Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 1

After my recent "success" with Runescape, I thought I doomed to be honest. But thankfully, one of my friends recommended a couple of other online games to look at, and one of them turned out to be my saviour! The first game was called VSide, and it mostly centered around forming and joining parties, socialising, partying etc. I didn;t really get much of a grasp on it, but I thought I'd try it anyways. The character creation system at the beginning is pretty simplistic like Runescape's, because you only get a few hairstyles, tops and such to wear from the off.

Upon downloading the game and getting ready to play, I loaded it up only to be faced with a scary looking menu with several options all the place in different categories. There were venues I could visit, existing parties that could join which were set up by other members and so on. But whenever I tried to visit a venue or a party, I kept getting the same weird error message which just frustrated me as I didn't know what to do at all. Seeing as the game was centered around partying, I figured it wasn't for me anyways, and I decided to leave it and look at Twinity instead.

At first glance of Twinity, I was already impressed especially with the level of character detail, as it seems to be on the same level as Second Life by the looks of it. I had a look around the homepage for the game and I was generally impressed with it, especially seeing as it seemed a lot like Second Life, but I COULD RUN IT. Thus I immediately signed up for this one and got decided to start playing straight away upon installing it.

This screenshot is what I saw when I first loaded up the game anyways. I chose to go to the Welcome Area and I immediately spotted people buzzing around talking to each other, even though it is a bit empty. As you can see though, the character customisation options are definitely more advanced and specific than the other games I mentioned, which pleased me a lot, as I can now create a much more detailed avatar of my inner personality woot :P. There are a couple of options that have intriguied me a fair bit, there's an option to create yoru avatar's face using a photo, which I will test in a minute and report on it. Also in the bottom middle of the screen, there isa silver toolbar with an "animations" option in it. Upon reading the user guide, I found that you can make your character perform a series of preset animations such as dancing and cheering, which is something I usually like in a game with 3D avatars in :P.

In this second screenshot above, I've managed to create the look of my ideal persona. Unfortunately, the range of hairstyles in this game is also fairly limited but it's the best I have seen so far despite that. I really wanted to have a spikey hairstyle for my avatar, but it wasn't available so I chose my next favourite style, the dreadlocks. As I mentioned in the Runescape blog, blue hair is a must for me, hence the blueness of my dreads. I really wanted a fire coloured theme for my character's clothes, and this shirt was the closest I found to it, but I am really fond of the design and colours of it. I thought I'd add fingerless gloves for the fun of it, as I've always imagined my ideal persona to be wearing them, and I added headphones in too, to reflect my deep passion for music and the importance of it in my daily life. The shoes were a brilliant find though, I found some black boots with flames on the side of them, which just screamed out to me to get them. I also put in a random sword because I'm a big fan of sword games, so that's a good way of summarising me I suppose. I am really happy with the appearance of my character despite the lack of a spikey hairstyle, because I feel that my personality truly has been projected onto this chaarcter via his image.

I didn't bother with the feature that lets you put a photo of yourself as your avatar's face because I didn't have a photo that met their requirements, and also I realised more importantly, that this character is supposed to be a self expression of who we are on the inside, so there's no point basing the character's appearance around mine, as I didn't choose how I would look on the outside when I was born, but I chose who I was on the inside when I grew up instead, and that is what is important after all for this module (I have to say though, I think I was starting to sound a little poetic just there!).

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary - Day 1

Day 1:

I found myself unable to run Second Life from my home computer due to an incomptaible graphics card, hence I was faced with quite a dilemma. I didn't want to use World of Warcraft as it meant paying a montly fee which is something I can't afford now as I'm low on money. Thinking of my past experiences with online gaming (which isn't much to be honest), I was faced with having to return to a game I abandoned a long time ago...Runescape.

