Log: Week 7

Week 7 Interactive Project

Feb 25 – Mar 02

I am suddenly all excited about my project. I finally got to a point where I felt I had done enough research to approach the ‘professionals’ of the Second Life Machinima makers. I have been a frequent browser of the forums and joined the mailing list for the Machinima group on the 2^nd Life (e)mailing list and I have been interested to read the various requests and comments that you get in this kind of mailing group. It has been a good way of being able to view some of the newest offerings by the group.

So I posted a request for assistance on the machinima forum on the 2ndLife website and also e-mailed it to the group on machinima@lists.secondlife.com

Within 2 days I had replies with offers of help, costumes and props from a few people, which I have included in my filed research/work folder. Among these people were Cecil Hirvi and AWM Mars (In World names) who are listed in the SecondLife Wiki pages under Machinima Content Companies. Which can be found at

 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Machinima_Content_Companies

AWM Mars said “Hello,
This is a very noble cause, and I think we can help you here.
IM either me or Pixie Tungl ingame please and we can setup a meeting to discuss details.”

 

As it turns out Pixie Tungl is the 2ndLife PA to AWM Mars who seems to head up the SecondLife Company of WBA Advertising. They make promotional movies in 2ndLife and also show movies among other things, it looks like a professional outfit and I am pleased to have had a reply from them. More information can be found on their website here

 

http://www.wba-advertising.com/

 

I have had replies from AWM on a forum thread when I said I was having problems with one of the video capture packages I tried. He was very informative and helpful then so I shall be making contact with AWM Mars and/or Pixie Tungl over the next couple of days to find out how we might collaborate over this project. This company seems to have done some good work and has quite a few clients and I am looking forward to speaking with AWM.

Cecil Hirvi wrote

“I can do a pretty mean, “Aarghh me mateys!” in voice.
-c”

I can only assume this is an offer of an ‘Actor’ for my project as Cecil acts in his own machinima. I don’t really mind what he does to help as I have seen the amount of films he has produced and I think it would just be good to have someone as well respected as he is in this circle along for the ride.

Cecil composes music, photographs, writes and produces in real life and is a machinima maker in 2^ndLife. His online portfolio includes work for educational institutions and can be found at

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?p=r&user=CecilHirvi&page=1

 

Log: Week 5

Week 5 Interactive Project

Feb 11 – Feb 17

I went to visit Adam Soler’s shop and purchased some clothing for my avatar. I purchased his hoodie tops in for when I want to look preppy and one of his Vixen outfits. I know it seems silly but I really don’t like to dress my avatar in clothes that are too revealing. I spent a lot of time and some Linden dollars on a shape that seemed fairly ok and some nice hair. Well, a few hair pieces and an extra freebie shape and skin, just to ‘feel right’ when I am communicating in world. I haven’t been too prim about it but I wouldn’t feel right as a fluffy bunny when talking to people in a semi-professional capacity, nor do I want her to look like a page 3 model in skimpy clothes. So I was really pleasantly surprised when I struggled to choose something in Lookr. It’s all a bit hip and trendy! Never one to be labelled a fashion victim, I just couldn’t do it, so I finally went for the Vixen design outfit which is a pair of jeans with a long jacket which is not dissimilar to some of the stuff I wore before I got pregnant and fatter. I still wear that kind of stuff, just a bit baggier these days, which brings me on to how vain we are about our online personalities. I am really quite amused by it and by the fact that I also fell into the same trap. In fact I went as far as coming up with a reason to join up properly to SecondLife so that I could get money to spend on stuff. There are ways to earn L$ in world but they are time consuming and answering questionnaires to get a few pence really isn’t for me, added to that fact a lot of the available questionnaires are not for people in the UK.

I began roughing out the interface of my game in my sketchbook. I found an article in the .net magazine on using hand drawn elements well on a web site and having looked at the general title pages and interfaces of various games, I think I’d like to go this way with my designs as I think it may work well with the pirate theme.

Log: Week 4

Week 4 Interactive Project

Feb 05 – Feb 10

As far as the character design has gone for the Discworld characters, I have been looking around for people to draw as source material. Seems everyone is busy these days. So I took a look through my partners photography collection, he is a photographer. I found a few images to use but this isn’t as easy as I thought it might be. I have let life get in the way of my drawing over the last couple of years, and I have been agonising over what style to do them in and how they should look. ~I asked Luke to show me some more of the artwork he liked and he found some images that helped. They showed the initial drawn character and the 3D character that was eventually derived from it. I really need to go back to him with something fairly quickly.

In my own project, and whilst I was mooching about I decided to pop over to Adam Fairhead’s SecondLife concern, Lookr which he runs under the name of Adam Soler, to see how he was getting on and what kind of clothes he was selling. I had been interested in Adams project from the beginning and it was thanks to him that I looked at SecondLife at all. I originally started to look at it as a massive ‘poser’ type program, where I could dress up a 3D character, position them and take snapshots to use to illustrate my work. But as things progressed and my research took me further into the realms of SecondLife I realised that here was a whole world of possibilities, if only I could find my niche. I was interested in finding out how Adam was getting along with his venture. As it turned out his new shop is very pleasant. It appears to be underwater but that doesn’t prevent the store from looking nice and modern, with places to sit and chat as well as the actual shop which has some really nice looking clothes for male and female avatars.

I did actually try to catch up with Adam in his store and unfortunately I had a problem with my system so that all I could see was my avatar losing its clothes and running off into the distance. I still haven’t worked out if it was just a glitch or a mouse problem, as this was around the time I began to have a problem with my computer mouse.

I have spent an awful lot of time searching SecondLife for a place to film in and I have come across some interesting people along the way some of whom have offered me in world friendship (for ease of future contact) and also offered their help if I need more help. I need to formulate a document to send around to the groups as a request for help. I have really had an issue with this for some reason. I think it was because I still feel so new to a lot of this and I needed to feel I can talk about what I want to do without looking like a complete newbie. The same really goes for your avatar too. I found the better my avatar looked the more time people were willing to spend talking to me in world. I guess what Adam said about that is true. I should possibly send him a note or e-mail to this effect. Although I have to say, if your female avatar shows any amount of flesh then you tend to get hit on by females as well as males, this can be really irritating but I found the ‘Kiss My But’ gesture quite appropriate when used with the teleport facility.

Log: Week 3

Week 3 Interactive Project

Jan 28 – Feb 04

This week I took some lessons from Luke on 3D studio max. I didn’t actually make anything but he ran me through the tools available and showed me the possibilities. He also showed me how time consuming it can be and just why rendering is one of those things that I hear complained about so often. Although this is an art form I would love to devote more time to, I do not feel that it would be appropriate to embark on that course until after I have finished my course work, at least for this Uni year. So I shall endeavour to learn some of it over the summer holidays and use available resources for the sake of my sanity and my Interactive Project.

I did some work with the camera controls in second life and also revisited the Silver Bells and Golden Spurs website to refresh my memory of what could be done.

It has to be said that my camera work is jerky and I am not initially very good at this. I can but persevere.

 

Log: Week 2

Week 2 Interactive Project

Jan 21 – Jan 27

We talked about his characters and Luke then asked me if, as part of my work for him, I would like to design some characters for him. I jumped at the chance. Oh to pick up a pen again would be such fun. At least I thought so at the time, with hindsight I might think differently.

We discussed and looked at styles of artwork and film previously used for the Terry Pratchett Discworld and Characters.  It was at this point when I asked what style he would like them in, that it became apparent that we would need to do some serious research into artists and illustrators of the printed page which I could show him, and the type of digital art so predominant on the web, which Luke could introduce me to. I noticed he had a book of Gustav Dore’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy and this led to a further discussion of some of the world’s best artist and illustrators past and present and the state of our art education. I don’t mind admitting I am appalled by the seeming lack of artistic historical knowledge being taught to our young people, particularly in the design education field. We decided that it would be a good idea to go and visit some art galleries to see some of these beautiful and fantastic images in the flesh, so to speak. I mentioned a few of my experiences with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites when I actually stood in front of them for the first time.

I have also been frequenting SecondLife to price up land, costumes and props again just to make sure I had it right. I think I did. My findings confirmed that my original budget plan is correct. I am also getting around in SecondLife and chatting to people just to get me into the swing of things. I found and joined the Machinima list in the Groups on the SecondLife Website and I have been looking through the Machinima forums trying to gauge who does what, and how and who seems to know what they are doing, for future reference.

There is a particular guy, Cecil Hirvi, who make ‘Borg Films’. Not sure I would make these futuristic films but then you never know. He seems quite well respected though and has lots of his SecondLife films on YouTube.com.

Signs as True Type

My Font

Log: Week 1

Week 1 Interactive Project

Jan 14 – Jan 20

This week Luke and I spent some time revisiting our IPP and discussing where we had got to and the fact that we did less over the holidays than we really expected to. All the best of intentions but not enough time. Luke is producing a marketing piece for a MMPORPG based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I spoke to Luke about his project. He said, that he wanted to change the focus of his project from the motion capture and greenscreening that he’d had in mind to a more interactive part of the project like the game, the design and interface. This made more sense really as the movie element wasn’t really very interactive and the whole look of the game was actually a big part of it and really the interface would be one of the first things you come across when playing it.

