Year One Passed

And so, Year one is officially passed. I am not familiar with UK's evaluation system, so I am not really sure if I am very excited about my results, however, I met our lecturer Deborah the other day and she said 66.8 is quite a good mark. So I guess I should be excited. Either way, what I know, is that I will be really excited when these marks bring other results, like a proper job, for example. So, onward, to 70% and beyond!

Ed

THRESHOLD CONCEPTS - interactivity

 Task1:
Write down all the elements you as a viewer need to enjoy a film?

1. I enjoy a sense of thrill and emersiveness very much. 
2. Unlike many other viewers I don't enjoy open endings. Conclusion is crucial for a good film to be good. I can cope with it being slightly open so that you could guess the ending of some back-story. It is something like a conclusive ending but still giving you a bit to think about.
3. A character that I can relate to, or a believable one who could make me fell his emotions as my own.
4. Visuals are a very powerful tool so I expect a good movie having great visual style. Not the CGI or stunts, but the artistic style of it: distinctive colors, props, etc.
5. A story with twists and turns. Its hard to enjoy a story without a getting a thrill of whats going to happen next.

 Task2:

 Devise a plot that tries to introduce these elements through a series of scenes. Come up with 

four scenes minimum

 What storytelling techniques would you need to employ to get the sense of enjoyment if you can't 

determine how the user experiences the scenes?

 How much control do you retain? How much do you give away? 

                   One of my old ideas. The film would be based in the first years of 2000's somewhere in Mid. or Eastern Europe when many lives have just been ruined and some just established by recessions and constant change of governments. People knew a lot about the worlds  newest technologies but not many had them in their homes, so eye to eye interactions were the main method of communication. Sorry for saying this as if these parts of the Western World were in the dark ages at those times, but I just want you to imagine the grey-ish, brown-ish colors of the indoors and the bright green, blue and gold of the outdoors. Yet not in this first scene.

          

           Scene one is a slow-motion scene of a young man falling. All you see is him and the sky. His face is pale and there is no emotion whatsoever. The voice-over, which is his voice, explains a situation as highly depressing and quite bad. He invites us to look onto some moments of his life to explain the whole falling situation.

          Scene two is a prequel to scene one and shows him arguing with his single mom on very high tones and what it tells us that he is being oppressed with no good reason. She blames him with everything there is to blame.

            Scene three is him explaining something to his friend very persuasively, but the lad will not listen. There might be a back-plot to this story because you can shift the last two scene and the following one around, maybe making it all interactive, putting some explanations that are presented in a form of the first scene.

         Scene four would be of him and his girlfriend talking, trying to figure things out but it obviously doesn't work out and she leaves. Again, this can be turned into an interactive experience because all these people could be presented as his last resort, the last ones he could trust. The main thing is that however you change their place, there is no way you can affect the main plot, which is...

          Scene five is him making a conclusion of everything that we saw and basically ending his own life by falling to his death... But thats what the viewer thinks. He is not actually a pushed around emo kid. The next image we see is the water and a body that drops in it. We can see someone swimming to the sunlight and then we see him on the surface smiling. All those people are around him, in appropriate places of course (like his Mom and his girlfriend both with him in the lake all wearing clothes is a bit less believable.)

           Scene six is when he explains his views on the world. He says that (depending on what happened in the prequels) he is being forgiving or the people are forgiving him... blah blah, he understood the meaning of life. Something like that... Sunshine, love and credits.

           I do love happy endings. 

 As of directors control, this would be a movie a person creates for himself (if its interactive) but there surely would be a central path to always refer to.

 Thank you for reading this far, have a great day,

Cheers.

Ed.

P.s. Sorry for the layout, Bloggers' been buggy lately.

Narrative and Authenticity

  As most of the discussions, in which many participants are Doctors or Professors who speak their own "language", this one, for me, had little or no consensus.
 The talk went mostly about the authenticity and how can one achieve or measure it. The points were that narrators telling their stories often lie to make their story more attractive or suitable for the audience. Others called it adaptation to the situation, your surroundings in your present because you cannot fully relate to the experiences you had in the past, just because it is the past, and now the situation is different. One very interesting point stated that in religion, or how it was said, culture, repetition is a key element, thus repeating your story from time to time changes your feel of it, changes its narrative, because you yourself have changed. And that is not lying.
 Changing of one and not being able to sum up your own narrative, as see your whole authentic self, would be, kind of, impossible, because for that you will have to die and look back on your own life, were the only ideas that came to some conclusion.
 I liked the idea that said - being authentic, does not mean being different form others. All began with the discussion of notion of culture that actually shaped us and gave us words to express our narrative in the first place, thus, already, giving us all the same base to start with, then went to the idea that we often chose the same paths, and then again many end up with their own thoughts, ideas and feelings, all of it excludes lying, and turns it into referring to someones' experiences as our own. But is it a lie if people actually had same, or very similar experience?
 There were many interesting ideas in this discussion, and to many of them I can relate. In fact, all of those I can relate to I have already described earlier. I guess you remember only something similar to your own thoughts. I do believe most of the people in this world are authentic and the stories they tell too. Unfortunately all of them tend to catch a noticeable amount of foreign influence, but some just are better of putting them through as their own (with no intention whatsoever), though we all are in danger of changing our stories according to the audience. When speaking about stories changing from time to time, I think, it is a normal process of growing, rethinking and reacting to the present situation, and does not damage your authenticity in any way.

P.S.
I have to say, I am writing this just after hearing this discussion, and this is a hell of a job remembering everything, but, yeah... here we go. Thanks for reading this far,
Cheers,
Ed.

Superhero School - Animation

                               Superhero School is a 30-seconds animation I've made. Enjoy

                          
 This animation was born as an idea the very moment I heard that we are going to have to use still images for our animation project and put them into, what had to seem as, 3D space. The pictures were made without my presence, but it didn't effect my ambitions much. I knew I wanted to do something like this and I carried on.
 I've done some After Effects animations using still images before, here is a playlist of some examples:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF8D7FE1105D3F241&feature=plcp

 In this animation I wanted to do something new, and I set out to do limb animation to make some movements more believable. The firs time you see it in the video at 00:04 and you can clearly see how girls arms and legs move as if she is trying to balance her self upon falling. This is an enhanced version and I've made a draft some time ago to show people where I want things to be in the Master edit. Here is the Draft version:

                          

 Funny, but the biggest struggle in this animation I had was with the soundtrack.(http://ccmixter.org/files/wired/91)
 I wanted it to be spot on, but it just wouldn't fit. And I had to use it, it was part of the assignment. So I've made some tweaks to it, changing to a faster speed and a lower pitch, adding some effects on Adobe Soundbooth, to make it "spicier" and here it was, a version I thought might work. Adding some addional sound clips did the job nicely,
 The other thing was the background for the last scene. It was hard to compile everything I needed for it to look at least good. A lot of work in Adobe Photoshop. Custom signs for the school on the walls and gates to sell the look of an expensive, sort of X-men themed, mansion.
 I had a lot of fun working on this one, and put a lot of effort to make it look as it looks. I would go back and fix some timing issues and work more on some VFX for them to look crispier. But overall I'm very pleased with the result, and, judging from the feedback I got, so are the viewers.

Thank you very much for reading all this,
Ed.

P.S. Here is a clip of the very first animation I've made a few years ago. Lots of Photoshop and a little AE animation: