KrazyKakashiReborn's Blog

Lots Of Awesome Short 3D Animated Films

2010-01-23T17:49:00.005Z

Pigeon Impossible?

2009-12-01T15:07:00.006Z

I recently started reading two 3D magazines called 3DArtist and 3D World, and in one of the issues for one of them, I discovered this amazing, awesome, hilarious and extremely well made short film!

The name of it is Pigeon Impossible and I'm sure you can guess what to expect generally from the fact that the title is a pun of the secret agent film series Mission Impossible.

The film was made by an animation student called Martell Animation and it's fronted by a man called Lucas Martell. On his Youtube account which can be seen via clicking the actual video above, he did a series of blogs leading through the production of the film including rigging the characters and other 3D modelling and animation tasks.

You get to see him working on the film over time and see how it became the final product as well as gain an insight into how he actually made the characters and so on.

The film is all about a secret agent who is pretty clumsy, accident prone and gullible (I think he was based on me!) and he gets tricked into going on a wild good chase to protect this hi-tech briefcase I think. The actual film is all about him eating a bagel and getting harassed by a bagel loving pidgeon who attacks him for it, getting trapped in the briefcase by accident and causes mass havoc whilst inside it using the inbuilt weaponry.

It's pretty amusing what happens and I loved the way the pidgeon interacted with the briefcase as well as the "Tom and Jerry" style battle he had with the secret agent. This film clocks in at about 6 minutes but I enjoyed it all the way through and happily will watch it plenty more times too. I believe it was just as good as a lot of feature films I've seen despite it's length, it's creator shows a hell of a lot of promise and seeing as the 3D animation industry is really taking off now as shown by Pixar, Sony Pictures and Dreamworks particularly, I have a feeling this guy is going to be big one day as well.

I subscribed to him and actually cannot wait for him to bring out another film, even though this one took many months to create! The humour in it reminded me of the other animation studios but also more like classic cartoons with the slapstick involved and also simplistic plot as well. The simplicity isn't a bad thing at all, it's perfect for a short film and it's common knowledge that people enjoy the simpler things in life more, I certainly do!

I seriously cannot recommend this film enough, I hope he actually does make money from this some how, I know it had a $10,000 budget on it roughly, so not to make any income at all would suck. If he doesn't though, I couldn't be any more sure in that this has opened many doors for him with plenty of prospects for him. It came out on 8th November this year and has racked up almost a million and a half views! I personally think it needs more attention but it's doing damned well regardless!

Watch this guy, he's going to be big! You only have to watch the film and you'll understand why, the film is an absolute gem and would love to have on DVD if it came at a price respective to it's length!

SPP2 - Task For 27/11/09 Seminar

2009-11-27T07:57:00.006Z

I was asked to write a few lines about a Multimedia practitioner based around my pathway and there is one I've known for a long time now who I am going to show you.

His name is Simon and he is the CEO and budding creator for a 3D avatar based social networking website called Frenzoo. I actually mentioned Frenzoo and Simon during a blog in my first year on the course but I never got to spend time on the website as promised due to numerous extreme difficulties I encountered up till now.

The site is all about creating your own person 3D avatar to represent yourself and communicate with other members on the site, thus making new friends and discovering people from around the world. You can buy new clothes for your avatar using thei

r currency system on there from the online shops set up by members and staff. Pro Members can create their own clothes and soon furniture, pets and so on. It's been a long time since I went on the site truth be told, but Simon told me progress has been good for them, they are expanding the site including Pro Members being able to create more types of objects and also securing a big deal.

Although Simon is the CEO, he does contribute his own fashions for his own online store on there and it can be viewed via the link provided below:

http://www.frenzoo.com/beta/shop_store.php?bazaar_id=23

As well as that, one of the animators/meshers from the company created a new look for his avatar for Thanksgiving Day but it has it's own personal twist as you will see below...

I asked Simon for a brief summary of his background before Frenzoo and this is what he said in response anyway:

Me: Can you give a brief biography of your career pre-Frenzoo?

Simon: Sure, before jumping into the online 3d world with Frenzoo, I worked in Internet networking with Juniper Networks, the upstart competitor to Cisco.

There I was leading the Emerging Technologies team for Asia. That was a great job, dealing with customers in Korea and Japan through to emerging countries like India and Vietnam. Learning how and how not-to introduce new solutions to market, winning over early adopters, feeding requirements back to development teams – a lot of fun.

Before that I was in Melbourne with Juniper where I worked with Telstra to help design their 2nd generation broadband infrastructure (their DSL network). That was a great job for a young engineer, although I recall a lot of late nights living in their labs

As you can see, he's had quite a lot of experience working with networking in particular, and has experienced and gained a lot from his prior jobs. He also has had the opportunity to work in different parts of the world as you can see as well as interact with customers from other countries from where he was at the time. At the moment, he is working in Hong Kong with some Multimedia graduates on the Frenzoo website.

It is quite fascinating seeing what he did previously as he did get to travel around the world, interacting with people from different countries and learning a vast number of things whilst trying to emerging countries and also as he said, having a lot of fun along the way.

Even though dealing with networks isn't something I'd do, it's inspiring to see how Simon built his way up to where he is now and what he experienced along the way. He ended up doing online 3D in the end and the 3D industry is what I'm currently studying as well hoping to have a career in one day.

Also, our current essay is all about networking and building up our networks of contacts to help promote ourselves, so I think talking to Simon has been pretty beneficial for me especially seeing as he works in the 3D industry now. To have someone I know who works in that particular industry can always be very helpful for me, because I can gain advice from them, get a good insight into the 3D industry, show them my portfolio to get some feedback on it and also get references for any future jobs I want.

If I could get the references, it would be excellent as it would be from someone in the industry I'm trying to get into so getting a recommendation from someone like that would have a lot more weight to it I imagine and also show a lot more promise.

Looking at what Simon does now, I wouldn't mind doing 3D work for a site like this if I didn't make into the games industry as planned, by getting to know other areas more where 3D is used in apart from games and films, it helps me to understand how much more open my possibilities can be and it gives me more options for my future should getting into the games industry not work out, or if I need to build myself up in terms of my experience, skills and portfolio before I join a games company.

Even though Simon is based in Hong Kong, this is a great start to building up my own personal network of people to help promote myself and I hope to be able to gain more contacts like him in the future to help promote myself as well help me to learn the necessary skills and knowledge that can help me with getting the jobs I need in the future.

I am going to try and find people nearer to me as well, preferably ones who know me in person if possible as that can help, but the more people I can meet, the bigger my network can get and the more opportunities that await as a result of that.

Disaster Looming

2009-11-20T08:33:00.002Z

I should have good news to report but I'm afraid I don't really. Just earlier this week, I discovered I have 2 separate viral infections to fight off and I've been off uni again for the whole week due to being severely ill.

Due to my condition, I've been unable to work as well. 3DS Max finally arrived on Tuesday but I feel so crap it's difficult to work. I have insomnia again and my stress really is peaking, I'm going to have to go back to counselling to be truly honest.

As it stands, I don't have anything built for the rollercoaster project. I've modelled a bit of water, island and city but thats it. I'm still kind of figuring out how to build parts of it.

With the robot animation project I am fine thanks to Andy's completed file but I need to animate it. That's the problem, I'm struggling to animate it as I missed the seminar on it. I can understand what we need to do, but I'm having problems posing the robot right to begin with hence I'm already sunk and stuck.

I'm stressed out as high hell at the moment, my sleeping pattern and diet are destroyed again and my deadlines are less than 3 weeks away now, I'm terrified.

On the upside, I've rung the office and after messages were passed on, I got emailed by Jools asking for me to book a surgery as soon as I can, although I think I'm going to need a voodoo ritual to resurrect me after these projects are over xD.

I need to speak to my tutors for Virtual asap but it's going to be hell trying to go to uni in my state, I may email them and hope to get a response. I already emailed Andy so he's up to date, it's just contacting Simon now.

There's a reason I haven't mentioned Games Design yet and it's actually my shred of good news amongst the hell...

I've completed the project! Just typed up my foreword and rules for it, and it's all set to be handed in whenever. I wanted to write an evaluation for it tbh, the lack of an offline journal is a problem and I need to rectify that before I hand it in although I have plenty of time.

This project has gone amazingly well for a change but it seems too good to be true although it's my ray of hope in all this darkness right now.

But yeah, I wanted to show my ambitions with the project and how versatile it is, I couldn't really as I already hit the 1 page limit for both the foreword and rules but ah well, this should be good enough hopefully.

I'm really excited about the card game project and hope it does do well otherwise I will cry D:.

I'm going to get extensions for the other 2 projects, I'm going to need to hand them in after the holidays if possible, my illness isn't exactly going away quickly and I even had swine flu scares and being rushed to A and E for nothing so my stress is being intensified hugely by the illness alone right now :(.

Roller Coaster Designs: Car

2009-11-12T13:36:00.003Z

I hadn't really thought about the car's appearance to be honest so I thought I would get round to visualising it immediately so I can start modelling it. I only have 4 weeks left on the project so I need to crack on with modelling asap, hence instead of drawing up designs for the car, I decided to do a moodboard different rollercoaster cars and try and get a design from that.

The idea is that I can get inspiration from their designs and mix and match elements from them with my own design. The moodboard c

an be seen below anyway.

The designs I am most keen on are the blue one in the bottom right corner and the little grey one in the middle. I particularly quite like the design of the blue one actually, it reminds me a lot of a hovercraft type vehicle and I wouldn't mind modelling something similar to that, but it would need be as transparent as possible, so the passengers can look out all the time.

I would probably opt for modelling the bottom half of the car to something like that but having a huge glass screen to cover the top half so people can look out of it.

I'm going to try modelling it now and see where I go with it, improvisation is something I do a lot of and I'm good at, I'm always adapting as I progress so I'll be adapting my design as I model it.

A Sudden And Very Fortunate Windfall?

2009-11-10T22:33:00.003Z

My 2 seminars today actually went really well! For the Visualisation seminar, we had to present our work on the rollercoaster so far, the designs, research etc and my presentation went better than I thought tbh. It was credited to being a good concept which Im happy with and I agreed with the feedback I received as it was what I needed to do with the concept, which includes reducing the amount of things I include due to the time frame I have left to work in.

Simon also recommended I work on each of the areas of the track as separate files to make it as a lot easier for me and connect them up in one file later on instead. Or instead of connecting them, I could just render a movie clip for each file and compile the final movie using the clips, making sure the transition is as smooth and unnoticeable possible otherwise that will ruin it.

The Games Design seminar actually really shocked me because I was pretty stressed about the card game. I was struggling to get a decent design and I even came up with a 4th idea, but that was too similar to Blackjack and Solitaire in all honesty. The reason for the shock is what happened with my 1st design actually. None of the 3 original ideas I came up with were anywhere near complete and they had their major flaws. We had to test the prototypes for our ideas so I just went with my first one and decided to improvise as I went along.

Me and a friend of mine tested my first idea and we ended up improvising as I hope, we actually made a much better design in the end! Brad sent someone called Matt I think to give us feedback as we played, and he gave me some pretty helpful feedback and also found my project to be really damned good which what cheered me up so much! I already was happy with it but then he made a couple of minor suggestions to improve it and he said the idea was one of the most versatile and unique ones he's ever seen. He's never seen a card system like it before, he designed 3 in 3 weeks that all failed in their first week, and he said the card game was so simple yet strategic and fun, it was brilliant! Matt pointed out that the card game is easily adaptable for all ages by changing the rules slightly and thus creating a range of difficulties.

The fact that I used original playing cards kept it simple and I didn't go down the path of designing a completely new card game with it's own characters, cards etc, it's a new game that utilises the original playing cards in a new way. He said is actually quite educational as simple maths is involved in it with a frantic pace which adds thrill and excitement to it as well. Due to the educational factor, it can be used in schools by teachers and seeing as the difficulty can be altered based on the ages playing, it can appeal to anyone too and also he said there is a good market for this as there's nothing out there that is like this really!

Hearing that really made my day to be honest and it's given me a lot more confidence with myself and the project! I'm really pleased with how things have turned out as well as shocked still, and I'm actually quite excited about finishing this project and actually playing this game!

My friends liked playing it a lot too and their projects turned out brilliant too, I ended up giving them helpful ideas and advice too and they've used it to help better their projects too, all in all the testing and feedback worked out extremely well!

I actually posted on Facebook that I was on fire due to how well I was doing today and recently, but I'm just receiving replies from friends worried if I'm ok and if I got burned? :S Something tells me, they have never heard of that phrase being used as a way of saying how well you are doing, I cant think why...

Rollercoaster Designs

2009-11-09T23:03:00.003Z

Click thumbnails to enlarge

Apologies for the terrible quality of my sketches, my presentational skills have always been terrible, I'm quite a messy, all over the place person as you may see. Neatness was never my strong point and hence I emphasise these ar pretty rough sketches.
My rollercoaster is going to have the underwater theme as mentioned in a previous post and it starts on a huge theme park island. Starting at point 1, you have the beginning part of the track where the people board the rollercoaster.
It then starts moving slowly and naturally ends up accelerating as it goes down the slope. A glass tunnel visible in the water is where the track passes through and the car travels in a U shape to end up back outside where it goes up a short slope and then pauses for a second. After the pause, the car ends up moving backwards down the track due to gravity mainly and down a new branching track which also is in a U shape. This was designed deliberately so the car would end up facing the right way after the 2nd U bend. As it comes back down now facing the right way, the track ends up twisting in corkscrew fashion along the walls and ceiling for a certain distance before resuming it's usual form.

This 2nd area comes after the corkscrew part and the car accelerates as it's going up a slope and about to hit a huge jump. The track leads outside once again and the jump takes place in the air as the diagram shows. Once the car hits the jump, time will "slow down" with the sound of screaming drowned out by wind and extreme wide eyed expressions will appear on the passengers too. The camera will pan around the car slowly too and will snap back to the front immediately when the car hits the track again with time speeding up to normal speed again respectively.
The car goes underwater again and hits a huge U turn before ending up going in the opposite direction to where it came from but this is leading up to the last part of the track that is behind the island itself.

After the turn, it hits a loop de loop and then passes through an area with wildlife, plants and possibly a shipwreck too. I was planning on having dangerous wildlife here like sharks and octopi to add to the thrills and scares.
After the first wildlife section, we come to the "Dolphin Jumps" area. Here, the track takes the form of 2 large hills rising out of the water, with a gap at the top. I was trying to recreate how dolphins jump in and out of the water rapidly as they swim, I would have liked to have more jumps here actually.
After the Dolphin Jumps, we come to the Minefield Madness area. As the name suggests, an underwater minefield is located here and the track weaves in and out of the mines before running into the 2nd and final wildlife area. The 2nd wildlife area is a tamer place designed to act like a breather before the grand finale and only features safer animals like turtles. I was thinking of having a treasure chest here too. Here we have the Grand Finale area, featuring a huge loop de loop and an exciting jump to the end platform. The loop de loop rises out of the water and is placed to help gather speed for the jump at the end. After it, the car will accelerate as it will rise out of the water and the back of the island will be visible too. The track stops before the end platform but has a little ramp at the end so the car will have to make a leap of faith to the end platform and stop there. The gap won't be far though anyways.

I really like the ideas I have come up with to be honest and I'd love to be able to make the full thing I designed. Trouble is, there is an immense amount to be built and animated, and it literally would be impossible in my timeframe so I will have to make scarifices, but I am happy with the concept and should be able to pull it off without too many problems I think.

Phoenix Wrong: The Movie!

2009-11-06T16:39:00.003Z

Hey guys, as you know, I make a series of video game spoofs called Phoenix Wrongs. The last time I posted about them, I had made 12 of them and now I've made 15 of them altogether since that time, with over 200 subscribers to my name now as well! I took a huge break out to concentrate on my course, but I'm planning to go back to making them...in Summer that is D:. It's a long time away and it gives me plenty of time to refresh myself and build up tons of ideas as I've been making them nonstop for 18 months!
Before my break, I really went out with a bang though...As you know from the title of the blog, I finally made the movie length Phoenix Wrong! I collaborated with 14 other PW makers to make the movie over a 2-3 month period and its a Youtube hit, its still to gain more attention before it truly becomes famous and makes an unforgettable stamp, but all 15 of us worked hard on the project and we all are exceptionally proud of how it's turned out! We had to sacrifice some ideas for it and also we are now keen to make a sequel as well as inviting people on board to make it in the future, no idea when but hopefully not till Summer as I'll be free then!
This is part 1 of 7 of the movie and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we did making them!

Ideas So Far: Term 1

2009-11-06T15:49:00.010Z

Concerning my 3 main projects, I have come up with ideas for each of them, I already mentioned I had some for the card game project for games design.
With animation, I've got a few ideas floating for the comedic gag that the robot will succumb to and I'm actually pretty excited about it as I'm keen on both animation and comedy especially the latter, so making something humorous is right up my alley! I can actually feel inspiration gathering and I can't wait to see if I can actually recreate my ideas as I would love to! Whether the final idea I choose is going to be funny, unique, creative and memorable enough for the standard required is just a matter of time, but I hope I do well on this to be honest as I'm pretty keen on it.
With those Phoenix Wrongs, I get pretty creative with them and I specialise in slapstick, random humour in them so I'm really hoping to apply what I do there to this project and hopefully make something memorable for the right reasons and good enough to pass with a decent mark.

For the rollercoaster project which is what I wanted talk about mainly, I have 2 main sources of very convenient inspiration actually. One of them is a 3D rollercoaster game on my phone, which I only just realised I had! I play it a lot and have picked up a lot from it through playing it, which is going to be extremely helpful for this project! My other source of inspiration is another game called Audiosurf. Normally, people would say RollerCoaster Tycoon as as source as its a popular and well known game, but here I'd like to focus on something more unique and abstract.
First things first though, we had to choose whether to have our roller-coaster set in space or underwater, and I've opted for underwater which is the harder one as I realised. With underwater, I will have to recreate accurate physics of travelling underwater, but I already have a counter measure against that. I'll probably need to model wildlife and plant life to add to the atmosphere of course, otherwise it will be quite an empty and disappointing ocean. I may have to leave them out due to time restrictions, but I will try to include some in including a shark and a turtle as well as some shells and seaweed possibly.

The counter measure against the water physics I mentioned just now by the way, I will not have to worry about that really as I plan to have the roller coaster go through an underwater tunnel with some "freaky" movement along the walls and ceiling, which is something I picked up from playing a Sonic game called Sonic Heroes.
As you can see from the 2nd screenshot, that is the level that inspired me. Its one of hte bonus stages from the game and you're inside a huge transparent glass tunnel which you need to chase that hot air balloon to the end. What I love about this level is that you can run along the walls as well, other games have incorporated this in their own way I think, actually the F-Zero games do have something like this as well. I imagine the rollercoaster car going down a tunnel like this underwater and it moving along the walls and the ceiling in a corkscrew fashion as the track spirals through the tunnel.
What would be the icing on the cake would be the fact you could see the wildlife outside whilst travelling through at high speed which can be both entrancing and also scary depending on what appears. Actually, that reminds me of another source of inspiration to think of it, the film Jaws 3 I think it is. It's where they are at this water resort and at one point, I remember them being underwater in a tunnel like this and the shark smashing against the tunnel, which could be a good surprise to be implemented in this.

I also got some more inspiration of a friend of mine who said I should have the rollercoaster go through an area populated with underwater mines and have the roller coaster weave in and out rapidly to increase tension and thrills. I'd like to also implement a ship wreck somehow too if possible, but I doubt it will be possible due to time restrictions. For the car itself, I'm probably going to have some sort of submarine/roller coaster car hybrid so that it can travel outside of the tunnel, by automatically closing a watertight shield over the car when it reaches outside the tunnel. I'd like to also have it come out the water at certain times to go through the air and rapidly drop back into the water, with the track ending the back of the island you start on.

Back to the first 2 sources of inspiration anyway. The game on my phone is called 3D Rollercoaster Rush and it is by Digital Chocolate.
I noticed whilst browsing images of the game, that UFOs appear in the background during a nightime setting which is an interesting touch, I'm not far enough in the game to know that but I'm sure I'm close. This game as you would expect gets more intense and difficult the further in and I find it to be a great deal of inspiration right now. They include features like breathtaking drops, very steep slopes, closely put together gaps and huge loop de loops to add intensity to the track and you really have to balance your speed throughout to make it through safely, never mind scoring the 5 star rating!

The other game I mentioned is Audiosurf, a game emphasising use of your own music to produce the actual game! Basically, you ride a spaceship down a track collecting coloured blobs and creating matches mainly, and the actual track is formed by the song used, it changes completely to suit the song loaded, with bumps, tunnels and other features representing particular moments of the song.
The shape of some of the tracks you get can be very wild, twisting, mad and eye-appealing really. The speed you fly down the track is affected by the tempo of the song and also the amount of blocks you have to deal with (the "traffic"), is affected by the song too. I've always felt the game to be like a musical rollercoaster to be honest, it literally is like the sci-fi racing game F-Zero fused with music recognition and a typical puzzle game to me. The tracks themselves are the source of inspiration here as they can have corkscrews, huge drops and climbs, hills and the like, which remind me of a rollercoaster and hence I can get inspired by it too.

A screenshot above shows a typical screen from the game whilst playing on a track anyways. It cant really be seen, but in the top left, you do get a mini map of the outline of the track showing what horrors are coming your way xD. Quite a strange choice of song too there...

Anyways, I am planning to work on some outlines for the track later today, I did try to do them digitally and it went badly, so I may use an A4 sketchbook instead to sketch out designs, as it will be easier. I do have a graphics tablet, but I still find it hard to use in this sort of situaiton so doing it on paper will probably be best, I can try using the mouse with the paths tool in an image editor to think of it, but Ill see how I get along on paper first. I'll scan my drawings in if I do opt for the paper option and I'll post them on here.

Back From The Dead? Progress So Far 6/11/09

2009-11-06T14:55:00.003Z

Well my 2nd blog is out, much, much later than it should be.
To tell the truth, I've been ill with a nasty viral infection for about sweet sixteen days and it's been a killer. It conveniently happened at the end of my first week at uni which isnt too suspicious at all >_>.

I've made a nearly complete recovery now, still have a chesty cough which tends to pick up once a day but be dead for the rest of the day. I came back to uni this past Monday completely stressed as hell because of how much time I had off and the impact it was going to have on my work especially seeing as my deadlines for the 3 main projects are all 15th December...Just over a month away and Im crapping myself in all honesty.

With my first day back on Monday, it actually went really smoothly. I had my Animation seminar and it went really well, much to my surprise and delight! We had begun building the robot for the project and they had already made the legs and arms. This week was moving onto the spine and head, thus completing the modelling of the robot in 2 sessions including personal time if necessary. I actually sailed through the seminar, even stopping occasionally to help my friend out. I built the robots spine and head easily with no major problems, I was working from a pre-set file where the arms and legs had been already built.
I actually stayed behind at the end of the seminar to finish the final part of the work where we rigged the robot for animation. We had to build gyros which were pretty simple to do, albeit a little fiddly as they involved some rotation but it was doable. Pleased with my results, I had to connect the top and bottom of the spine as well as the head to their respective gyros. Andy already had left so what happened next was quite a problem, the body twisted a fair bit in a corkscrew fashion when I connected the spine gyros and it looked pretty weird. I got confused and frustrated to what had happened and left due to it as I had been working for 3 hours straight. Although, I spoke to a friend later this week and he said that does happen and it is fixable, so it's all good now I know how to sort it. I'll tweak it in next weeks seminar before we do the work and also later in the week if I get the opportunity, to look at and work through the Orrery and Arms and Legs worksheets.

The Visualisation seminar went well too, had some problems but I managed to sort them out throughout the seminar and I also was able to understand the seminar well and also what I missed. I hadn't missed that much I dont think, it was all about working with splines really which is important for the rollercoaster. We looked at light and colour, and my prior knowledge of them from A-Level Physics made understanding it a doddle tbh, although it was the simple version of what we needed to know. Apparently we need to know about Photography too, so I'm going to have to look into that at some point as we need to know about shutter speed, aperture etc.

Games Design was the one I'm most worried about and had the right to be after the seminar. We continued designing our card games or in my case, begun D:. After struggling a hell of a lot, I came up with 3 ideas but there are major flaws with all of them and it's making my life a nightmare, although Brad is speaking to me next week about them which is what I need now. The briefs says we need to make the card game playable for 2 people, simple, fun and strategic plus also be targeted towards the 16+ age range which is where the strategic element is vital too.
Only one of my ideas has any strategy to it and it isn't that strategic either, although it's currently the best one I have as flawed as it is. This card game project is pretty difficult tbh but I do have to try and do well with it as this is what I'm going into, which is Games Design and I'm sure to face scenarios like this even though I'll be working with video games.

I also actually managed to go to my tutorial yesterday with Deborah and Jools' lecture today after missing 3 weeks worth thanks to my illness. The tutorial was pretty helpful for me and it's helping me to get organised within the chaos I am in at the moment. The lecture was done by a guest lecturer who is a Careers expert for Art And Design who works at NTU. She gave us a pretty detailed insight into getting a job including building up your CV, how to compete with hundreds of other applicants and bucketloads of resources for us to look at too. We also had guest speaker from a recruitment company who is a former NTU student and also gave us a informative lowdown on getting a career and the current state of the industry as well as other things.

Entering The 2nd Year

2009-10-22T00:55:00.004+01:00

Well we've been back for a mere 9 days and ive been off university for 4 days as well as 2 days for the weekend and my day off twice in the 2 weeks so far. Im in my 2nd week of being back in this 1st term and ive been off since last Wednesday as I contracted a serious viral infection.

Before I even came back to university, I've been so stressed out to the point I've had to seek mental counselling due to the state I was in all the time. A load of nightmarish things happened to me during the time I finished year 1 and joined this year including major family problems, my neighbours dog barking all day everyday and also 3DS not working at all, no matter what I did.

I was so stressed out and dreading the course so much, I considered quitting to be honest. I finally solved my 3DS Max problem but I have to wait for my new copy to arrive as its 8 days late and apparently its due on Friday now, after I rang the company. Im undergoing counselling too but after 3-4 days at being back to uni or w/e, I fell hugely ill with a viral infection hence Ive been off since then and still not made any signs of recovery so far.

As it is i'm stressed to breaking point, but now Im very worried about how far behind I am with this now, it doesnt help I dont have 3DS Max on me yet nor having any practise with it in the holidays either. I chose the most demanding pathway of the 3 too, Virtual Environments. In order to pass, we have to at least 40 hours a week with it, although Im hoping that does mean divided along the 3 modules, 120 hours a week is just impossible of course o_0.

Before I fell ill though, I did get to meet all the tutors for Virtual Environments and get a grasp of each of the 3 modules. Im studying Animation, Visualisation and Games Design, the latter being the one I'm most excited about tbh :).

The Visualisation is being taught by a 3D Artist from a company specialising in 3D design work and Games Design is taught by a 3D Games Artist from the former company Free Radical and now based at Eurocom. I actually found to be able to be taught by people from backgrounds like this quite a privilege and fascinating, their showreels were definitely impressive as well!

After looking at the projects for the 3 modules, I do love what we have to do actually, it does look fun, interesting and rewarding in the end definitely. All 3 are very demanding beyond belief though and I am intimidated whether I can actually manage to do well in them tbh, especially designing an outer space or underwater based roller coaster for Visualisation, Animation is probably going to be the one I find easiest somehow. For Games Design, I have to develop a completely new, unique and fun card game to play which I feel pretty intimidated by, but I need to be able to do stuff like this and get my creativity flowing bigtime if I want to land the career Im after, so theres a lot of pressure on me at the moment. Animation has us building and animating a robot which will be the victim of a comedic gag, one that will be something like a banana skin on the floor but with our own unique twist to make it fresh. I believe Im more capable of doing this than the other 2, as Im forming ideas of how Id like to do it already.

Since Ive come back, Ive had to miss my tutorial session and my first SSP2 session as well as this weeks seminars and the like for VE, which is a huge setback, as Im off for the rest of the week too.
I've had to make huge sacrifices too, I quit my Japanese supplementary course to ease a lot of pressure and free up as much time as possible, I also have taken a 9 month break roughly from my hobby work to focus on my uni projects as well.

To be honest though, I dont mean to be so negative at the start of my new year, but I will need a miracle to get through this. The work we have to do is pretty exciting and interesting, but due to all these complications I keep suddenly suffering and fear of not being capable enough to succeed enough, its going be a battle on the scale of life and death in some ways to get through this, but im sure it will really have its rewards when I do get through it.
Although, I have to say...next summer cant roll around fast enough =/.

Some More Awesome Stop Motion Videos Yo

2009-06-02T18:27:00.003+01:00

That second one is just AMAZINH, FREAKING AMAZING!

This is exactly one of the strongest reasons why I love Japan! :D

2009-05-18T19:29:00.002+01:00

My Invitation To Artician = Very Potentially Beneficial Participation

2009-05-11T02:11:00.004+01:00

http://krazykakashiii.artician.com/

I just got an email earlier asking me if I would like to join this huge artistic community called Artician. After looking at the site and getting highly impressed, I noticed it's literally like a hybrid of Carbonmade, DeviantArt and Blogger! You can set up your own online portfolio and also import your own work directly from your DeviantArt account to be viewed on here! As well as that, you can set up an RSS feed of you're own blogs as part of your own domain on here, it literally is perfect for me! I was meant to be using Carbonmade but I may just stick to this solely or use it as well as Carbonmade, I'll see :P. Ill upload my Identities project to here too, which will later this week! :D

P.S. Sorry for lack of updates, its the last week to build the project so it's a mad last minute panic for me and I've had to make sacrifices to free up more time for me to build the project. Everything is built apart from the box itself in Flash which im working on at the mo, and I seirously have so much to update on here, it's terrifying. Brace yourself next week, as I'll be doing LOADS of blogging as so much has happened and such, its going to take me freaking ages to describe it all, -sigh- >_<.

Ciao for now anyways!

After One Intense, Hopless and Unfruitful Struggle...

2009-04-29T15:48:00.006+01:00

THE AVATAR IS COMPLETE!!!! :DDDD

Sorry, but I just feel incredibly fantastic after completing the avatar that I've been trying to make for over 2 months now I think! 0_0 I wasted so much time on it solely and I paid the price for it with falling behind with the project itself and having to sacrifice Japanese revision and life drawing as a result. Last week Monday or maybe slightly earlier, I had a sudden revelation of sorts, I suddenly figured out how to build the head for the avatar. On Tuesday when I went in for a seminar instead of going to the one on Thursday (I went to another groups seminar due to complications on Thursday), and I ran into a good friend of mine who knew how to build the avatar which was a brilliant stroke of luck.

I showed him the head I had built seperately and the body as well, and asked him how to join them together. After some tinkering around, he managed to join the two parts together and form the avatar's whole body :). Trouble is though, I still had no idea had to do clothes and hair, so I went home after the seminar to attempt it anyways. I struggled like hell to figure out to make the clothes, I tried some methods but it always went wronf and I barely could find tutorials on adding clothes on the Internet, hence it was very frustrating for me. But I had another relevation later in the week and I realised, what would happen if I tried to model the clothes on the body seperately using the same method I used for the head?

Basically, I built a plane in Front view for the coat in front of the chest, and I applied the Symmetry modifier to it and then used the Extrude Face option combined with the Shift key to create new polygons from that single plane-cum-polygon now. I created a box around the chest, basically imagien people who wear cardboard boxes with their arms, head and legs sticking out thats what literally recreated. I then made the box transparent and edited the vertices of it with MeshSmooth active on it to help me mold the box into the shape of a coat on the body, and it worked out really well! :D

After that recent success, I immediately applied the same method to build face mask, eyepatch, trousers and shoes and what you will see soon is a result of my discovery :). It took me freaking ages to mold the vertices of the coat alone just right, but it paid off in the end. After modelling all the clothes on, the next step would be to texture them. Handily, since I made them as seperate components to the body, they will end up using their own invidual materials and hence each component can hsve a different material assigned to it. I used the UVW Unrwap modifier to create texture maps of each component one at a time, then I exported them as image files, where I thus edited them with The GIMP (yes that is its actual name). I went a little crazy with the coat, and I changed the look of it by adding red dragons to the front, some blue lines and butterflies (I brush I downloaded for the butterflies) on the back of the coat and I also used a Japanese character brush to put my name in Hiragana on the coat, but it ended up on the inside (dont ask how -_-').

Finally, the hair was left and this turned out to be the biggest demon to conquer. As it stands, Im not really as happy with the hair, but 3DS MAX does create some truly awesome and realistic hair. I had no idea how to do the hair, and I tried following the tutorials but only the official ones were of any help to me. I was meant to model the hair using splines so I could create my ideal hairstyle, but it was very fiddly, difficult, time consuming and frustrating to work with, hence why I didnt use it in the end. Instead, I used preset hair and I tweaked the hairstyle of it using the Styling options as well as recolouring it too. It still looks pretty damn good, but it's not the hairstyle I wanted ideally. Hair in 3DS Max is probably the most difficult thing in bar human and animal animation possibly, and the hair you will see is what I managed to get after hundreds of failed attempts and retries due to limitations and how unforgiving the Hair system is.

Anyways, no moee further delays, here is the avatar! I'm still trying to figure out how to get it from 3ds max into flash, but Ive just asked a friend on it anyways:

The avatar has turned pretty awesome in my opinion, I created a hybrid of my two imvu characters, but it's nowhere near as detailed and refined as my ideal avatar, although for my first attempt its not too damn bad! ;D. I am going to create my ideal avatar one day definitely, its going to be one of my ultimate challenges, I was too ambitious witht the concepts for the box, elements and avatar, but Ive always been better at concept than technical skills anyways :P. if you could leave me any comments on here, Facebook or in person or w/e, Id be very pleased :). Ciao!

Drawings Update 18/04/09

2009-04-18T18:17:00.006+01:00

In the first drawing for today's list, I wanted to do some more sketches of human faces hence I picked out a random picture I had, and Mr Bean was the one I got. I found the picture ideal to draw from and the result of it is above. I kept it greyscale rather than colour because I prefer it this way for this drawing, and I also used the premade tones in Manga Studio again for the clothes in this sketch. It's a pretty pleasing result anyways and its slowly helping my confidence with drawing humans now.
This next drawing is actually a sketch my friend Tebby did for me. He wanted to test out my inking and digital colouring skills, so he drew me a sketch of a character he made up on the spot and handed it for me to turn into what you see now. All I did was ink the drawing after scanning it in and added colour to it using a colour scheme I felt was perfect fort his character after lots of experimentation.
He's going to be one of the main characters in the manga me and Tebby are going to be working on and we haven't decided on any other specifics like his name, but I think I have a good idea of how I'd like him to be in personality.

This next drawing is of Shigure Sohma from the anime and manga series Fruits Basket. I'm a big fan of his character because he is always very goofy and outgoing but he does have his serious side as well which seldom appears in contrast to his outer personality. I couldn't quite find the pattern I chose for the background with dogs in it, but I loved the style of it so I used it anyways. The style of the background is very similar to the artist's drawing style hence I felt it suited this character to a T.

This next drawing is of Ranma Saotome from the much loved and highly inspirational manga and anime series Ranma 1/2. The manga artist is considered a living legend partly because of this series and many anime have been inspired by it in many ways. Here's a twist for you though, Ranma is actually a boy but he a curse put on him and now he transforms into a girl when splashed with cold water, and back into his boy self when it's hot water. I love the colour scheme and the design of the female Ranma hence I wanted to draw "her" and I gave her a background to suit her beauty as well. Since I love the colour scheme so much, colouring this drawing was an absolute must and you can see the awesome results above :D.

This next drawing is of Roy Mustang from the Full Metal Alchemist anime and manga series. I'm quite a big fan of his personality as well as him being the Flame Alchemist in the show wo produces flames from just clicking his fingers, which is so simple but very effective and impressive. Again I chose greyscale as I favoured it for this drawing too, and I used a premade tone for the background. I'm not exactly sure why I choose colour for some drawings but greyscale for some others, I'm just weird like that XD.

Finally, this next drawing is from the same series FMA, but there's a twist. The series just got remade to match the storyline of the original manga series instead of following it's own storyline and it currently has aired it's second episode now. The author has changed his drawing style slightly in the remake making one of the 2 main antonganists Edward (pictured above) look more mature and hardended but the series still does have plenty of goofy moments with exaggerated, comedic expressions and poses. Due to the altered drawing style, I thought I'd do a sketch of the 2 main antoganists Edward and Alphonse Elric as you can see above. I did the drawing in 3 sessions over 3 days and as you can see, I accidentally did Alphonse with a thicker, darker brush setting but I think it works well in some ways now xD. I'm still currently debating whether to colour it or keept it greyscale, or just to leave it as is even.

2 Absolutely Brilliant Stop Motion Videos Using Action Figures

2009-04-18T18:11:00.003+01:00

Just watch them please :D. They are both seriously amazing in their own ways, and deserve a lot of recognition. I would love to be able to make videos like this, they definitely have inspired me and Id love to make something similar with my own unique twist on it xD. I love the music in the Iron man vs Bruce Lee one and the implentation of well known sound effects in the Godzilla one helps to immerse you into the setting very well actually, I forgot I was watching a stop motion video xD.

Krazy Kakashi: An Official Fundamental In Making Other's Lives Better

2009-04-18T12:57:00.004+01:00

I just logged into to my main Youtube account today as usual, and checked the new comments on my videos, only to discover the most shocking, enlightening and motivational comment I have ever received in my life for anything, and I quote:

Riaxaria

I just have to tell you my man, I have a good friend dying from cancer; If it not for the utter magnificence of your unique and brilliant Phoenix Wrong videos all this time I don't know where I would be right now in life. Thanks a great deal Kakashi, dont ever stop doing what you were meant to do. Continue inspiring others with your outrageous talent and five star sense of humor. A smile a day can change a life. A thousand laughs per minute can change the attitude of the world. HpyB!!!

That was posted on my Ultimate Wrongs Part 2 video and it can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HEEXWVLBw

Well, I think you can see why I was so shocked and amazed by that comment now. I actually managed to help someone out greatly in that sort of situation by just being myself essentially, not a lot of people can say that! All I ever cared about with these videos is also my life long passion, to be able to make others laugh as much as possible mainly with just being myself! This comment has been an unbelievable motivational boost for me, if ever required any motivation to keep myself goign with these videos, this is it. Im a veyr keen supporter of fighting cancer as my grandma very nearly lost her life to it a year ago and also recently a best friend of mine came down with a cancerous lump but is doing fine now with the treatments and all that. I also support several charities and I work for Cancer Reserarch so this is just an amazing discovery for me really, this is definitely going to keep me going with these videos, knowing once and for all just what kind of impact they really do have.

There you go anyways, thought I'd let you all know about it :).

Identities Box Project Update: Final Concept and Construction

2009-04-12T21:41:00.004+01:00

With my Identities Box project so far, I havent got as much done as I would have liked to ideally. My concept for it is finally solidified now though, and Ive chosen how the box will be and the 5 elements that will form it.

With the core of the box, I have decided to go for the idea of the manga books on a table as I've learned how to build everything I need for that with 3DS Max now, and I can use Manga Studio to greatly assist me with it too. I'm not making the conents of the books interactive anymore, I believe that I definitely don't have enough time left to do that, but each book will still contain one of the 5 elemements.

My logo has already been built, and I'm currently building the 3D avatar now. I've endured weeks of frustration on how to use 3DS Max and modelling my character, but the penny has finally dropped and I know now what Im doing hence Im trying to make up for lost time now. The avatar will be a merge of the two outfits I showed for my character from IMVU, and if I do get time somehow, I'll try to model the secondary avatars as well, who are going to acts as pets for my main avatar.

The audio-visual element is going to be based on the tributes I do to the fan created parody series of the Phoenix Wright games, Phoenix Wrongs. I'm currently developing a video of my greatest sketches out of all 12 of the videos I've made so far and I may make it longer than the (just under) 10 mins that I usually do depending on how it goes.

My 4th element has finally been sorted on what it is going to be. It's going to be two seperate videos, included as one video, as I would like to have both videos in the project to be honest. The first video wil be a stop motion animation of a wooden mannequin I have dancing to different songs, or maybe just one depending on how long it takes to do all the photo shooting. The other video I will be submitting will be a whiteboard animation, but I'm throwing in a little twist on it. I own several whiteboards due to buying a bundle off them instead of 1 by accident on a website, and hence I thought Id make the most of them. Im going to have them arranged in a horizontal row and basically, imagine an animation starting on the leftmost board like someone kicking a ball. After he kicks it, I can use the whiteboards to show the ball traversing from one whiteboard to another as it flies to the right, getting larger on each board until it hits something or someone. I believe if I manage to execute this well enough, it will be a highly impressive video to watch :P.