 

I have my storyboard ready but Luke needs to do his yet, so we had a look at the type of things we might need 3D modelling to use in both of our projects. Luke decided to have a look through the SecondLife website to see how I might use the facilities on offer with my project in mind. He mentioned the fact that it is open source and that I could possibly (at a cost) set up my own server and have my own part of SecondLife. I don’t mind admitting that this appealed to me. My own little world. Well, my partner Mr P always said he wished he could get tickets to ‘Shelly World’, he firmly believes that he could make a fortune selling them. Although it would be ‘Shellby Shelford’s World’ after my 2^ndLife name.

This week have downloaded Wink and Camtasia to try out as screen capture devises. I know that Bells and Spurs was done in Wink from the research I did last term, so I thought I would try it.

I have joined the SecondLife Educational (or SLED) mailing list, and contacted the owners of the Education Island Uk part of SecondLife who have suggested a few things and also mentioned that there were somewhere in the region of 240 members in their group most of whom were willing to volunteer for a good cause.

 

Typography Module General Write up

 

 

 

Typography – a dying art form?

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/typography_a_dying_art_form/

 

Mark Boultons page is one I have bookmarked for future reference.

 

An interesting page. The initial article asks a very simple question, which is answered eloquently and not without some passion by the various contributors to the page. It seems to me that there is a definite feeling that Type as a craft, as something to be taught properly and appreciated for it’s own artistic merit and craftsmanship is lacking.

 

There is a definite leaning toward a hope of seeing type evolving with the ever better tools at our disposal as web developers/designers. I can see the point one person made about the trades in which you would have learned to become a craftsman at Typography are dying out, and the opinion that “we’re currently in a much better place than we were even a few years ago, which, in my opinion, is strong evidence for typography’s continued vitality as an art form and indispensible communicative entity.”

 

 

 

The sentiments of the above page, are echoed in the introduction of Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style, the bulk of which can be found here

 

http://webtypography.net/toc/

 

“For too long typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, particularly in body copy. In years gone by this could have been put down to the technology, but now the web has caught up. The advent of much improved browsers, text rendering and high resolution screens, combine to negate technology as an excuse.”

 

 

The next thing I looked at

http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr

 

“sIFR-One way to use embodied fonts or as the page is titled;”

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

This is definitely something that I shall be looking into further as I continue through the module as it will take some looking into.

As an aside I do like to see the old ‘Hacker ethic’ still alive and kicking at the forefront of the industry.

“We’ve released sIFR to the world as open source, under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge.”

I do think following some of the links provided are worthwhile too, this one is the original post that Mike Davidson made about this.

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr

I shall be looking onto this a bit more as I would like to incorporate this type of text into some of my web design, as previously I have created text in Photoshop and used the jpg image in a web page to ensure that a particular piece of text looks that same regardless of the browser.

 

The Makings of A font.

Having spent some time with Luke photographing various shapes that might either provide a letter shape or some element of on, I then started to sketch some of the shapes roughly into my pad. The photographs can be veiwed here; 
http://www.shellintons.com/typo_pics.html

I read through the various links on the Moodle site page that were provided. I have written about those as in the overall module report as I think they are pertinent to the whole module.

I found that I particularly liked the shapes from the Dummy photograph and some of the iron work from the church gates. some of the shapes reminded me of the crop circles I had cause to research and I decided to follow that as a theme for my font.

So I tried a few different ways of mark making but I struggled to get the perfect lines and circles that I felt I needed if I were using my Crop Circle influence. Most of the images I have seen and the one crop circle I have actually been in, most of the lines and cirlces tend to be as perfect as you could make them.

I began by making a document in Photoshop. I made several layers which contained the common elements I would use in the letters. I then opened a small document in which I was able to drag elements over from the main document and create my font that way. I saved each letter as a layered psd and then flattened the image to drag and drop the finished letter into the main large document.

Saving the PSD layered version enabled me to reuse parts of the letters as elements for new ones. I feel this enabled me to easily keep some kind of uniformity and this in turn gave me scope to play around with the various ideas which suggested themselves to me whilst I was working.

The next step was to check out the FontCreator program which I downloaded. Admitedly it was the trial version but enough for the sake of this project and to get a taste of the program and for making Fonts.

I had a good look through the User Manual before making the font, as I too often just open new software and jump in before really getting a good idea of how to use it. This has, in the past proved to be one way of learning a program but considering the time limit on this part of the module, it seemed wisest to at least read the instructions. The manual does make it seem remarkably easy.

There is some interesting information regarding ‘True Type’, ‘Open Type’ and ‘Font Copyright’ which, I believe, should be read for future reference by anyone making a font.