Going back to it now, it's just as "fun" to play with as it was back then. The biggest problem with Runescape I've felt is the fact if you are "inactive" for a fairly short amount of time, it automatically logs you out, which it's already done to me a few times, as I try to write this blog alongside playing it. The character creation options are very basic too, you can only customise the hairstyles, facial hair, torso, wrists (which has next to no efffect), legs and feet. Sure you do get to customise al the important factors, but the range of options themselves such as available hairstyles is a bit too limited for my liking, and the colours you can pick do need some more shades, as most of the current ones are too bright.

In this screenshot above, I have made my character now, and he's been plonked onto the start of Tutorial Island. Unfortunately with this game being so basic (Im not sure how advanced the Members version is), my character ends up with lacking a lot of detail as you can. I cannot zoom in on him as well, so I had to provide ascreenshot like this I'm afraid, but I have circled who my character is.

This character is a rough example of how I would love to look if I had the choice. I love the mixture of orange, red and yellow to create a firey look, and as you can see, I do love blue hair as well. Due to a very limited range of available clothes, this is nowhere near as detailed as how I imagine my ideal self to be, but I suppose it will do for now.

I will try to create a separate diary for another online game like Second Life or something similar, which has a much more detailed avatar creation system, but as for now I will document a basic diary using Runescape until I find a suitable game.

Narratives: Interactive Narrative Project

The third project for our Narratives module is the study and production of a Flash based Interactive Narrative sequence. Using at least 10 still images and Macromedia Flash CS3, we have to build an interactive story sequence which is affected by the choices the user makes throughout it. Basically, at certain parts of the story, we have to make the user decide what to do in the situation and thus see the consequences, whether it could be progressing the story onwards or coming to an abrupt halt.

User interaction is the core of this project along with the story itself, and we have to try and include as much interactivity in the project as much as possible. This can include clickable buttons or parts of the image, moving around with the mouse and also clicking on a given option when asked what to do next.

To be truly honest, I was stuck for inspiration on this project, not as much as for the One Shot Film but still to a reasonable degree. But then it hit me...I've got quite a lot of games that are pretty much interactive narratives but with a few extra features and such. There's one particular series of games that I own which is what I'm going to base my work around. As I think I mentioned in the past, I produce video based parodies of a Nintendo DS series called Phoenix Wright as a hobby. It's an existing internet trend, but I decided to contribute my own tribute to it which has become pretty successful and well-loved on Youtube since I started making them back in June this year.

The video parodies I make are called Phoenix Wrongs, and the original inventor of them produced them through Macromedia Flash, where as I produced my versions of them through a video editor called Sony Vegas. I have wanted to learn how to make a Phoenix Wrong through Flash though for curiosity's sake as well as it does produce more polished results than a video editor can for this. Hence I decided to combine my Narratives project with my hobby and thus the final idea for my Interactive Narrative was born.

My final idea is going to be an Interactive Narrative based around the Phoenix Wright series, which will involve travelling through various areas one at a time. In each area will be three characters from the series who all have been accused of murder and it's up to to the user to pick who is the guilty party out of the three people. The right choice will move the user forwards, but the wrong choice will either move the user back to the start or preferably just make the choice again. I had 2 of my friends look over the structure map and the basic idea of my project, and they suggested having some sort of a description appearing when you hover over a character. I also told them about a couple of ideas I had in mind, where one of them would be the character changing their pose or expression when you hover over themm which would be easy to do with sprites from the game itself. The other idea is when you hover over a character, a spotlight style effect will appear on the respective character, with the rest of the screen going dark, to help make it more obvious that the characters themselves are interactive.

I really like this final idea that I came up with, and I'm confident that I'll be able to produce it to a pretty reasonable standard at least. It's based on a game which I'm very passionate about and do love interactive narrative work especially in the games that I have. With the previous two projects, as extremely enjoyable as they were to make (especially Pixilation!), I didn't feel they did turn out to be the standard the course expects from us to be honest, especially upon seeing the interactive narrative work by the students who were in the first year last year. That's also part of the reason why I chose to do the Phoenix Wright idea, as it's something that I've been working with for a long time and I'm pretty confident with, hence it should help to improve the actual standard of my work. When it comes to humour, I have to say I am really good at it as shown by my fan's reactions and comments to my videos on Youtube, but prensentation and polish have always been my mortal weaknesses. My videos may excel in the humorous department, but they always lacked the finesse of other videos such as other Phoenix Wrongs made by other fans of the series. I definitely can't pass this course with humour alone, hence why I am determined to bring up my presentation and production skills up to as high as level as possible to help ensure that I do well in this course as well as in the future with anything else.

