Sian's Blog 12/08/08

Today we have started to make the background and buttons in flash which we are going to place the pictures into.
Our starting page looks like this:



We have used simple colours such as greys and white so when the pictures flash up in colour they contrast to the background.
There are four buttons on the left hand side of the page for each of the categories.
When one of these buttons are clicked on, the word of the category appears vertically next to the box that flashes all the pictures we have collected in a sequence.

Happy:












Dark:













Significant:












Lifestyle:













And also we have made a button called 'All' which collectively shows all of the groups of pictures next to each other:













This is our final working multimedia project. x

Sian's Blog 10/08/08

We have decided to create our presentation in flash,
we have asked five different people in our class to choose a picture of an object or a scene which makes them:

• 'Happy'
• Reminds them of a 'Dark' feeling
  
• Something 'Significant' to them
  
• And something that represents their 'Lifestyle'

we have then collected all of these pictures up an separated them into there categories.

Sian's Blog 03/06/08

I have decided to create my multimedia project in a group of two people...
we are going to create a flash presentation of the four words we decide to choose using buttons to lead to the pictures, and then the pictures will flash from picture to picture to create the mood. I have been researching how the flash layout could look, and have found some ideas that i like. x

Sians Blog 14/05/08

Today we watched a film called Tron made in 1982, about a hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn who is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate known as the Master Control and reconstituted into the internal, 3-D graphical world of computers. It is there, in cyberspace, that Flynn joins forces with Tron to outmaneuver the Master Control program that holds them captive in the equivalent of a gigantic, infinitely challenging computer game.
A hacker is split into molecules and is transported into a computer. In this computer a mean program called Master Control behaves like a dictator. The hacker, who programmed a number of features of the environment he got into, teams up with a book keeping program and his girl-friend and together they try to replace Master Control with Tron. Tron is an honest safety system.
Kevin Flynn is a former employee of the software corporation Encom, now running a arcade. Flynn has been trying to hack into Encom's mainframe computer to find evidence that Encom's senior executive Ed Dillinger stole four video games he created.

Sians Blog 07/05/08

Today we watched a film called Koyaanisqatsi, The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.' Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is based on a collision of two different worlds, urban life and technology versus the environment, the music was composed by Philip Glass. The film isnt so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value, it stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and natural landscapes across the United States. The film starts with an ariel shot of the choppy sea and rows of flowers followed by interperating mans involvement in the enviroment, with shots of a mining truck causing tonnes of toxic smoke into the air, power plants and mining.
The film contains several sequences with recurring musical themes, the chapters on each sequal are seperated and named by the titles of the musical sections:

• Organic
• Resource
• Vessels
• Cloudscape
• Pruit-Igoe
• Slow people
• The Grid
• Microchips
• Prophecies
• Ending

This film made me think about the ways in which i am going to present the words from the four groups of words we were given. I am thinking about using different videos and stitching them together like the koyaanisqatsi film, and also adding text and sound. x

Sians Blog 06/05/08

I have been researching different ways of combining sound and images,
and have found a website that i find interesting:
http://www.thedesignersrepublic.com
I like the use of the moving text and imagery, as the mouse is scrolled over the text it moves, sometimes changes and makes a different sound, while the image flashes from image to image showing different types of text, reflected or lit up on buildings.
I have thought about using the flashing use of imagery and incorporating text and sound into it. x

Sians Blog 30/04/08

Today we watched the video "Pi" which is a disturbing film which many would find hard to understand, it is about a mathematician Maximillian Cohen who is tormented by a severe migraine since he was 6 years old when he stared at the sun. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson. Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life:

• Mathematics is the language of nature
• Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers
• If you graph the numbers in any systems, patterns emerge

Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market, he becomes obsessed with numeric patterns. Due to his research, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with interest in the results of his studies, and by an orthodox Jew follower of the Torah, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God.
Driven to madness, Max experiences another headache and resists the urge to take his pain medication. Believing that the number and the headaches are linked, Max tries to concentrate on the number through the pain. After passing out, Max has a vision of himself standing in a white void and repeating the digits of the number. Whether he is facing God or the vision is just another product of his own mental disorders is not confirmed.

A Fibonacci spiral approximates the golden spiral; unlike the "whirling rectangle diagram" based on the golden ratio, above, this one uses squares of integer Fibonacci-number sizes, shown for square sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34

After watching the film i looked at the bacikground of the film and the mathematical pricipals used. Now i am going to carry on with my research and development of ideas.

Sians Blog 23/04/08

Nigel went through the Multimedia Design Assignment, this module will enable me to develop strategies for multimedia storytelling and narritive creation. It was explained that we have to complete a digital multimedia outcome with the following criteria lists to form my outcome:

• Mood: Happy, Sad, Ecstatic, Melancholy, Reflective, Indifferent.
• Object: Large, Small, Significant, Insignificant, Countable, Non-countable.
• Habitat: Wild, Tame, Dark, Light, Rough, Smooth.
• Lifestyle: Aspiration-al, Reclusive, Representational, Non-representational, Organic, Chemical.

we can choose to use a number of different forms of digital multimedia such as sound, video, images or text. At the moment i think i will explore with video to work towards my final outcome. I can either create a video with a word from each group and stitch them together or collectively create a whole video using a word from each group.

For example: a video that portrays Happy, Significant, Light and Representational. x