Fundamentals of Interactive Media Evaluation

When given the brief for the interactive media unit we were given a choice to pick a fairy tale story from either Hans Christen Anderson or Bothers Grimm tales to base it on. My first idea was to base my project on the classic tale Rumpelstiltskin as I have heard the story many times when I was a child. For the few weeks after starting the unit leading up to Christmas we were given lessons in how to create scripting on Flash. As I felt little more confident using Flash from the animation unit I was quite interested in learning how to create simple buttons and games. This soon changed as the coding became much more complicated. I hated the fact that how one miner scripting error could alter everything you had typed in and to make one simple control or movement an absolute nightmare to create. As always what I did enjoy about the beginning of the unit is designing the characters for the Rumpelstiltskin story as I could hand draw them and just imagine them as what I thought them when I was younger. Instead of drawing up a storyboard I just wrote down my ideas for what I would of liked to include in my interactive tale. After looking at a few examples of games on the Internet such as crappy cat I decided to keep my thoughts simple, as I wanted to design the game mainly for a younger audience. These would just be easy multiple choices and click on buttons so that the story could be followed and understood.
After Christmas break I soon forgot a lot of the experimental scripting work and at times I tended to avoid working on this unit and focused on the others. When it came to continuing I separated the body parts of my characters into layers so I could create movement. Overall I do feel that I had spent too much time on this process, making to many parts complicated and really were not needed. I feel I should of focused more on the interactive side than the animation.
As I seriously struggled with the scripting I tried to create the backgrounds and animation work first to get out of the way. After getting the idea from the TV series Phone Jacker to keep things basic I decided that I would just use writing in speech bubbles and flapping mouths to tell the story. Instead of having voice sounds I would just half a medieval tune in the background repeating itself. When it eventually came to the coding I found it extremely confusing and became frustrated just over miner problems. At numerous times I needed help and felt like I was going nowhere with it. A huge difficulty was when creating a movement symbol and then afterwards trying to figure out how to make it into an interactive button. Although I encountered many problems, eventually I did learn how to create certain buttons and script them to go to different scenes. However I wouldn’t really like to continue interactive media in the near future as I found it very testing and lost interest to quickly.

Dr lakra

when studying my illustration and visualisation elective, it was then i came across the unusual work of the tattoo artist, Dr Lakra. What i found interesting about his work is that he transfers his tattoo designs and skills onto posters of old pin up girls. Deliberately changing their appearance from being beautiful to ugly and old looking. Kind of like drawing all over a person in a news paper. when looking closer at the markings on the posters Lakra's talent as a tattoo artist shows, as he has drawn the designs as if they had been shaped to the real skin of a person.

Pon and Zi

After looking over the Internet countless times on google, YouTube, etc many times i have come across the cartoon pictures of Pon and Zi the emo characters. What i find fascinating is that they have become extremely popular cartoons through the web and when it comes to looking at the design of them they look so simple and nontechnical to draw. Similar to the The Simpson's, anyone can draw the characters but what attracts viewers is the actual storyline and humour. Each drawing of Pon and Zi gives of a meaning to teenagers, example, Love and Break Ups

As a fan of caricatures i especially like this 3D character. Although i have no idea who it is of i took an interest in it straight away as you don't see many around. with the beard and hair it kinda looks like a drunk Tom Green. I think that it was originally drawn as a 2D piece so that the artist could first capture all of the features and then possible designed on Maya or some other software. With the dull lighting, dopey eyes and blank expression the artist has truly created a excellent confused and depressing character.

Eden Lake

I just watched the low budget English thriller film, Eden Lake a couple off days back. There are no really big actors featured in the film apart from Cook (Jack O'Connell) from Skins series 3 and Thomas Turgoose from This is England as the kids in it never the less the acting was still convincing. At a first glance, i did not really expect much coming from a cheap horror, but the film turned out to be very impressive and quite shocking and disturbing in parts. The scenes of violence are very graphic and well down and because its an English film and the majority of the cast are new i think it gave of more reality to me. The film also shows the viewer what certain gangs of kids are capable off and what life is like today in parts of the country with high rates of teenage knife crime. A film to watch.

2D caricature animation

As a interest i have always like to design my own type of caricatures of friends, computer and film characters. After watching a series of 2DTV, instantly i found it to be hilarious. As there are not many 2D caricature animations around, although there is not a great deal of animation work included in this cartoon, what makes the show so funny is the designs of characters. what i love about caricatures is that the main features of the persons face and body are blown completely out of proportion making it more funny than ever. Another main quality about 2DTV are the characters voices and how they capture the stupidity of the celebrities faults and take the piss by sounding nothing like the actual person in real life. from watching these this it has given me more of an idea to animate my designs as well and i do think that caricature animation should be publicised a lot more 2D and 3D.

UFC 09

I cant wait until this game comes out for the PS3, i actually thought that these were shots from a real fight. With so much detail included in the fighters like the facial features and sweat the graphics pretty much look near perfect. The fighting and the different movements shown in the trailer bring great realism to the audience as well and seems to be a massive improvement from the original UFC games.