Well last week was the 4D deadline… There were some problems right up to the last minute such as flash stopping on one frame and freezing the movie for no real reason apart from it being Flash! I had to pull off a couple of late nighters to get it finished and by the end of it the first chapter was driving me insane (Once you know all the lines just from listening it gets worrying). I would of like to of done more graphics wise and maybe produced it in premiere/After Effects to get the better sound quality but as always time was against me.

The presentation went quite well… I think perhaps I was so tired I just didn’t care anymore. All the films were amazing in their own ways… some with really good graphics and others with interesting narratives. We had a good review for ‘Who the Fuck is Alice’. So fingers crossed!!

Big thanks to the family and Kat

Well it’s taken two days hard work but my final year project is finally complete and in its testing stage.

Currently the project works by using motion tracking with a very primitive form of gesture recognition. The screen is divided into several sections (Percussion, String, Brass, Wood Wind), each section holding a different sound. The partcipant has to draw a circle over a section to activate a sound… The sound can be looped depending on how many circles a partcipant draws i.e. drawing 3 circles will loop the sound 3 times.

The sound can then be manipulated in speed by using the bar at the bottom. When the programme recognises two points over the same area within the bar it will change it to that location. This also works with the volume bar along the right hand side.

I’ve attached a couple of movies that record me playing with it… currently it tracks my blue pen (thanks barclays for your free pens) but when I come to testing it next week in the small media lab I will be using my light wand.

Movie01

Movie02

Movie03

Movie04

Attached are the links to download my dissertation and the cover.

Dissertation

Only 2 more weeks till 4D hand in and then a weekend to dissertation… have been putting the graphics together today and it took me pretty much the hwole day to make it look like a page was turning and even then it still doesn’t look 100% great.

The voices have been recorded with my family playing quite a few characters. Because the recording was left so late it meant that we couldn’t search around for people with voices that would be suited for what we wanted.

I’ve pretty much finished my critique I just have to stick in the evaluation and appendix.. I think we should have it finished before the deadline but I don’t think it will be like what I hade imagined.

I’ve uploaded a quite shot of the book graphic..

Well it’s just less than a month till final dissertation hand in. I have my introduction and all 4 chapters complete and am now in the task of writting my conclusion and then completing my abstract and I am done!!! It was quite a struggle to get it finished and last thursday I pretty much spent the whole day finishing off two chapter so that Mike could read it on friday and give me some feed-back. Luckily he seems to really like it and weirdly I have enjoyed writting it quite a bit and would love to take this onto a PhD or something but am not too sure if that will be possible….

Any ho when it is all complete I shall post it up for the world to view…

During one of my escapes from work and surfing youTube I found this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46eaeAfeqw

Whoop…. I finally finished my graphics today. Which was a holdload of delphi programming which I have never used before so it’s made for some fun times. To be honest the coursework is a bit unfair as it’s only a 10 credit module and the coursework is only 40% of that and you have to put in more work than you would do for a 10 credit module. By the end of today I was so fed up of the rubbish program I gave up trying to comment it. I am just glad it’s over and now I just have to panick about everything else.

It has come to the point where my porject is completly stuck. I have spent 3 days sloving a whole load of errors with my neural network and now it just doesn’t want to compile because of one error that I cannot solve. So if anyone knows java/processing - help!

Friday we had to pitch the Alice in Wonderland idea to Mike. Michelle wasn’t too keen on the idea and thought Mike wouldn’t be either but I thought it was worth a shot as I really liked the idea of it and had written a draft script for one of the chapters.

When talking with Mike we decided to take a couple of chapters from the book and convert them into internet conversations. So now we need at least 8 peoples voices for recording the different characters.

The story will be told to the rhytm of people typing. For example when someone if arguing the typing becomes quicker and louder but when normal conversation is happening it’s slow but sets the rythm for the whole story.

I choose the idea of Alice in Wonderland as it shows Alice’s journey through a stange world and how she makes friends through different circumstances. (In our film it will be about how she makes friends through the internet) But also how she struggles with changing her height so much (In our film it will be about how she changes her identity, with each new friendship she forms)

We decided not to use shots of people because it spoils the story a bit so instead were going to build it in flash so that when people speak the words appear on the screen and all the words will build up until the screen is totally full with words and then thats when the story ends.
So all in all Alice in Wonderland becomes a metaphor for the story of friendship and identity… ta dahhhh