Narratives: One Shot Film Project: The Videos

This is the original shoot of the One Shot Film project we did:


And this is the edited version of the video that I made myself:

Narratives: The One Shot Film Project - An Insight Into What We Did

One Shot Film: The Meeting
With the Narratives module, our second project for it was all about the "One Shot" method of filming. One Shot filming is where the video is shot with one camera consecutively running throughout without it stopping. The camera can move during it, but for the project we had to work on, we were only allowed to move the camera once.

We had to create our own One Shot film in groups that was based around a fixed title, which was; “The Meeting”. As the title suggests, the film had to be some type of meeting and due to only being allowed one camera movement, we had to rely on other methods to help create the right feel for the film. This included the use of lighting, the content of the script, the position of the camera and how we used the single movement we were given and so on.

In my group, we decided to go for a humorous approach with this film rather than a dramatic one, as we felt we would be able to produce a comical video more easily. The original idea we had was to film a dinner date at an Italian restaurant, where we had a girl waiting there for her date to arrive. We planned on having the waiter gaining an “interest” in the girl and then flirting with her before the date arrives, upon when he does, the waiter suddenly shows a ruder, more “snobbish” side to his personality. We also filmed a test video of the dinner date to see how it turned out, but we felt it wasn’t enough as it was so we worked on a more “fleshed out” and complex idea.

From that idea, we kept the original idea from it being a date, but instead of being just a normal date, we changed the scene to become the setting of a girl trying out speed dating instead. The idea this time would be that the girl would be sat a table, and a range of weird and disturbing characters would visit her during the speed dating service. We found a suitable location to shoot the film in, but we did have some problems with setting up the lighting and positioning the microphone. We managed to sort it out in the end though; the biggest problem that remained was the tables we used. The tables were pretty high up along with the chairs, and basically the camera had to be positioned behind the person who was sitting opposite the girl but it had to be above them as much as possible so you only saw their hands. This was quite a pressing problem as we had to replace the chairs with smaller ones and also had to “duck” to avoid our heads appearing in front of the camera.

The reason we chose to film the person’s hands though was because we had more characters in the film than we had people to play them, so we tried to give create the impression that there is a different person sitting there each time. We were also quite limited on time and budget, so we couldn’t afford to spend money on buying costumes, which would probably only be used for this film only, hence we improvised here. We had a lot of characters altogether in the background and foreground, thus we had to create some sort of schedule so that we could have our characters enter and leave with ease as well as giving us time to get into position and such.

When it came to filming the final video, we did end up having to retry it several times as expected due to unexpected problems, including a girl who walked in playing her drum during one of our final takes, hence ruining it. The video we have right now is where I said to the group we should stop filming now and take what we have now as the final version, which was really lucky because literally five minutes later, the African society turned up next door and started singing, dancing and playing drums which would thus created some sort of a rainforest or jungle style setting due to the “backing music” coming from that society. We still made minor mistakes in the final shoot particularly me, but we are all happy with what’s been produced and it has turned out better than we expected especially in certain places.

When I looked over the video, I noticed things that I could change or improve to be honest, and I guess that what helps to form a great designer/inventor/creator or the like. If I had another chance to produce a film like this with more time to develop it, I would be happy to as I wish I had more time to rehearse my parts and also plan more ideas for it. The final video did turn out to be very long in length by the way, we were thinking of cutting out sketches from it, but we may just keep it as it is.