And finally, the 5th element is going to be a slideshow of my drawings I have done, since I started using my graphics tablet to the last one I did, just before I made the slidehow.I've got an insane to impossible amount to get done in the time I have left, so Im currently trying to get as much done as possible whilst actually staying calm for the most part. One of my biggest weakenesses is how much I panic over things like unfamiliar new situations with high risks like exams and also nearing deadlines for projects, but I'm slowly learning to be calmer and more composed and focused now with them. Im not letting myself go into a panic frenzy like I usually do, I will get as much I physically can get done with this project and I for once, will be happy with what I managed to achieve regardless.

Drawings Update 7/4/09

2009-04-07T12:57:00.007+01:00

Sorry I havent updated in a while again, have been so caught up with doing my Identities project work as well as my upcoming Japanese oral exam, so Im very stressed out right now, but I have done a lot of new drawings which I will show now:

This first drawing is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I'm a big fan of the series and this character so she was was on my list of characters to draw, and I chose this picture especially because it was done in the Chibi art style. I am extremely keen on this art style as I love how cute and adorable the characters look (xD), but I love how colourful and joyful they appear too, as well as the oversized head proportionality to them lol. I'm trying to learn how to draw Chibi style properly at the moment using some Manga drawing books, and I hope to be able to draw my own characters in it.

This drawing is of Link from the Zelda series, but this is a new art style invented for the series starting with the game Zelda: The Wind Waker. It was an all new cel shaded art style that caused both a lot of controversy as well as appreciation and divided a lot of the long dedicated fans. Up to this day, the style has grown on people more now though and has been used in other games, some of them starring the same Link from that timeline, which are: Zelda: The Minish Cap, Zelda: The Four Swords, Zelda: Phanthom Hourglass and Zelda: Spirit Tracks (W.I.P.). I added a black border around this drawing too after seeing how well it worked with the previous one, and I have to say, it's worked pretty well with both the coloured and original black and white versions of this one. I absolutely love black and white graphic style effects, but not in insane amounts as offered in that new Wii game Madworld -_-'.

This 3rd drawing is of Konata from the anime and manga series Lucky Star. I'm a big fan of this character as I find her personality pretty similar to mine and I love the colour of her particularly (xD). Hence I had to draw her too, and this picture I used seems to depict her in some sort of a Phantom Of The Opera outfit, which I haven't seen before, but I never watched the series through though. It could be a fan art for all I know, as poeple these days can actually replicate manga artist's work perfectly from scratch which is actually very intimidating for people like me now lol.

These next 2 drawings are of characters I created by "accident" when working from some step by step guides in my Manga books. What happened is as I was following the instructions, I drew the characters to close to the paper's edge and hence I couldn't fit on the whole of their hairstyles so I had to improvise and change their hairstyles to make them fit on the page. On the second drawing with the character at the top, that si a pretty accurate recreation of the original character as that one I managed to do fine. The first drawing was ironically a boy to begin with, but as I continued to draw him, he started to look more feminine due to how I drew him, hence I decided to make him a "her", and there's the final result of what happened lol. The bottom part of the second drawing went through a pretty drastic change too, he had huge spikey hair in a semi circle fashion, but as you can see, I changed his hair quite a lot lol. Also, I changed the colours of this drawing and that boy (who's now a girl), and I added face markings to this character to make them more like my own creations in essence.

This next drawing is one of my favourite characters, Rukia Kuchiki from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I really loved the original picture for this, hence I decided to sketch it out and this is what I got eventually. It was a pretty demanding drawing especially compared to some of my more modern ones, and I decided to start using different shades of gray and highlights for the black and white pictures to add more depth to the composition anyways.

This drawing is of my closest friend for quite a long time now, Leila Fox. She is a serious art fanatic and is one of the best artists I've seen especially non professional of course, and she is extremely popular with my old school's Art department for obvious reasons. I've been trying for ages to sketch a decent drawing of her, but I always struggled due to my lack of skills and experience with drawing human anatomy, hence I never managed to do one successfully. I finally managed to do this drawing though recently after a random, unexplainable surge of determination I got to fulfil this wish of mine and I used the same style I did with my self portrait to to draw this. I started using the Tones feature in Manga Studio, to help with the shading of this drawing as well as make it more eye appealing, particularly the background as you can see. Completing this drawing was a serious achievement for me and it gave me a fairly strong confidence boost as a a result too, and it was all thanks to getting a graphics tablet in the first place :D.

Finally, we get to another drawing of Phoenix Wright I've done, but this time in his original form as drawn by the artist. I loved how this one turned out after it was coloured, it really does resemble the original artwork for him very well, hence it did my confidence a good boost. Embrassingly, I was lazy with shading and colouring the bench he's on actually, as I was too tired to finish the sketch and I wanted to get it out the way at the time, so I cloned the bench from the original picture to save a lot of time and effort. It looks good of course being the original bench used, but it's also a pretty cheap result because I didn't draw and shade in the bench myself >_< bleh. Im still pretty pleased with the whole picture though regardless.

A Truly Amazing 3D Animation Video I Found

2009-04-07T12:44:00.002+01:00

This video is a fan of the Naruto anime and manga series' attempt to animate scenes from the manga which haven't been animated yet. The person who made this used a combination of Maya, After Effects and Photoshop to produce his own animated versions of the manga scenes, and I was seriously blown away by it. This is something I'd love to be able to do, and it's the sort of thing I was hoping to work towards as Im aspiring to be a manga artist or a character artist/animator preferably. I thought it would be better to combine these two careers as much as possible into one, hence Ill be a character artist focusing on the manga style really. I'm going to try and work to this guy's level as much as possible, obviously it won't be an overnight process, but with enough time and determination put in, I could do it.

Drawings Update 29/03/09

2009-03-29T23:50:00.005+01:00

This first drawing is of Sadaharu, a giant alien dog from the anime and manga series, Gin Tama. The picture was done in an orthographic style with 3 different views of him, hence I found it quite useful to draw as draing from different angles is one of my weaknesses.

This next drawing is of the Akatsuki leader from the Naruto Shippuuden anime and manga series, Tobi or his true name Madara Uchiha. He's one of my fave characters in the series with a really goofy personality that also really matches mine well and a brilliant voice actor to boot. I decided to colour this one on a whim and it soon caught on for me after it was done. It did turn out pretty well and now I aim to colour each new drawing when I do one if possible.

And this next drawing is of one of my most favourite characters in general from a game as well as an anime and manga series now, Sheena Fuyibashi. She is from Tales of Symphonia and she's another character who I adore for her personality, but I love her clothes too, especially since they are a kunoichi (female ninja) style. If you can, open the image in a new tab or window to see it in it's true quality and size :P.
This drawing is of an "legendary" character from the Zelda CD-I games called "The King". He never had a name as far as I know, that's how he is always referred to, the poor guy. The games are spoofed immensely because of how cheesy and childish they were, and the King with his extremely "memorable" quotes has become a huge internet phenomenon and gets parodied all the time. The writing in the picture is his most famous catchprase and it is abused a lot, people just love to say it, the man has been a massive influence but not for the reasons he was intended to be I dont think xD.

Finally, we get to the drawing I did a little earlier. This one is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series, Bleach. I absolutely love the chibi style of drawing and wanted to learn how to and master drawing with it, hence this picture was ideal for me, and it has turned out fantastic in my opinion! :D I particularly love how well I managed to colour it and replicate the original picture it was based on, even though this was a trace =/. I am doing drawings on a daily basis now, hence I will be blogging on them more frequently as I'm doing at least 5 drawings a week now :P.

My Personal Progress So Far

2009-03-12T00:00:00.010Z

At the moment, I've got a 101 things going on, so I thought I'd blog about what's happening and what I'm doing for the course as it stands, especially as I keep forgetting to.
First things first, I've definitely decided on my pathway, I already had it in mind when I chose the course, and my mind hasn't changed at all, the pathway I'm taking is Virtual Environments. It combines 3 things I'm very keen on, Virtual Reality, Games Design and Animation, it's a sort of mecca for me right now XD. I'm currently in the progress of writing my 2nd essay which is all about design pathways for the course and pracititioners from the area you're interesed in. Embrassingly, I've only started the intro, but I will amp up the work done on it immediately, I'll explain later why I haven't gto as much of it done as Im meant to.

After being recommended a book by Roma and Jools doing a lecture on books, I decided to set out and get borrowing books from the library...finally lol. It was definitely a great idea, as I was a kid in a candy store when I found the games design and animation sections, hence i've gota lot of books to talk about now XD. Roma recommended me a book called "The Skillful Huntsman", which is all about the recreation of a particular book by graduates and students/teachers from one of the world's leading art schools which is based in America (Art Centre College of Design, Pasadena in California). the book is all about the design process the artists when through when they were designing the visual piece. What attracted me was how they devleoped the characters, they started out with hundreds of miniscule but pretty detailed thumbnail sketches of a character, and built up the character through increasingly complex stages, involving larger, more detailed sketches, silhouette forms, drawings of the head alone etc. It's really fascinating to see how they go from simple, tiny sketches to extremely detailed, awe inspiring, much larger sketches in the end which become the character you see eventually.

Moving on, I bought some books after borrowing them from the library and finding them really useful for the course, especially with the pathway I've chosen and they will also help wih my personal work and eventual career a lot too. I'm jsut going to list the books instead of describing them, as this blog is going to be very, very long without me describing them anwyays! The books that I think are really useful, and definitely worth a look for anyone considering Virtual Environments are:

Animating Real Time Game Characters - Paul Steed
Video Game Art - Nick Kelman
The Complete Guide To Game Development, Art & Design -David McCathy, Ste Curran and Simon Byron
Inspired 3D Short Film Production - Jeremy Cantor, Pepe Valencia
The Skillful Huntsman - Khang Le, Mike Yamada, Felix Yoon, Scott Robertson

I haven't actually read these books through ironically, I'd have to be Superman to have read all of them by now -_-', but from what I saw upon looking through them quickly, I was highly impressed. You can get all the books from the library, (after I return them on Friday of course :P) and if you wanna get them after seeing them, I seriously recommend Amazon, they are pretty cheap on there usually. As well as those books, I bought 3 books from the "For Dummies" range, which are Drawing, Manga and Manga Studio For Dummies to help with my drawing as much as possible, as seeing as I'm a complete beginner, I need all the help and practise I can get 0_0. Again, I havent read them but I'm going to try and read them as much as possible soon especially Manga Studio so I can get closer to drawing better as soon as possible.

