I came across the game Animal Crossing : City Folk through my housemates heavy gaming obsession, and thought it had some relevance to the Digital Cultures Brief. The game is essentially a virtual life simulation, much in the way that The Sims is, and even Second Life. Players are able to meet their friends online and converse with them as game offers the use of Wii-speak. The thing that interests me about all of this is the fact that the game is aimed at a pretty young target audience, meaning a lot of kids today are growing up with all of these really advanced interactive features, so in the future they'll be expecting everything else to have the same level of interactivity. This means as designers we need to be aware of our future audiences expectations, as a lot of the things that are currently standard won't cut it with the younger generation when they grow up.
Up next, Nabaztag!!
One of the more positive things I've come across while researching RFID tags is Nabaztag, which is a plastic rabbit with an RFID tag in its nose and Wi-Fi in its ears. This little contraption sits next to your computer and can speak out information from the web for you, from news reports to weather. Yup, great. And as I read on one website ' Your kids will surely appreciate it as the rabbit can read out RFID tagged children books which mean it could take over the role of child's grandmother with ease.' So off to the retirement home with you grandma, nabaztag's made you obsolete.
For the Digital Cultures and Technologies module I've been watching several sci-fi films, to see some different possibilities/interpretations of what the future may hold. A particular standout was eXistenZ, which I think confronts a very important issue with immersive gaming. With peoples desire to become more and more deeply involved with their game playing experiences the question has to be asked, if you are that deeply immersed in the experience, how do you know what's reality anymore? The film ends with the people who entered the game at the start of the film not being able to tell whether they've actually left the game or not. An important message there methinks.
I also read the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, which also goes heavily into people immersing themselves into virtual worlds, and it is cited as being the book in which the term 'cyberspace' was first coined, and was also the inspiration for the film the Matrix. I'd previously read another of Gibsons novels, Pattern Recognition, which personally I enjoyed significantly more than Neuromancer. I guess as I've already seen the ideas laid down in this book brought to life more vividly in the years since its release, It didn't have the impact it would've had, but I can see that at the time of its publication it would've been a pretty big deal. Some of the ideas in it are very interesting, the concept of being able to jack into someone elses body, see through their eyes and feel the sensations they're feeling is definately something that I'd like to see in reality, it could do a lot in helping peoples empathy for others.
Having had a first little look around the world of second life, the first thing that came to my mind was 'why?'. I found it much like how I could never see the point in sitting playing The Sims video game, getting my character a job and a girlfriend, when I really should be doing these things in real life. Its a very detailed environment visually, which offers lots of possibilities for creating a completely individual character, building a house, making clothes and objects, and again 'why?'. I can see the benefits of an environment like this for social interaction for people with disabilities, but beyond that I can't help but thinking how people must waste a significant portion of their actual lives 'living' their second lives.
To work out a walk cycle for the Dr. Doom character in my animation, I took two series of photographs of myself walking, one side on and one from behind. This was so that I could see the key moments of movement that occur when walking, so that I could translate them into my characters movements. I wore a green hooded coat during these shots, to be as similar to Dooms cloaked hooded figure as possible.
Then I spent a bit of time walking backwards and forwards trying to time how long it took me to take X no of steps over certain distances, and noting at which point during my steps my body dipped or raised, so I could time my characters walk with this to ensure it had a natural rhythm.
I decided to trace over the images of myelf and modify the length of the coat to make it look like a cloak to use them for the actual walk cycle. I wasn't too concerned that it wasn't going to look exactly like Dr. Doom as I was happy for him to be a bit incognito until his identity's revealed at the end. After getting halfway through creating the walkcycle however, I decided to pull the plug on the idea for two reasons. Firstly, I found I actually didn't like the look of the character, and decided I'd be better off using actual images of Doom from the comic books, as the character simply looked too unlike him. Secondly, the walk wasn't working out quite so well. I'd created the body in seperate sections: a main body, an upper and lower arm section for each arm, an upper and lower section for each leg and seperate feet so they could pivot onto the ball of the foot as the leg came up for the stride. Testing the cycle halfway through its creation, I found strange things were happening, one foot was leaping away from the lower leg and reaching its destination before before the rest of the leg, then snapping back onto it, and the right arm was shortening and lenghthening through its swing, making it look pretty weird. So, for these reasons I decided not to waste anymore time on it, and to go back and have a fresh start with a new character graphic. Below is the half completed walk cycle I abandoned.
