new shiny work area

for me and liam to develop our ideas and try things out and stuff.







and i'm a pretty fairy.

i've scanned in stuff from my pretty book, "where's my space age?", and liam has posted what he's found wondering around second life, and sketches of some of his ideas.

i want one!!!

ALAVS

these... are... so... cool...

ALAVS (Autonomous Light Air Vessels) are amazing pretty little blimp robots that are really quite cool. they FLOAT. and they're pretty.

ALAVS 1.0 had three programmed behaviours; ALAV with a person, ALAV with other ALAVs, and ALAV alone. when an ALAV is alone for a while it emits a call, to find the rest of the flock and get some attention. if a person wants to interact with an ALAV they have to wait till they're hungry (which is shown by the colours of a dangly LED thing), and then the person can feed them with a pretty light.

ALAVS 2.0 use mobile phones to let people interact with the ALAVS more than just feeding them. using an IVR system (Interactive Voice Recognition) a person can interact with the whole group of ALAVS or one. their behaviour changes depending on wether or not the ALAV percieves the person as a friend or foe.

there's also BLUBBER BOTS!!!
they also respond to mobile phone activity, so if you wave your phone about you can attract their attention, and they'll respond with a song or a dance. they also seek put the strongest source of light and flock when in a group.
best of all you can buy them.

i want one so much it hurts.

interactive design rationale

i've decided to work on the second life gallery space brief, and since we're allowed to work in pairs on this one i will be working with liam.
i chose this brief because it has the second life element and the social network site, so i'll be getting a chance to develop my second life skills and my web 2.0 ones aswell. and i want to see what is possible with emerging web technologies.

what both me and laim are hoping to do with this brief is to make something in second life that reflects the possibilities of what can be done there, instead of relying on something based on what we see in real life. although i think it will be worthwhile looking at some real life architecture to see how we could adapt these ideas into second life. we want to get across the idea of what is possible in a metaverse instead of creating a comfort zone.

i'd also like the chance to play with twitter again, and i'm hoping that since i'm working in a pair this time i can work on my group skills some more.

evaluation of ident.

When I first decided to work on the brief for “Custard”, the only thing I was certain of was that I wanted to make something bright and annoying. I’m quite good at making annoying things, and getting better at making bright things, so I saw this brief as a chance to develop my skills further, also wanting to get my head around Illustrator a bit more whilst learning Aftereffects as well.

I started off my research with children’s programs that I already knew of (Pocoyo) and had recently come across (YO! Gabba Gabba), looking at the style of animation and the narrative. YO! Gabba Gabba gave me an Idea of what I wanted my sound design to be like, and how to use simple animated elements. Pocoyo just embodied cuteness itself. I also looked at idents for Cbeebies and CBBC, to see how the channels branded themselves and the style of animation that was used, which was pretty much anything goes. I was struggling to come up with ideas at this stage, so looked at other cute things that interested me, like the Kawaii not comics by Meghan Murphy, and the Katamari Damacy game intros.

Katamari Damacy really helped to get my ideas going, the style of animation was quite simple but looked really good, with lots of hyper-rainbows and dancing pandas. My first idea was based on the Cbeebies’ yellow blobs, Katamari’s hyper-rainbows, and YO! Gabba Gabba’s strange costumes. I wanted to have some actors in animal costumes having a tea party in a park, but since I couldn’t afford to rent costumes (at £25 each minimum), and as masks were likely to be more scary than cute, I had to abandon this idea.

I instead decided to look at the programs that were on CBBC on a Sunday morning, hoping to use the characters from the show in my ident. I spent the next couple of weeks recording the shows, going through them and cutting out images to use. This part of the project was the most painful, as children’s TV is incredibly mind numbing, and boring, and nonsensical. I had to watch the Chuckle Brothers!! The pain!

I ended up only using a few of the programs from the Sunday morning line up, to save on time animating and to keep the ident shorter. After I had the images I wanted I storyboarded the new idea which was based on the idea of rainbows flying around and text popping up and characters bouncing around the place.