As it stands, I'm currently undergoing life drawing classes as well as doing as my own sketches to boost my drawing skills as much as possible, as I'm aiming to be a character artist or an animator. I've done 2 classes now, but the term is finished so I have to go in the next term now. Our tutor reckons we shouldn't think about textures till at least 20 weeks into the course though, which could be in the 2nd year possibly. I have no real experience with drawing to be honest, I didnt really practise that much in the past, and I had such a "rollercoaster" experience with my drawings in the past before I upgraded to a tablet, I got put off it and decided to try wing it purely as a technical animator somehow. I've regained my determination to draw again though, as you can tell from what I've done above and my previous blog posts.

It is extremely difficult for me right now though, thankfully the life drawing classes are over, as in 2 weeks time, I have major exams for Japanese which are the last ones for this year, the super evil sounding oral exam is after the easter holidays though. In that same week, I have a 10 minute presentation to do for the Identities project, and also hand in the essay I mentioned earlier, due to my neighbours dogs barking for hours everyday and sending me into a near mental breakdown alone from that! I am going to try coming into uni to work now though as I've had enough now, I may use Boots Library's study rooms actually, or just go into Waverley, especially for computer based work. I have been reduced to tears practically from stress lately, and I'm currently finding things extremely difficult, the hardest part of my life so far, but I'm pulling through slowly. With life drawing, it's going to take me AGES to even do anywhere near decent drawings, and for someone with low patience and a tendency to get put off easily due to too much self reflection, comparison to other examples and lack of immediate results, this is so going to be "fun".

Finally, with the Identities project so far, I've got some of the elements built already as you will have seen from my blogs. Ive got my ideas sorted now, and Im trying to go for the table idea with comic books on it for the hub of the box. My logo has been made now, I've already got 1 of my additional elements ready which is one of my Phoenix Wrong videos (a compilation verison made exclusively for this), and the other additional element is gonna be a slideshow of all the drawings I will have done by mid April ish. Since I can easily make the slideshow quickly through Sony Vegas, Im leaving it till last and gettign everything else sorted including building the actual box. I'm still trying to master Bipeds, Walking and Facial Animation in 3Ds Max, and also learn how to make a table in it (I learn how to make a book). Hence, Im still trying to build my 3D avatar, but I definitely know how it will look, if you want to know what it will look like, check the blog before this one ;D. I also want to make some additional 3D avatar pets for my avatar himself, which are characters I made up and are quite fond of, so Ill try to make them in time for this project.

That's everything about what's going on with me at the moment I think anyways, ill update again in the future to let you know how the project is coming along then.

Drawings Update 11/03/09

2009-03-11T00:20:00.005Z

Blimey, it has been a fair while since I last posted, but I have got some more drawings to show off. These were all done specifically for the Identities project, with the the 3D avatar in mind of course:

This drawing is off a new character I invented through total randomness XD. Im a massive fan of Ninjas and Meerkats, and I felt like combining them for some reason lolol. This is a basic sketch of what Id like my Ninja Meerkat character to look like anyways. I used a photo of a meerkat as inspiration and guidelines for this sketch. Ideally, I want him to be the pet of my main 3D avatar, although hes fine to be a stand alone character too.

With these pictures, I wanted to create a 3D avatar version of Jeffrey the Seal who's a character invented during the editing of my version of my group's one shot film lol. He started off an as ordinary imaginary character in the film, but I dubbed it with seal sound effects and thus Jeffey the Seal was born due to that XD. To produce these drawings, I bought some ceramic seals from the charity shop I work at, and I took photos of them, and used photos for one of them as the basis for the drawings. As you can see above, I took photos in an orthographic style, hence I have drawings of the Top, Left and Front views of Jeffrey as a result. I'm going to use these to help model the 3D version of Jeffrey neways.

If you've been following my 3D avatar diaries, then you should know who this fellow is^^. It's my character from IMVU, KrazyKakashi! Its the avatar I also want to recreate in my 3D avatar work for the Identities project, as the two different oufits there both contain the exact elements of how I'd love my ideal self to be! Anyways, to help with recreating my avtar from IMVU in 3DS Max, I thought I'd take screenshots of both outfits and draw them out, so I could look at them whilst I'm sculpting the avatar in 3DS. These were tough to do, as the quality of the screenshots (due to the quality of the game) weren't fanatstic and looked fairly horrid when imported into Manga Studio, it made zooming in difficult as a consequence, but I finally managed to draw them in the end. I drew basic versions of them by the way due to this problem as the finer details were much harder to see as well, but these will do perfectly fine for my 3D avatar, although the wings may benefit from some added detail.

My All New Logo

2009-03-03T00:17:00.023Z

In order to develop my logo for my Identities project and personal work too, I originally started with Macromedia Fireworks CS4, but I eventually ended up creating the newer designs in a program called "The G.I.M.P."
The definitive nickname I want to go by for both my university work and my personal projects is: "Krazy Kakashiii", and hence I chose to base the design of my logo around this moniker as much as possible. I started out in Fireworks developing the text part of the logo, I experimented with some premade effects and textures to develop the logo, and ended up making quite a few different designs as a result.

As you can see above, I ended up creating logos with very different styles to one another. I was hoping to have a blue or green colour scheme, as they are my favourite colours and also, green is often associated with both the characters used in my existing logo. Hence, even though I do prefer the colour blue, I'm swinging more towards using green actually, as I feel it will blend and correspond with Tama-Chan and Kakashi due to their colour schemes. To be honest as well, green is definitely looking better than blue does with these logos so it would be good to have a logo based on several shades of green.

Looking back over the previous designs, I found the light blue one that I made with the "Hobo" was the most ideal font for my logo and was the one I felt most comfortable ad pleased with. I love how the shadow and highlight are used to make it stand out like that, it's something I enjoy adding onto text when I working in GIMP.

Anyways as you can see above, I set to work developing the final version of the logo text using said font. I decided to focus on a blue and green colour schemes as you can see here, but I also gave orange a try as a part of a very random whim. The bottom most logo is the one that I'm happiest with, and is the one I chose to use as part of my logo. Since I have sorted out the text part of my logo, all that is left to do is create the background/graphics for the logo and it will be complete. Ideally as I found out from a friend, the best thing to have done here, was to create the background for the logo in Adobe Illustrator BEFORE creating the text in Fireworks, as if you make the text in Fireworks first and export it, you can't really edit it easily in Illustrator, hence you lose a lot of freedom with the design of it that way.

So instead of using Illustrator, I decided to use GIMP instead as I'm a lot more comfortable with it and it means I can easily work on the logo from home. I set work developing a range of new designs for the logo neways featuring several different background in them, which I shall show now:

As evident from the pictures above, I created quite a lot of different designs for the logo, but my personal favourites from them are the Africa one and the one with a Geisha woman holding a Japanese umbrella. I was going to use one of them for my logo, until I came up with my newest idea...

I decided to sketch the picture I originally made for my existing logo, and make the sketch into a new logo! As you can see above, that is the logo I made after sketching the characters and colouring them in and then fitting the text on as well. The first version of this I made has no background, but I included a background on this to make it stand out better. I really like this logo actually, and I am going to use it as well as my final logo, but then again I'm still tempted to use the Japanese Umbrella one alongside this one too as a secondary logo. If anyone could give me their opinions on the logos and which one to choose, I'd very grateful :P.

Drawings Update - 1/03/09

2009-03-01T16:31:00.011Z

This first drawing is of the main antagonist Gintoki from the absolutely amazing, hilarious and random anime/manga series Gintama :P. Everyone who has seen this picture loves it, and reckon it's at least the 2nd best one I've done so far, which is something I strongly agree with it. It took quite a while to draw you may have guessed, but not as long as the Kakashi one.

This next drawing is a self portrait I did as part of my practise of drawing myself, which is something I need be able to do for my ideal 3D avatar. I was meant to draw myself in manga style, but I decided to draw it in a more realistic style for now instead.

Ironically, just earlier today I decided to draw a manga style version of myself as you can see above me. This is pretty how I'd love to look as a manga character before I actually joined IMVU and made my ideal character there XD. I used the same photo of myself for guidance and drew this face with it, along with some help from one of my manga drawing books. I will attempt to do some more manga drawings of myself and also possibly different angles and expressions too as these will come in great importance for how my 3D character will look and function.

This drawing is of two of my most favourite anime characters, Tama - Chan from Love Hina and Hatake Kakashi from Naruto, who both have been mentioned a fair bit by me in the past, especially Kakashi. I'm going to try and use this drawing as part of the logo I have to develop for both my personal work and my Identities project, and once the final logo is ready, Ill post a blog all about the logo, the other ideas I had for it and my design process. I will also be colouring this drawing anyways as part of the logo.

My Phoenix Wrongs: Current State of Them

2009-02-22T17:02:00.003Z

Following on from what I said in my previous blog all about the "Youtube Incident", I've been busy remaking the first 3 videos in the series in Sony Vegas, and now as of today, they are all up on Youtube :P. Since I've remade all the ones I wanted to remake, I can now upload the rest of the videos on a more regular basis, for example on a weekly basis, and I only want to remake the 8th one as I feel that one was a disaster, so I will replace the sketches in it with newer, better ones.
Here are all 3 videos on Youtube so far anyways:

I will either edit this blog or post a new one when the rest of the videos are uploaded neways.

My New Drawings So Far

2009-02-22T16:31:00.004Z

Ok with my next set of drawings I've done, my first one is of Phoenix Wright from the games of the same name. The picture I originally used to draw this was a fanart done in the "chibi" style of manga drawing, which I am a big fan of, so hence a picture combing that with Phoenix Wright, was begging to be drawn lol.

My next drawing is of one of the main characters from a manga/anime series called Lucky Star, whose name is Konata. I'm a big fan of her character because of her blue hair (XD), love for games, laidback, carefree attitude etc lol, as I can see similar aspects of my personality with her.

My next drawing is of a screenshot of a scene from an anime called Ranma 1/2. It's one of my favourite scenes due to the way Mr Tendo on the right is drawn, and the sheer randomness of it, hence I wanted to sketch it. This one is considerably more detailed than the previous drawings I've done hence why I also wanted to draw it, I wanted to step up the ante of my drawings by doing more challenging and detailed sketches to test and improve my skills further.

