Moving Image

I have never really liked the moving image projects to be honest. I am not a fan of filming but I have always tried to do my best and get involved. Our group was given the "Shift", which is a script about a man who steals government secrets and then becomes a target for the government. We had to change a part of the script and add our own scene in. As a group we thought about what we wanted to film to be about and decided it was to be a mystery what was going on until the end. So we had the man go through the different scenes slowly revealing little details. After we had been given our different roles, I ended up with sound and assistant lighting. I liked these positions as it meant I was involved but it let the other people in the group who were still interested in moving image take the more important roles. We started filming with the scene in the office. It was the most difficult to film as its quite long and we struggled with props and the fact that it was supposed to be night but we were filming during the day. I think the scene turned out ok and it is one of the main scenes in the film. We then filmed all the other scenes in an afternoon and late evening, it was quite an easy shoot and we had all shots completed. I think that Caleb did an especially good job at organising it all and creating his vision. We then had to edit the film, which is where we came up against some problems. Some of the scenes had crackling in them, you could see a foot of one of us in our main office scene and the total running time for all our scenes was about 6 mins. We managed to fix the disturbance and just about managed to cut down the scenes to just over three minutes. We also added some suspenseful sounds to add to the feel of the film. Overall I feel the film turned out really well and I think we are all happy with the outcome.

Interactive Design

Interactive design was another project that I was looking forward to. I have enjoyed it much more than I was expecting this year. The brief was to create an interactive quiz that was enjoyable and fun. At the start of the project I thought about what I wanted my quiz to be about and what I wanted to be in the quiz. Initially I thought about having a “guess the intro” as this would be fun but also include lots of media, which would make the quiz challenging for me to create. I then thought that creating a pub quiz would be a better idea by having different rounds and making it more general knowledge. I thought about what I wanted the rounds to be and I decided on having a sports round, a history round and a general knowledge round. This means that the user has to have a good general knowledge to be able to do well in the quiz. I spent lots of time finding and researching the right questions. I looked through lots of online pub quizzes and general knowledge quizzes. When I started designing the slides I wanted to keep it simple, as the questions are quite hard. I wanted to make it a quiz rather than a gimmick so I went for basic red text and simple buttons. I thought about the buttons and wanted to keep it easy for the user so I just have buttons, which get you to the next round, and the start. I also had to think about how I wanted to end the quiz, I thought about having different endings for the different scores you got but thought that would be too difficult so I decided on just having a normal “this is your score ending”. The brief also states that the user must be able to see the answers so I also included a “cheat” button, which gives you the option to view the correct answers. To fulfil the including sound deliverable from the brief I have put a sound track over the top of the quiz. It gives a sense of suspense so gives the user a better interaction. Overall I think that the quiz turned out quite well. I think that it’s entertaining but at the same time it challenging. It is quite simple and I think that if I could do this project again I would include some animations and make it more fun and vibrant.

Superhero Lair Video

Superhero Lair

When I got the brief for the first of the 3 projects, virtual environments, I was quite excited. I always look forward to working in 3DS max. My initial ideas were either some sort of fun house style lair or a really colourful and abstract lair. I started to look through film magazines and on youtube to look for current examples of superheroes. I also had to think about what I wanted my superhero to be. After much consideration I thought that a superhero who was very posh and rich but was living in opposite conditions maybe underground or in some sort of dungeon. When I had an idea of what I wanted my superhero lair to be, I had to think about the layout and what I wanted in it. First off I thought about having something like mole tunnels which different chambers so that you were underground but decided that might be quite hard. I then decided to make the lair as a shanty house, with tin walls and roof. The brief stated that there be 4 rooms so I decided on a big main room that would be like the main hall, then a weapons room and a media room, then finally a long firing range. As for the decoration and interiors, I wanted the lair to be quite minimalist as the superhero would live in poor conditions but as our hero is well off and has some standards the things he did have would be of quality. So in the main hall I decided on making it his living area with a table/chairs and a TV area with seating. I also wanted to have some more models in there so I made some plants to have around but I had to keep to the minimalist style. The next room was the shooting range. I needed to have somewhere where our hero could fire from and at targets. I created the red lights as this gave a “warning” feel to it. I also made a gun to make sure everyone knew it was a shooting range. I also made a weapons room which originally I wanted to fill with different weapons that I had made however I found it really difficult to make weapons that looked realistic and were different so in the end I just mapped some images of weapons onto the walls. It looks ok but I would have much preferred to have made the models myself. The final room was the media room which every superhero seems to have. I decided that he would need to see all the news that was happening around the computers. world so I created the screen bank that is on the wall. I also created the computers. Overall I think the lair turned out well, if I was to do the project again I think I would have spent more time creating the models to get much more detail in them and maybe have made the lair more elaborate as it is fairly simple.

Apologies

I have been neglecting this blog a lot recently. As you can see the last post was from January. It seemed that my blog got removed from my research process. I would always forget about putting things from my projects on my blog. Over the next week I will try to put up all the information and research I did from my projects over the last two terms. I will also be talking about my visual essay and presentation.