Identities Project Update

At the moment I am really quite pleased with the progress I am making.
I am still doing the animation side of things in 3D Max, but hoping that it should be complete by the end of this week and then I can start the Flash side of things.

So far I have a my welcome page set out how I originally planned. Although there is an addition of a letter. This explains what the site is for and a bit about me. Where the address would normally be is a list of links to the interactive elements of the page.
Letter header:

This was done in 3D Max using a projection.

My basic logo:

Although it looks a lot like a pretzel, it is supposed to look like a 'J' and a 'P' intertwined.

I had the idea of making this into a magic8 ball, the only problem being mapping my logo on the base. Although, I do quite like the idea and might use it anyway without the logo if i can't do it, as it is visually quite effective.


To bring all my objects together I have created a shelf. Below is a render of what it looks like at the moment. Each of these objects are going to link to something. The Letter will open similar to it does at the start. The sketchbook will link to my blog. The photo album will open, and the pages will turn when a page is clicked on. The duck will link to some examples work that I have done during the year. The monopoly house will take you back to the closed door. The Bubble Bottle will take you to a bubble game, where you have to burst the bubbles to achieve a good score. The picture hanging on the wall, will take you to my avatar animation. I am hoping to include the magic8ball but we'll have to see about that one. I have also made an ipod. I meant to include this in my animation but it proved to take too much time, but I would really like to include it in this and make interactive, so that the user can change the between a few selected tracks. I'm not how difficult this is going to be though. I have a feeling I am being too ambitious and I'm sure that flash won't be very kind to me either.

Interactive objects:
1) Bubble Bottle/Game
2) Photo Album
3) Ipod?
4) Magic8ball
5) Door

To Do List(in order of priority)
* make a label for the bubble bottle and map on
* map onto photo album
* sort out the animation for the letter
* animate ipod
* render everything and take it into Flash!
* re-render animation
* buy www.jacquipickup.co.uk
* magic8ball: animate

Drawing Out Exhibition

In the week beginning the 14th of April a group of us - Steve, Troy, Ed, Laurel, and myself- were asked to facilitate a voluntary whiteboard animation in Bonington. Unfortunately not as many people volunteered as was hoped and we ended up doing a lot of it ourselves! but as you can see from above it still went really well. It was linked to the 'Drawing Out' exhibition that is currently available to view. this is also showing in the Bonington Building.
through doing it we were able to explore the possibilities of whiteboard animation in much depth, and it has given me an urge to do more.

Influence

This advert for Pizza Hut is a really well thought out piece of work. without the music it wouldn't quite be the same but the concept is really quite ingenious. I like the wallpapers and variety of different frames mostly, and that is what i have taken from it.

Identity Project 2 Brief_Ideas

For the second part of the identities project, I want to incorporate as much of my modeling and animation from the first 'avatar' assignment. Not necessarily to save time, but to create continuity through the projects and also this way I will be able to improve what I already have and so insure a higher quality of work. I put a lot of effort and not to mention, time into the first project and although there were a few things which I would've tweeked if I had a bit more time; I was really quite happy with my final outcome.


Welcome Page:
















Full shot of the door which zooms into the door knocker...

















The door knocker will be a button and when pressed it will trigger the knocker to knock on the door (possibility for sound fx) and door will open.

















Simultaneously the camera will focus on the welcome mat with the letters strewn on it. These letters will act as links to other pages and hopefully the images/information on the letters will have some relevance to the link.


I am going to re-model the door knocker and improve the lighting as this is the first page the viewer will see i want it looking good!


Photo Album:
I will model an interactive Photo album where the viewer can turn the page...this will incorporate picture but also AV files. The animation will be done in 3d Studio Max.

Bubble game:
Using the bubbles from my animation I am going to create a simple game where the viewer can burst as many bubbles in an allocated time period.

wAlKeR...

This is my walker from the Heirarchies exercise that we did in one of our seminars, I learnt a lot from this exercise as i hadn't used a lot of the links, IK chains and contraints before. its a shame that i have made my avatar already as i could have developed a more advanced person if i knew this previously, but saying that i am quite happy with the simplicty of my avatar and its environment as that was the originl plan anyway.

Cars

These are my old cars, thought i would have them scooting around! they are just splines that i've extruded and maped so very simple!

bUbBlEs!!!

Using a tutorial from a fellow blogger ( video-tutorials-chile.blogspot.com )and also 3D studio max help i have managed to create a Particle system. I have now got to find out how to animate this...

Guest Lecturer_Encounters

Ruth Ben-Tovim, a theatre designer came in to give us a lecture to tell us about her on-going project: Encounters. Her and friend and Trish O'Shea have acquired disused shops and explored ways of enticing the local community into creating collaborative art. This project began by finding a few plastic farm animals down Sharrow's high street in Sheffield. Sharrow is where Ruth Ben-Tovim lives and also where they opened their first shop with the help of funding.

They have taken the idea of communal identity into a number of different streams: Lost&Found: where they planted similar plastic toys around Sharrow with a note on: if found return to...
the moey: a mobile
Theatre/performance: made gift bags with activities to complete inside, actors recited stories they had collected previously from people in Sharrow..
Collections: finger prints, journeys, stories etc from villagers,
exhibiting in Venice,
Archaeological dig: dug up a small area, collected and labelled everything they found

I find this project really interesting and refreshing. We live in a age where we are gradually becoming more and more distanced from one another, where not knowing your neighbour is becoming common. For art to bring a community together and at the same time (in some instances) produce quite personal documentation of individuals in a community, is really quit inspiring. It also explore the idea of multi-authoring. the information and artefact's they continue to collect through a variety of ways, has little to do with them personally although by them providing the means it is still classed as their work. I haven't heard of a artist doing anything like this before and for this reason I find it hard to categorise what they do. Ruth described themselves as "forensic artists", and I think this as close to a 'style' as it gets. They work on many levels of interactivity and there work is extremely original.

They have a really good website as well: www.themoey.co.uk
www.wearencounters.co.uk