Successful Practise – Colour and Light Online Journal Task

Double Dervish by Rebecca Partridge (2008)



In this piece of work by Rebecca Partridge, she has used the various different properties of colours to an astounding effect. As you can see in the picture, the painting is all about coloured light prisms and how they create new colours upon making contact with one another and blending together. The amount of colours used in this picture, the size of it in general and how the artist has managed to portray them blending together is pretty staggering.

There are mostly bright colours used in this painting, but the artist has used blending capabilities of colour itself in order to produce darker versions of colours that appear in the painting. If you study the painting carefully, you can see due to the extreme mixture of colours, the theories of clashing, complimentary and harmonising colours are all in abundance around the painting. For example, you can see “cool yellow” prism next to a “cool green” prism, which is an example of harmonising colours.

If you also look towards the outer areas of the painting, the colours are at their most luminous, which is due to what I believe is called “tinting”. Tinted colours seem to have a faded style effect to them and are significantly brighter than their pure, original hues. To me, it seems to be creating a ‘colour pastel’ effect, which is often very luminous and colourful. The artist has used Colour and Light to a very interesting, stylish and unique effect in this painting, which also seems to be evident in her other piece of work too.

Succesful Practise - The Rule of Thirds (Image Composition)

The Rule of Thirds is a set of guidelines created for help to improve the composition of images whether it is a photograph, painting or even video. The idea with the rule is that any image can be split up in a 3 by 3 grid with 9 equal sized parts, 2 parallel horizontal and 2 parallel vertical lines making up the grid.

Upon research of "The Rule of Thirds", I found a couple of websites that explain what it is and how to try it for yourself within photography. The link to the first website is: http://photoinf.com/Golden_Mean/John_Longenecker/Rule_of_Thirds.htm.
According to this website, The Rule of Thirds is a guideline to help you with the placements of the various elements in a picture when you are framing it. They also say by ignoring the rule, you may still achieve a great image, which is dependent on the content of the picture and how well the elements are balanced in it. This is only good if you want your viewers to focus on one element in the picture, which would then need to be stuck right in the centre of the picture. As said on the website, "Knowing why you do something and what effect it will have leads to good composition."
On the other website (which is located at: http://photodoto.com/rule-of-thirds/),
they also describe what The Rule of Thirds is and also provide examples of it in effect. On this website, the author of the article has displayed some pictures he has taken of his daughter to demonstrate the rule. They are all headshots but they vary in how far they are 'zoomed in' and how much is consequently cropped out of the image. Each one of the photgraphs has the 3 by 3 grid added on to show how the rule in effect. As shown on the website, the overall balance of the picture is affected by how far the picture is zoomed in on the girl. After some experimentation, the author managed to get the balance right in the bottom-most picture by panning the camera to left and zooming out to show the whole face. There is a fairly significant difference in this picture to the previous ones, which shows how using the Rule of Thirds can really improve the composition of a picture.

-Video will be added soon with comments on it-

Pixilation Project: The Final Version

This is the final version of the video we had to make as part of our Pixilation project for the Narratives module.

To make this video, first I had to apply a series of effects to all the original pictures to create a consistent look through out the video. Thankfully, the program we used to do it (Adobe Photoshop CS3), has a feature which takes a series of custom set settings and applies them to every image in the folder one at a time. Once the pictures had been customised with the effects I had chosen, I had to put them into Adobe Premiere. And from there, the pictures became the video in Premiere and I was free to edit the new video how I liked with all sorts of tools and effects.

I tried to recreate as much as possible, the original video that I made at home. This included repeating the part where our coats appeared to be 'sliding across' but I fear due to have speed up the video to help minimise the size, it's a ltitle too fast for it's own good. I've spent a lot of time tweaking the video though, especially with speeding up and slowing down chosen segments so I could minimise the size but sitll keep the video running at a reasonable speed. The size limit for the video is 100MB, but with a fair bit of tweaking here and there as well as changing some export settings to help minimise the size, I managed to get the final version of the video to around 40MB. I had already saved the video a few times before, but there was always something wrong with it so it became a trial and error process for me.

