Mind Map

Awhile ago we used a mindmapping software and i have often thought of interesting ways to use it. One way would be to map out the plot of a digital distributed video game series. The plot of this video game would become as convoluted as most tv shows plotwise, but would also suffer from the hundreds of variables that the player can make. A mind map showing all the possibilites for story progression availabe to the player would be very, very huge. But this kind of stuff needs to get done right?

Digital Essay

The theme of my digital essay was 'great villians in history, how humanity always gets it wrong.' Basically the argument was that humanity is always mistakenly labelling people and monsters throughout history. The five arguments I used were the Smokers (waterworld), Alien (alien), The romans (real life), Wookies (star wars, real life?) and Vikings (IRL). Using a combination of video clips, images and a chart I set out to prove that these people/monsters were often looked at as being inappropriately evil. I also threw in some book quotes to prove my point.

I enjoyed arguing something in this style, the ability to use videos and images to prove my point is something that appeals to me. It made me feel at points like I was writing an article for Cracked.com or maybe the Onion, which felt excellent. It was also a welcome departure from the regular essays that I write constantly (it's all the history monster wants to eat).

Some difficulties encountered would be trying to keep everything concise, this is a common essay writing problem for me. I can often slip into tangents that don't serve the overall purpose of the essay.

Meme

Made a meme, the theme was delicious moments in history. Cut together some images of hamburgers with various scenes from history, Civil war moments, Napoleon, a spartan warror, julius caesars assassination. Some of them have puns attached, like Julius Caesars being the 'sides of march' as a reference to the ides of march. The biggest difficulty is in just selecting a theme to begin with, there are always limitless possibilities when approaching something like this.

Website Idea

It is a travel website that sells time travelling tours and tickets to famous events throughout history. However something has gone wrong, someone is moving through time erasing parts of the website to cover up their tracks and hide some sort of horrible secret.

So made the video with Xtranormal. Cut it together using the simple, beautiful Windows Movie Maker. Cut out the logo at the end of the first two clips and left it at the end of the final one, the whole piece I mean.

The Good

Ability to plan out scenes. Voices sometimes produce unintentional humour. Good way to plan out a scene and see if your dialog fits together.

The Bad

No character movements, No ability to use own voice (i think). If you want multiple scenes you must do it yourself. All these things may be available in the full version so money could be the issue.

Xtra Normal Piece

Who is the Kestrel?

It is there

Hotspots writeup

The general theme of this piece is the differing amount of perspective there can be about a certain topic. The topic in question was: Deers. What do they think? Are they just mindless biscuit munching drones? The first picture shows the thoughts of the people surrounding the deer. Most of them are envious. They imagine the deer to live the perfect relaxed lifestyle. The deer is well fed, gets to lie about in the sun all day and has none of the concerns that humans do, such as making a living, securing a nice home to live in etc. In a way the deer represents for these observes the culmination of all perfect aspects of life.

The reality is far from this, as is shown in the second picture, which goes into the mind of the deer and observes his thoughts about a life lived in the constant presence of humans. The tone of the second image is different to the first, it deals with more basic concepts. Note also that the deer is not envious of anything, like the humans are. He merely observes what goes on around him. Perhaps the deer is living the dream life that everybody supposes he is.


Working with the technology to create this piece was both new and familiar. The layout of Dream weaver is easy to use and allows you to focus on the creativity side as opposed to when we were writing code in WforW in Year1. It seems like the things I am learning in regards to website design in this subject are going to be more creativity based, which is a positive. Making hotspots is simple and it will be interesting to explore this in the future, muck around with the different things you can do using the program.

There weren't many difficulties when making the piece, other than the usual accidental deleting of certain bits of code, resulting in the whole thing failing. Other than that no problems.

Jack

CLICHE

I tell myself to push the envelope and don't ever give up. Go out in a blaze of glory; it aint over till the fat lady sings. But you should say your prayers, you are going to be pushing up daisies. When push comes to shove you are all bent out of shape. I've had it up to here, your bark is worse than your bite.

I'm playing chess with my friend and I inform him of his imminent loss. He gets fairly upset by this claim, especially when I follow it through by decimating his pawns. Then we have a brief discussion about our favourite dogs.