Finally, we have my personal favourite of a drawing, the big one!^^ This drawing took me a good few days to do, ad I am extremely happy with how it's turned out, I still can't believe I pulled it off, even though it was a trace. Anyways, this drawing is of a possibly fanmade wallpaper from the anime/manga series Naruto, and it features the main antagonist Naruto Uzumaki and his own sensei Hatake Kakashi. Kakashi is the very same character I base my nickname on, and is one of my favourite anime characters of all time, hence you can imagine, he's an important factor in understanding who I am. This drawing I chose to do was definitely the most detailed and challenging by far, I think you will see for yourself why in a second ^_^.

Wicked, huh?^^ I definitely love showing this one off neways! :P

Design Ideas for Identities Box Project

2009-02-17T23:27:00.005Z

With my interactive box project for the Identities module, I came up with a couple of designs for the appearance and structure of the box based on a Japanese theme. The reason I have only done 2 designs so far is because I've been concentrating on designing the content of the boxes, but I am thinking of coming up with more designs to be on the safe side.

With this first design, I wanted to have a Japanese pagoda building as the core of the box, and to act as the hub of the navigation for it too. I used my graphics tablet and Manga Studion to trace around the outline of the pagoda from an picture I got, and then I filled in the details myself. I found it difficult to trace the inner details, and I also wanted to make the picture as close to being mine as much as possible, so I added in my own markings all over it, using a very random but effective technique that I used in GCSE Art.

I was meant to keep it as just the outline, but seeing as I'm enjoying drawing so much at the moment, I got carried away and drew in extra detail on the pagoda >_<. I wanted to make a 3d model of it neways, most likely from scratch within 3DS Max., although that will be freaking difficult to think of it. Anyways, if you imagine the above drawing in 3D, I wanted the navigation to be centered around the camera itself. Basically as respresented by the arrows there, clicking on different parts of the picture, will rotate the building to show a specific side, and thus one of the included features of the box like my logo for instance. I was thinking of creating movie clips of the building being rotated in 3DS MAx by use of the timeline and moving the camera itself to give the impression of the building rotating. I would then embed the movie clips into the project, which is being built in Macromedia Flash, so when you clicked on one of the areas, the clip would play and the building would appear to rotate as a consequence. Due to time limitations as well as lack of skills, I fear I may not be able to pull this idea off actually to be honest, although I would love to! Out of all the ideas I do have for the box so far, this has to be the most complex one to be honest, but most likely the most visually impressive too potentially. I was thinking of creating a 2D version of it actually, where the box would look something like it does above, albeit the arrows of course, and I'd have small picture symbols in the box somewhere, which would act as buttons and respresent each individual item in the box. Visually, it would probably look a lot like my moodboards, but hopefully a lot better. If you want to gain an impression of what I'm planning to create, please feel free to search for my blog on moodboards, it can't be missed!;) I would probably have an animated ninja character in the middle of the page in front of the pagoda, which I could possibly make it "fly" ninja style towards the chosen symbol, which may be a cool feature. If I really go advanced, I may even be able to pull this off with the 3d character avatar I'm developing for the box, but then again time and skills are problems here too.
With my next design which you can see above, someone suggested an idea to me about having a comic page style interface for the box, which I really liked, being an obsessee with anime and manga of course. Hence, I came up with the idea of having a several manga books lying on a table closed with a bird's eye view of them, and each one would represent a different item in the box. When you click on a book, it should open up and reveal what's inside it, hence the comic page style interface can be used here.

In order to build this, I will need to use 3Ds Max to create the 3D models of the table and books, and I will also need to develop the actual project in Flash in a similar way to the other design idea I mentioned. I will also need to use Manga Studio as it can generate comic panels on a page in seconds, which I can export as .jpeg files and thus possibly map them to the 3d models in 3Ds Max. I would then export the books with the panels added in them, and then import them into Flash after that, where I would add in all the items to each corresponding book. This idea does seem at least a bit easier to make than the first idea, and it could work really well if I manage to build it successfully.

Finally, I do have one final idea which I haven't skectched up yet though. It's pretty similar to the 2D alternative of the 3D pagoda design I mentioned, where I would create a moodboard style interface bassed around a Western Asian theme, and have interactive elements in it, which would take you to different sections of the box. Out of all the ideas, this would definuitely be the easiest to make by a mile, but it also will the be easy way out and the least visually impressive, so I do want to try and avoid using this idea...unless I really have to!

I haven't chosen which idea I'm going to develop yet, as I'm still exploring the software, learning what I can about them, what their limitations are and what I can actually pull of with them especially with the amount of time and the current level of skills I have too.

Back To The Drawing Board

2009-02-13T23:33:00.008Z

In a recent seminar I had, I gained a strong amount of inspiration for my Identities interactive box project, as well as rediscovering my love for drawing. The reason for me being enthusiasic about drawing all over again is due to using a graphic tablet properly for the first time! I was so impressed after using one in the seminar, that I immediately decided to go out and get one, which I did :P. Thanks to eBay, I got the same graphics tablet that I used for a mere £50, when the usual price is like £80!!. The graphics tablet is called Bamboo (Eastern Asian style name woot!^^), and it's by a famous brand called Wacom.

It's a pretty nice looking tablet and as you can see, it matches the colour scheme perfectly of a pc with black, silver and blue colours, which is what I so happen to have. The blue part comes from the embedded lights anyways. The tablet is really fantastic to use anyways, it picks up the pen so well, and the smoothness of your drawing and the recognition is brilliant in a word. I'm already becoming quite accustomed to it, only receiving it earlier this week! It's super easy to set up too, you literally just plug it it in and it autoinstalls, but if it doesn't, there's always the traditional method. Combining this tablet with some software I bought called Manga Studio, drawing has become a real enjoyment for me, and I try to aim to draw something every day now, I enjoy it that much!

Anyways, on with the real purpose of this blog which is to showcase the drawings I've already done with this tablet anyhoo. Without further ado, here they are in all their glory in chronological order:

This first drawing is of Dr Zoidberg, a character from the cartoon series Futurama. I did some random photo manipulation when I was younger, and for some odd reason, I wanted to make Zoidberg look evil, so I warped the picture to make it look like he had horns, and put flames behind him. I ended up drawing the picture myself later on too for some odd reason anyways, and then I scanned it into my pc to edit in Manga Studio recently. As you can see above, that is the drawing after I went over it with the pen tool in Manga Studio using my graphics tablet anyhoo. I literally made this drawing straight after getting the tablet, so not exactly a bad effort even I do say so myself ;D.

Moving on, this is the very first manga style drawing I did. I recently redrew it in my sketchbook lately, my new sketchbook is A4 in size, so I can finally scan my work in now, the previous one was A3 which made drawing an nightmare too. Anyhoo, this the drawing after I scanned it in and re-inked it in Manga Studio. I forgot to get rid of the construction lines, but I can always do that any time. This character is the first face you draw in one of the manga drawing books I own anyways.

Drawing number 3, and we have the Old Man Sensei (brilliant name :P) character from a game I got recently called Ninjatown (which I may blog about in the future). I love the art style of the game so much, I had to draw my favourite character from it neways, and it's turned out pretty damn well, I know I traced over the original picture, but to have done that with a graphics tablet, which I have next to no experience with, it's really impressive for me! Don't why I drew it in blue by the way, I dont know either to be honest XD.

Moving on, we have my drawing of a "Raving Rabbid" from the Rayman Raving Rabbids game series by UbiSoft, which I am an extreme fan of, and then some. Again, the drawing's turned out so brilliantly neways, I've shown this drawing as well as the previous ones to friends, and they were all really impressed even though they are amazing artists themselves!

My next drawing is of an adorable as hell character called Tama-Chan, from the anime and manga series, Love Hina. Tama-Chan is a flying turtle who ends up turning up in the oddest places, at the weirdest times and doing all sorts of random things, and I really enjoyed drawing her like the other drawings I did before too.

Finally, we get to the drawing that I literally did like half and hour ago! This one is of Sonic the Hedgehog (if you dont know who that is, I may have to hurt you [metaphorically of course]), and he's a character that I've always admired since the golden age of like 5 or 6 years old, to this very day. He's one of the most important aspects of the personality, and hence I had to do him some justice by drawing him lol. The original drawing I did of him which was my 2nd proper drawing and done in full A3 size, was one of the best drawings I've ever done, especially since I copied what I saw, not traced it! It actually looked almost exactly like this to be honest, I did myself proud with that one.

Anyways, those are my drawings with the tablet so far, pelase feel free to give me any sensible feedback or tips on them, and I will continue to do blogs on them as I do more, I may even do weekly blogs on them depending on how things go.

Anime Conventions And All That

2009-02-12T23:34:00.003Z

Recently, I was shown the website to an anime convention being held at DeMontfort University in Leicester by a friend of mine from Youtube. Being very keen on anime and manga of course, I've already signed myself up for it and it will be held during September 4th to the 6th this year. I think this will be a fantastic venture for me anyways, as I will get to meet the guy behind the Yu-gi-oh Abridged series, which is a fan dub of an anime series called Yu-gi-oh, and it's freaking hilarious!^^ Im quite a big fan of him anyways, especially since he does all teh individual voices himself, which is even more shocking when you realise that the voices he does almost sound exactly like the vocie actors from the english dub of the anime!

I will also get to meet a female samurai descended from a long line of samurais in her family, spanning many generations! There are millions of things to do there, I won't list them due to the excessive number of things to do, but you can easily access it via the website.

Anyways, I've been planning to have my Phoenix Wrong videos shown off at a convention recently, and amazingly, my friend suddenly showed me this withotu having any idea of what I wanted to do! I've decided that I want to feature my work there if possible as the Phoenix Wright series is done in the traditional manga style, and does have it's own manga series now too. They only have 2 guests featuring at the convention at the moment, and they want at least 5, so I'm really hoping that they will let me be part of it too, it would be an extremely helpful, amazing and generally spirit lifting devleopment! I'll let you know in the future what happens with this neways, wish me luck!

The link to the website is: www.alcon.org.uk

My Favourite Music Videos: Nickelback - Savin' Me

2009-02-11T20:49:00.004Z

Music Video:SAVIN' ME (by Nickelback)

Music Video Code provided by Video Code Zone

I was thinking about the video to this song earlier, and I remembered how much I love it actually. I love the actual concept of the video, basically it starts off with a man walking down a street on his phone, and about to cross a street, when all of a sudden, he gets dragged away with strong force by a nearby man who appears to be homeless. Literally just as he pulled the main guy away, a bus comes speeding fast like it's out of the film Speed or something...After that, the main character walks away but soon discovers something odd, which isn't revealed till later in the video. At the moment, it just shows him with a puzzled expression everytime he sees someone, and he tries to swipe at something above their heads much to their alarm.