I'm really happy with the audio I've chosen for the video though. It's a song I haven't heard in years and it just happened to be playing at the Glo Bar yesterday. And for some odd reason, I felt that the song would be perfect for this video and I believe I was right to now. The seems to compliment the video quite well because they both seem to emit the same sort of 'kooky', upbeat and amusing impression.

I've been having a look at other pixilation videos by other students and on the web, and I've noticed how easy to see how rough my attempt is in comparison, but I know what I need to do now in order to create a more simpler but far more effective video. I think I'm actually better at coming up with ideas rather than executing them, as shown by this video. To be honest, I am fairly disappointed with the way this final video has turned out, it definitely needs improvement especially with the brightness of it. If I had a chance to make another pixilation video at NTU, I would definitely jump at the chance and also do my best to make it a lot better than its predecessor.

Successful Practise task: Why Design?

This is a picture of one of my favourite designed items, the Nintendo DS Lite.

Why is it that we want our belongings to do more for us than to function well?
With the constant evolution of technology, people are able to make previous tasks easier to do or perform new ones that may have been possible to do without the technology. As technology tends to offer hundreds of new possiblities for people, their expectations of what they want technology to enable them to do and their ambitions increase as well. Therefore as a consequence, the more technology evolves, the bigger our expectations become. Because technology can do so many different tasks for people, I believe people are beginning to accept the idea that technology is potenially capable of almost anything at least and therefore, with what it is able to do now is no longer enough, they want it to be able to do what they want, on top of what is already capable of.

With peoples' increasing demands of what technology must be able to do now, it surely must be fuelling the designers/inventors into designing new technology or upgrades for existing technology to meet these ever rising demands. Technology plays such an important role in peoples' lives these days, it is only natural people will start to expect more from it as they grow accustomed to it.

Why are we willing, as soon as we can afford it, to pay extra for things with appealing forms?

In response to the question, I believe it is down to the presence of three personality traits in people ,which are greed, pride and envy. As technology continues to evolve and newer, better versions of existing technology appear, I believe people will feel intimidated by the version of the product they own becoming outdated or even themselves looking inferior. This is because as other people upgrade to the newest product in the range, that person may appear to others as stuck in the past due to that they still own an older form of the product.

There are many examples out there of constant evolution of technology causing people to be left behind as it charges onwards. For example, if you look at the Microsoft Windows operating systems, there are still a lot of people who own the XP operating system or even an older version, but there is a new version of Windows on the market at the moment called Vista. As technology gets more advanced, it is inevitable that it is going to cost more upon retail, which is evident with the Windows series. Vista is not exactly the cheapest of products out there, and with people trying to save up money to afford it, it will become a problem for them when they upgrade to it finally only to find out Windows is already working on a new operating system.

Another solid example I can provide is related to the enclosed picture. The Nintendo DS Lite is the latest product in the handheld series of consoles by Nintendo. Nintendo originally started with a Gameboy, and over the years, newer versions of it appeared like the Gameboy Pocket and Gameboy Colour. Eventually, Nintendo produced a new handheld console to succeed the Gameboy series which was called Gameboy Advance. The Gameboy Advance was a fairly large step up from the original series, but as the years passed on, Nintendo brought out the Gameboy Advance SP which was a smaller, redesigned version of the original model and then eventually, they brought out the Gameboy Advance Micro which was a significantly smaller version of the original Gameboy Advance. There were no ground breaking updates from each generation of Gameboy Advance to the othe particularly the SP to the Micro, but people still bought them like they were in limited supply. The next big leap, would be the launch of a new handheld called the Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS boasted much improved graphics, dual screens with one being a touch screen, a microphone and stylus as well as Wi-Fi capabilities amongst other features. The DS was a roaring success, and some time after it's released, Nintendo brought out the DS Lite which is pictured above. The DS Lite contains slighty bigger screens but a more compact design regardless, a new power switch and improved battery life and brightness settings. It was not a huge leap from it's predecessor, unlike the Gameboy Advance series to the original DS, but people are still buying it in the millions to this very day all over the world. But Nintendo hasn't stopped there, they are now developed a new DS model called the DSi, which contains new features such as o.3 Megapixel camera, several power lights instead of one, a new power switch, slighty larger screens and more advanced in-built software such an animation application. Yet again, it is not a revolutionising leap, but as shown through the past, people are more than happy to pay for a basic upgrade of an existing product that may only have been given a few extra bells and whistles and a new look. The fact whether the new features it offers are revolutionary and do justify paying the price for the upgrade, are basically just ignored by the millions of customers out there as apparently you only have to make a few small changes to the existing product and it will still sell phenomenally. This is also strongly evident in other forms of technology such as MP3 players and Ipods, games consoles and mobile phones.