Animating the idea was a bit daunting as I’ve never used Aftereffects before, and there were lots of elements to work with. But it turned out that it’s not as complicated as everyone makes out and I got my head around it in pretty much a day. If I could make the ident again, I’d like to work on the sound design more, I think what I used works with the images but it would have been nice to make something of my own.

fonts and that

after some deliberation and going through different macs fontbooks and searching around websites i have decided which font to use... (well i decided a while ago but was too busy working to be blogging)



yeah...it's childish without being too kiddy, and i think it suits the animation. i put the white border around it to seperate it from the rainbows as i'm using the same colours in the background and text.







so that's what i've done...

website-ness.

i've been in a right making things mood today.

i've started working on mine and lukes website again, working on my side of it...

here's what i'm currently thinking is going to be my main page:

and contact page:


the idea for the site is that they're our sketchbooks kinda thing. so i'm making my layouts in real life in a sketchbook, as i want mine bit to have texture and not look like i've done it all in dreamweaver. the plan is to nick a digital SLR and take nice photos of the pages when they're all finished, then put the layers for text and thumbnails on top... and maybe add more elements to the backgrounds on pooter.

and now i'm going to stop playing with my glue gun. and PVA. it's not just any PVA, it's art attack, neil buchanan endorsed PVA.

art attack rules!! YEAH.

glue makes me stick to things

^_^
japanese website for katamari paper based boredom killer

last katamari post... i swear...

my clicking arm hurts

because i have been animating in a hardcore manner all day.
and i still have three segments of the ident left to do: arthurs bit, the chucklevision bit, and the ending bit. the rest of it needs a bit of tweaking here and there but otherwise it's pretty much how i wanted it.
but sometimes the anchor point disobeyed me.
damn you anchor point, not animating properly.

i'll treat you to some stills:






i'm going to be sick of seeing rainbows after this.
the other bits i'm behind on are the typography and logo, and the sound design, which i have no idea what to do with as it scares me but i'm starting to think j-pop might be the way forward. something fast paced and squeaky.

on the typography bit i've been looking at the katamari logos (nicked the rainbow idea from them, might aswell see what else i can take inspiration from)...
katamari damasheeeeeeeee

^ new shiny logo for new shiny game

^ sans serif-y goodness

^ favourite! i like the use of colours in the logo, which don't get mixed up with those in the background thanks to the clever use of whiteness.

the current cbbc logo uses a similar trick:

the text is surrounded by the channels trademark snotty green colour, to distinguish it from any backgrounds it's placed on.

i want to make a hybrid of the last katamari logo and the cbbc logo, so maybe using different fonts for each letter or drawing it all from scratch.

i also want the name of the program illustrated to pop up in the ident with it's graphics. i think it will be best to use a sans serif font as it's going to be on screen, probably in black to distinguish it from the rainbows. i'm just looking for one that doesn't feel to adult... i've found that making it bold helps a bit...

scanning scares my fish

bless 'im.










okay, these would have been up ages ago only the pc back in derby was taken away by a man for being crap and the scanner there doesn't like my G3. and then i forgot to.

basically, i'm going to have rainbows swooshing everywhere and hypnotizing the little kiddies into watching the show.
even though this storyboard is four and a half pages long, the actual sequence itself wont be that long as each bit only lasts a few seconds.

electroplankton

it's FUN.

it's the kind of computer game i like because it isn't really a game. there's no high scores or items to collect or any of that palava. you poke at the screen and clap you hands and say random words into the microphone and things happen.

it's creator, Toshio Iwai, was obsessed with looking at things through a microscope and playing super mario bros. on the NES as a child. he also liked fiddling around with a tape recorder and a synthesizer, all of which he managed to incorporate into electroplankton.

the game has two modes, performance mode which lets you play around, and audience mode which lets you kick back while the little plankton do all the hard work. there's ten different kinds of pankton, there's tracy which follows lines you draw on the screen, hanenbow which bounce off leaves, luminaria which follow arrows, sun-animalcule which grow and fade, rec-rec that record what you say into the microphone, nanocarp that respond to your voice and claps, lumiloop which you spin around really fast to make sounds, marine-snow that you disturb, beatnes that remember beats you tap onto them and volvoice which distorts your voice. it's all good fun.