For the architecture in the street of my animation I headed out into the city with my camera and took photos of various buildings, so that I could pick between various elements of them and combine them to make my own building. I wanted the Marvel building itself to have an archaic quality about it, to emphasise the old way of doing things, and to contrast with the modern towerblocks beside it. I found an archway in Leeds uni that I really liked as the main door to the Marvel building.
I took the above pic into illustrator and turned it into a graphic using the pen tool, then added it into my building front.
I wanted to have glowing lamposts in the street as it's supposed to be night time. Rather than tracing out one from a photograph I made my lampost using illustrators 3D tools. I was really impressed how you can make a 3D graphic from a single line draming using the revolve effect.
I created the main post and the head of the lamp seperately so I'd be able to lay the glowing light between them. I'm really pleased with the final result, and the lamposts add a nice bit of atmosphere to the street.
As for the buildings themselves, I've now realised I went about their creation in a rather backwards fashion. I transformed some rectangles into 3D objects using the extrude and bevel effect, and then created graphics for the building fronts. I created arched church style windows for the marvel building to keep with the ancient look I wanted, and they juxtapose nicely with the billboard style Marvel sign mounted on the top of the building. I then used the map art option to add them to the faces of the 3D towers. Afterwards it became clear to me it would have been much simpler, and would have looked slightly better, to just use the extrude and bevel effect on the building front graphics I'd made. Still, learning the long way round's better than not learning at all.
For the animation module is was initially drawn to the Marvel brief, as I felt it offered a lot of interesting possibilities. I was slightly unsure of the limitations of having to use their pre-existing elements for the animation, but I had an idea pretty much straight away so I decided to go with it. My initial idea was to be aimed at a younger age group, using characters present in recent successful film adaptations of Marvel comics, namely X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, The Hulk and Ironman. My idea was influenced by the intro to the original X-men animated cartoon.
It was to involve key major characters bursting from the paper pages of comic books, e.g. Wolverine slashing out of the page, Spiderman swinging through the page, and to then have them all racing towards a point from different directions, converging at the same time as in the end to the X-men cartoon intro. Here's said intro, just because its a great start to a classic cartoon.
Though I really liked this idea, and spent a lot of time searching for suitable images from various archived sources of Marvel comics, I decided not to use the idea, as I felt it wasn't going to turn out as I wanted due to the difficulties of finding and modifying the images I'd need. So after going back to the drawing board and kicking around a few ideas, I settled on something completely different. The idea I decided to use involves a very minimal use of character, with the identity of the character (Dr. Doom) only being made absolutely clear at the end. This idea is aimed more at a slightly older audience, people who have been collectors of comics for years, who either have vast collections of old comics and like to keep them in immaculate condition and are reluctant to read them and/or have missed certain issues of their favourite comics at some point in the past. The idea is to show how the vast back catalogue of comics produced by marvel is now easily available in one place online.
Style-wise I'd had the idea of everything being very greyscale until the end when the shot moves out to reveal the computer screen, at which point it would transition to colour. I was interested in having the look of old, uncoloured comic books for the first section as its supposed to represent the old way of doing things. I toyed with the idea of having everything purely black and white with single touches of colour in a Sin City style, but in the end I decided to stick mainly within shades of grey and use colour for a few important elements, such as Doom himself and the Marvel logo. Here's the animatic for my animation:
I've just noticed the sound is out of sync on here, it runs fine on the original QT movie i made, so I can only assume its something to do with bloggers video hosting.
I've been looking into RFID tags, mainly their current and possible commercial uses rather than any artistic ones. Pretty crazy stuff going on with these really, the most extreme being the insertion of the passive variety (no internal power source) into the human body for reasons including security and, bizarly, VIP nightclub entry. RFID tags are also generating a degree of concern in some quaters, and rightly so. Though transmission ranges for the currently available passive tags aren't sufficiently large enough, when they do inevitably become further reaching then some quite worrying possibilities are opened up. I'm specifying passive tags as this particular type is able to be printed in a sticker, or a label in clothing. Essentially what this means is if you have a product with one of these tags in then your movements can be tracked anywhere within transmission range of the tag reader.
At the moment they're not quite so common, but with a few major retailers investing in them, and the cost of their production coming down, they're set to replace barcodes in the near future.
