Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Finished Interactive Narrative

For some reason its not working on Deviant Art.
But i'm going to leave the embed code here just incase it starts miraculously working.
deviant art ... you are a let down.

Interactive Narrative Doodle Gym MMA illustrations




Having planned my idea i have began development by drawing out concepts for the characters i am going to use in my interactive narrative.
I have began processing some illustrations on photoshop but have not entirely finished. Here are a few of my illustrations, my interactive flash should be up shortly since i am close to finishing though i heard people are having trouble with deviant art and uploaded flash files have not been correctly working.


Interactive Narrative Doodle MMA

Though in a rushing situation at the minute, I have been developing my interactive narrative. Changing the title from Fight Science to Doodle MMA, I have decided to develop my idea based on mixed martial arts fighting and martial art techniques using an illustrative style rather than a computer based image look.
To further plan my ideas I have been creating skeleton maps, to plan out how many slides I need and what they would contain as well as how many decisions were included in one frame.

Since I have also been doing my essay and this project scheduling has been difficult and I was unable to update my blog as
regularly as intended.
But here is a few maps and plans that I have drawn out for my development.


Monday, 7 December 2009

Food Fight Narrative

I've come back to edit this blog post since I forgot to write about the narrative. The narrative of my stop motion is based on what inspired me through my research this included stop motions such as MORPH and Wallace and Gromit as well as other stop motions I managed to stumble upon but not log down on my blog, majority of them where quite humorous and targeted children audiences with a small amount of violence. This is what i've tried to capture in my own version of my stop motion animation.

My Animation is about Blue-man who complains of being hungry and therefore asks for food from Orange-man, Orange-man declines looking down on Blue-man for his begging behaviour, only to find that when he turns away from his food Blue-man attempts to steal his meal, resulting in a violent response from Orange-man which turns into a hardcore bar brawl over Blue-mans selfish behaviour leading to him being killed as he attempts to kill Orange-man for defending his meal, hence the name I have given the animation as "Food - Fight".

My Own Stop Motion Animation

As well as creating a group stop motion / pixelation, I decided I would create my own, though it took longer than i expected to created it was worth the time though now I have a lot of the other work that has to be done more hastily, such as my essay and interactive narrative.
After 544 photographs (if i remember correctly) and 3 long days I managed to finish my stop motion, after researching a variety of clay animation styles i decided I would recreate my own version of the animation technique. It started off ok though later on I was to experience quite a lot of complications such as the photographs on my memory stick not actually erasing even though I erased them on my Mac, meaning i had to re-format the memory card every time I needed to take more photos. Also experienced complications such as the battery running out in my camera meaning i had to take the camera from its fixed area to re-charge the battery and had to try and re-create the position I fixed the camera to the best I could before I began to take photos again. You will also see the effects of my camera position changing throughout the process of the animation, though some of it is deliberate, most of it is mistake due to having no proper stand for my camera and having to makeshift using a self made blu tack stand ! when you haven't got equipment you just have to be creative !!!

Other than that it went averagely well, though I also had a few complications on the software side where I had to remember what methods I had to go through to modify the photographs in order for them to be ready to be transferred to Premiere. Premiere also presented me a few complications since i forgot how to create fades as well ass adding text although with a little advice from friends the methods came back to me ...

Here is my finished Claymation ! Hope you enjoy my work ..


Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Interactive Narrative Research ...

We were shown examples at our seminar of flash technology and interactive narratives such as the "dont shoot the puppy" flash game which was quite simple and looked like it was quite easily made, but i decided it would be best to do some extra research into existing flash interfaces and narrative games.

It seems that in modern day most small gaming websites use flash created games as forms of small entertainment like arcade websites, I know when I was in school we used to go onto gaming websites such as,

www.miniclip.com - and play games when we weren't supposed to which used flash such as small driving games and platform shooters.

www.newgrounds.com - which has a large collection of flash games and animation which is generally quite famous amongst teenage gaming culture, newgrounds gaming developers have also started professional game development such as the game castle crashers, alien hominid and behemoth which are available to purchase for gaming consoles such as the xbox 360 arcade where mini games can be purchased using microsoft points. This gives inspiration to flash users and game designers which shows you can become game developers if you start off small and work your way up.

As well as gaming websites, I found with my research that flash is also used a lot in professional website design for corporate websites and for design companies.
This also applies to design websites for the creative community, it seems a lot of the creativeness has branched out into web design and general digital design as a form of art.
One flash website i found intriguing and well designed is,

www.djnr.com

It is a website that the designer himself has made as a web based portfolio for him self as a designer for web and other creative projects to show off his skill sets to his clients. I feel it is very professionally designed and showcases his versitile talents as a designer, i hope to one day create my own website to showcase my work as an online portfolio to the same standard as he has done.
On his website the background cctv like video also shows him working throughout the day as the clock is like a timer on the bottom and fills from left to upper right of the screen, showing himself working throughout the day at his work desk in a professional manner, possibly to show to the client his typical day at work and that he is a hard worker and worth investing in.

Its a really good website and I advice you check it out for some inspiration, also take a look at some of his work ... very nice !!!