I admittedly do not understand why people must continually shell out their hard earned money everytime a new version of their beloved products are released, as most of the time the upgrades made to the latest version definitely do not justify the increase in price from what the previous product's price was. It probably does come down to peoples' obessessions with being as ahead of others as much as possible, thus creating an ever growing hunger to get the latest and best technology available as soon as possible without caring how much they will need to spend. The greed, envy and pride personality traits definitely do have their roles here and I think due to them being present in everyone, it causes this arrogant, self centered need to be amongst the most modern people out there.

Our Pixilation Project So Far

With our Narratives module so far, we have studied pixilation and stop motion animation. As well as looking at different pieces of stop motion work by various artists, we also had to create our own pixilation video in small groups as part of our assignment work. We had a 2 hour session to come up with an idea for the film, find an ideal location and also take the necessary pictures to produce the film. We needed to take at least 360 photos but the more the merrier. The video had to be at least 30 seconds long, which at a rate of 12 frames per second, equals 360 photos.
The people I had in my group by the way were Tebby, Dan Everitt and Umar.

Basically, we went into the cemetery near building and I decided for us to create our own spoof of the famous 'Thriller' video by Michael Jackson, but add some very crazy and unexpected twists into it like I do with my existing work on Youtube. With the video itself, I came up with the majority of the ideas for it at least, but I do owe the guys a lot of gratitude for helping me to make the video especially with the awesome poses they pulled off! :P

I'm one of those people who is better at coming up with lots of smaller, more random ideas than one long, consistent idea that runs through out the video. I think it's mainly because with both the projects I have worked on in the past (the anime spoofs and the project I am still doing now which is a parody series of a game), the videos I make for them are made up of short, random sketches. And thus, I believe from being so used to that sort of style, I automatically ended up applying it to this pixilation work.

Anyway, out of sheer excitement, I decided to make my own version of the video for this project at home, before we make a video during our session at uni. It was mainly as a basic demo to see how the video would turn out with the all the pictures put together and such. I am really pleased with the results, it has turned out pretty hilarious and I have uploaded the video to Youtube now. The video has been embedded into the blog below.


I will also provide a link later on in this post of the final video that I will have make with my next session and have it uploaded it to Youtube.

Whiteboard Animations

This is the overall video of the whiteboard animations everyone had to make during our stop motion workshop in the welcome week. My group's part starts from 2:48 as it the last one anyways. We had to take about 120 photos but I'm not entirely sure if we achieved that to be honest. The whole picture taking and white board drawing work itself took 2 hours to do, but our tutor put the video together.
I will also post a link to the pixilation project I am working on with new group as soon as it is ready.

Successful Practise: The State of Multimedia Technology

In my research of the current state of multimedia technology, I found an article by the BBC, where they are investigating three new possible methods of interaction with technology, particularly computers. The three new methods of interaction include: touch screens, movement and mind control. The article I have used is located at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7676552.stm .

