lab is really a glorified name for a workshop where we have access to a load of wood working and metal working tools as well as a variety of other things useful to our course. The induction was fairly standard, laying  down the rules, letting us know the safety measures required in the lab as well as a few other things key for us when using the lab, all of which really was just common sense or stuff that id heard countless times through Hard Tech and Woodworking classes through my Intermediate and Highschool years.

Overall though the day was another exciting and eventfull one that im already finding is changing the way that i look at things as well as somewhat preparing me for the amount of organisation and work that is going to be required of me through this course. Well lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that i can pull it through.

1st Day

Well heres to the first ever post on my first ever blog! Today was my first day in the creative technologies course after having a slight issue with the timetable system i find myself a day behind everyone else.... luckily through talking with James our program leader i have managed to catch up with the class and am now finally up to speed! I have to say that James's talk on visualisation today was in my oppinion very interesting as it encouraged me think more critically on the concept of visualisation as a whole and the way that our minds work. Well i figure that should be enough for a short post for today and now to get some sleep before starting day 2!