The type of interaction that I will investigate is the use of touch screens. Touch screens already feature in existing forms of technology such as PDAs, the IPhone, Nintendo DS and so on, but now they are trying to integrate the technology into computers so people do not have to use the mouse to command a computer. In the article, they describe technology that aims to offer a new way to interact with computers, which is "Surface" by Microsoft. Surface is a table mounted touch screen and on the inside, it has been designed to operate like a computer running Windows Vista. The use of a projector inside of the table and a reflective screen as the table top enables the users to see and "interact" with the table. I found an article detailing the various features of Microsoft Surface and it is located at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/microsoft-announces-surface-computer/. According to the article, Surface is able to recognise physical objects placed upon it including a paintbrush and a mobile phone and it will enable hands-on control of various media such as pictures, maps and music. Surface was designed directly for establishments such as hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues, with people actually being able to perform tasks such as, ordering a drink via a tap of the finger or even sorting through a list of music and organising it into playlists like with a computer. The difference here being, that they would not need to worry about having all the components necessary to run a computer, such as the monitor, hard drive and mouse, as Surface acts as all of them in one and can be used just with normal hand gestures.

Upon reflection, it does seem that Surface has got a lot of potential on causing an impact on the current state of technology. Combining the fact that it operates like a normal computer but without the need for the mouse and keyboard and that it also can recognise physical objects placed upon it, whether it's a person's hands or a still object like a bottle of wine means it can open up a whole new world of possibilities. As said before, it has been designed in mind to be easily usable by people who are not confident with a mouse, and thus it means it can offer people a less daunting and more familiar way of interacting with a computer, as it all requires us to do, is what we already know how to do by instinct. It can offer people a new way to do traditional tasks as well as technological ones in a completely new way so there definitely is potential for it having an impact.

My Phoenix Wrong work

Here are the links to my Phoenix Wrong work on Youtube. These Phoenix Wrong videos are my tribute to an already existing craze on the internet where people parody a popular anime style game called Phoenix Wright. The sprites are taken from the game and either put through Macromedia Flash or a video editor like Sony Vegas and thus these videos are formed from lots of dedicated editing.

I decided to join into the craze as I'm a big fan of the original game and the existing parody series that was started by a user called Ashfordpride on the website Newgrounds. From making these Phoenxi Wrongs and seeing people's reactions to them as well as seeing all the pixilation videos, I was heavily inspired into becoming an animation artist as my future career. The original creator of these parodies only managed to create 3 or 4 videos to the series, but I already am working on the 10th one now after I started making them back in June!

Here are the links to the first video in my tribute to the parody series and also to my homepage on Youtube so you can access the other ones too:



My Homepage : http://uk.youtube.com/user/krazykakashi234

The first video is still quite rough though even though I have made a revised version, but the quality of my editing does get more creative and polished with each new video to the series, I promise :).

My First NTU Blog

With this course, I would love to be able to further my skills with multimedia and also prepare myself for a future as a games designer. I'm very keen on learning as much as I can with games design and animation as I have recently developed a huge interest in animation. This was due to starting a series of video based projects which are parodies of a fairly well known video game series. I upload the videos to Youtube and they have gathered some attention and have received very positive feedback from the viewers. I am currently working on the 10th video in the series and I am considering the possibility of doing even more of them in the future.

I originally was into becoming a character designer as about 18 months ago, I actually started to try japanese manga style drawings as a hobby in my spare time. I didn't feel I was polished enough as an artist though to become a character designer and I actually found I really enjoyed animation and was fairly good at it after I started my new project. Therefore, that is the reason why I switched from wanting to be a character designer to an animation artist instead.

As well as doing this course, I'm also going to be studying the language Japanese as a supplementary course at NTU. I'm a gigantic fan of all things Japanese and Chinese hence being able to do this course would be extremely helpful for me in the future.

During this week, I haven't been up to much aside from all the official welcomes from NTU including the Dean of the School of Art and Design and a NTU graduate who went on to win a gold medal at the Olympics. I also got introduced to all the staff involved my course and received a very helpful and interesting insight about the Multimedia course. With the actual Welcome Week events I haven't really been to any so far as my friends decided to back out of the Game On! event and also the Chinese buffet, but I will be going to all the upcoming buffets, the Japanese taster session, the samba and instrumental workshops, bowling, a hypnosis show and a comedy gig, so I do have plenty to keep me busy.