After sitting next to a woman at a bench, it's revealed what has been bothering him, he can see timers counting down at a regular pace above everyone's heads, which immediately gives the impression that it probably is how long they have to live in this world. This soon turns out to be the right assumption as the man comes across a scene of an accident, with an elderly woman being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Upon looking at her directly as she enters the ambulance, he notices her timer moving down a lot faster than usual, and it shows the timer ticking down 5 seconds until it reaches 0, where her eyes close and I think you can figure out what happened there.

Alarmed by the sight of the woman dying and being unable to save her, he runs away from the scene, and walks down another street trying to clear his head whilst still being "cursed" with this new ability of his. Just when he has given up on trying to make sense of the ability and what good it could do, he notices another woman approaching her car and suddenly discovers her timer is dropping fast with only like 7 seconds roughly left on it, without thinking twice, he runs towards her and pulls her form the car, only for...well why spoil the ending? It's pretty damn shocking what could have happened to her just then!

The part I loved the most, was how it ended actually because what that guy did right at the end, is what that homeless guy did for him at the start...saved his life! I just thought it was brilliant how they brought back what happened at the start, but made it appear to have a cycle style effect, where the homeless man's destiny up till that point because the destiny of the guy he saved, and thus now this woman will end up having the same destiny...to save someone's life before it's too late!

Obviously, seeing how long other people have to live is not something that would be easy to live with, imagine trying to comfort a loved one who is fatally ill and you know that death will be coming for them soon, but you cannot tell them? To me, this video sends out such strong postive and negative messages alike, and has a kind of feeling to it, most music videos and maybe films and such cannot hope to have! As said just now, having this ability can have such negative impacts on your mentality, but the important thing is, not to think of it as a curse at all, but as a gift from God! Instead of worrying about who is going to die soon and how to avoid showing that you know to them, how about trying to save an innocent life instead which does not deserve to be taken yet?

As life will teach you though, you cannot save everyone, but as I like to think, it doesn't mean you can't try your best to! If I had this ability, I'd definitely try to save as many people as I could, but then again, the damage of failing and seeing someone die in front of you, could be likely to induce permanent trauma! I do love the thought of being able to save lives though, it's something I've always wanted to do, but I've always also felt incapable of doing for many reasons, hence that is one of the reasons why I love this video so much, it enables me to see what it would be like if I could save lives, if I could make a difference! Another reason too, is that I've seen a fair few deaths in my time, I've not always seen the deaths myself, but I've had to deal with deaths of both innocent people and animals, as well as losses of the odd family member too as well.

Anyways, I hope after what I said there, you can gain an understand of why I'm so personally attached to the video, and what it means to me anyways. This song does feature in my list of mysongs that Icannto live without, and now you know why ultimately, thanks to the video. If you don't mind, I would like to hear your opinions on seeing this video neways, and how it made you feel and such. Please no silly comments or anything, I'll only accept sensible ones, and I'll also compare how you feel to how I do and see if we can agree on anything, cheers.

Moodboards? More Like Mad-Boards!

2009-02-05T23:40:00.032Z

Okay, from last friday's seminar, we were told to design some moodboards to represent who we are as multimedia practitioners. Moodboards are basically like digital collages of yourself, but they don't have to be digital either, they can be made up of traditional stuff like newspaper cuttings, random objects, and sketches. I decided to produce several moodboards, all being digitally based with pictures used from the internet and my collection.

If you have read my previous blogs, seen some of my work, met me or somehow saw the presentation I was supposed to do for tuesday (but couldn't because I fell ill >_<), then you may think I'm probably hard to summarise clearly, I certainly think so to be honest. Condesing complex, more massive things into smaller, simpler things isn't one of my specialties as far as I know, so instead of creating one moodboard, I thought of doing around 4 or 5, each one based on a theme that I feel strongly about. Unfortunately, things did not go quite to plan actually, instead of doing 4 or 5, I ended up making 8 moodboards! I got so into making them and found it so enjoyable, I couldn't resist making more, and thus time and exhaustion are what eventually stopped me from making even more. If you read my blogs, then you probably will have noticed a "moodboard" that I made in the recent past, I called it "My Visual Collection", but after learning about moodboards in that seminar, I realised that it could probably be classed as a moodboard in a way! Here is a reminder of what it looked like anyways, it was a collection of items that I put together that I believed summarise and define who I am:

If you would like to know anymore about the items featured, and how they relate to me and such, feel free to look up the blog I did for this anyways, titled "My Visual Collection". To be on the safe side, stick "Identities" with the search tags too.

Anyways if you look below, this is a screenshot of the background for my Anime Moodbox. The trouble is though, like with the later moodboxes, I designed some pretty cool backgrounds, but then they went to waste due to so many images covering them up! >_<

And if you look below, you can see the first version of my Anime Moodbox anyways. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there's a white border from one of the pictures causing some visual nuisance in the picture, hence I had to remove it. Also, I didn't completely like the choice of colour for the background, as cool as it looked, it didn't suit the pictures that I used on it after I had edited them in a certain style for this moodbox.

Therefore, I decided to try changing the colour of the background too, and I ended up finding a better colour I think for it neways. I also decided to add more colour to the characters for the final version of the moodbox, as due to the coloured glow I put on the pictures, the whole moodbox lost it's black and white graphic style feel to it anyways. Here is the final version of the moodbox anyhoo with a screenshot of it and it's background on it's own.

Funnily enough, the characters I've chosen for my Anime Moodbox, are ones I feel that I have strong connection with when watching anime, and that I can understand what they're going through and why the feel how they do and such. I believe these characters personalities are all similar to mine, as I have a very varied, complex and random personality to be honest lol.

Moving on anyways, the theme I chose for my 2nd moodboard was Eastern Asia, which I doubt I really need to explain anymore why, as I think I've mentioned my life long passion for it enough times now in most of my work at least^^. Here is the screenshot for the background neways:

This time, my creativity started kicking in again like it did on the Frenzoo avatar website (look for my blog on that too :P), and I used this floral brush to try and create a giant flower which you can see above you. The brush I used, was literally one half of that flower, so I enlarged it to fit the page, and then "painted" the right half of the flower with it. Since you cannot flip the brush itself to make it face the other way, I had to improvise and I did that by flipping the actual image horizontally, then painting the second half in the same way as I did with the first half in the corresponding area. Flipping the image back to normal, and that's what you get up there!^^ I also created a white layer the same size of the background, and placed it above this background layer with a reduced opacity to create a sort of "tinted" effect on the background.

I got creatived with the images for this moodboard too actually, I added a "Softglow" effect to that ninja on the left to give him that slighty radiant look he has, which I believe works quite well. With the kung fu master in the red next to the ninja, he originally wasn't in colour actually. It was originally a graphic novel style black and white picture (noir style), but I felt it didn't stand out enough compared to the other pictures and their variety of colours, so I chose to add some red into his life as I believe it does look pretty good and still manages to retain somewhat a graphic effect, not as much as if it were completely black and white though of course.
With the geisha woman holding the umbrella in the bottom right corner, I accidentally managed to delete her silouhette whilst removed the background from the image, but this turned out to be quite useful, as I then noticed that the background appeared where the silouhette was, but in the same shape as it. Hence on a whim, I moved this Yin and Yang picture I was about to use, behind her and voila! It turned out a pretty impressive and eye pelasing result I think! :P

Like with the Anime Moodbox though, I wasn't convinced that the background colour was suitable for the job again, hence I decided to experiment again to find a a better colour.

As you can see, I not only recoloured the background in 2 different ways, but I eventually arrived at at the decision that a blue colour was the best choice for the background anyways. I forgot to mention by the way, I placed characters from the Hiragana script in Japanes and they spell out my name, Karan Bhalla. The romanised version of the characters is literally, Ka-ra-n Ba-la, although I don't think it's the exact translation of my name in Japanese but ah well.

And now for the 3rd moodboard anyways, which is based all around Animals. The screenshot of the background is below:

For this background, I decided to use a specific set of floral brushes to create it, with usage of several shades of green to try and add some depth to the picture. I only made a final version of my Animals Moodboard anyways, as to save time and such.

Like with the backgrounds, I went for a green colour scheme to help the images blend together and create more consistency within the picture. It did take a fair bit of fiddling around to get the right shades of green and all that with this moodboard anyhoo, it definitely was the 2nd or the most toughest one to make out of all of them, with this one only posing a mild challenge at the most :P. I am quite happy with the way it's turned out, especially with how well the animals blend in together with one another as well as the background.

With moodboard no 4, I went for an African theme anyways, as Africa is where I was born and raised, until my dad's side of the family started causing trouble and them my momma said your packing your bags and we're moving to UK! I got out of the cab and said, " Smell Ya Later!". Took one look at my house and realised I was the Fresh Prince of Lame Parodies...I Mean Nottingham! Sorry, I couldn't resist there, after realising how I worded that first sentence there XD. Here is the screenshot of the background for it anyways...ahem:

I used some new tribal brushes that I downloaded, as I love tribal designs, and I decided on a blue theme this time, as blue is my favourite colour neways, and it also reflects the calm, carefree life I had back in Africa. I used my trick of flipping the image again here anyways, to mirror the brush patterns in the picture.

I didn't want to overcrowd this moodbox too much with pictures, as I did want to show off as much of the tribal designs I did as possible. I chose the same blue theme for the pictures anyways to help make them blend in together as one image and also to blend with the background too. The meerkat with guitar and cowboy hat was a nice find anyways :P.

I'm afraid I cannot show you a screenshot of the background of the next moodboard which is the Games one anyways, as I messed up bigtime on it by forgetting to save a final version of the original gimp file of the moodboard, and seeing as the only version of it I saved was a JPG file, all the layers get merged together into one, so I cannot open that and show you the background like that, sorry. I do have good news though, me being the pre-emptive, clever git I am, I had arranged all the pictures on the background so that most of the background was still visible! All I can say to that is...thank god! Here is what the final version of the Games Moodboard looks like anyways:

For the background, I decided to go for a graphic style after all due to the brushes I used, as I think you can see why I chose it from the picture. These characters are from games that I'm very passionate about and feel quite a connection with like with the anime characters anyways. I decided to keep their colours though because of the wide variety of graphical styles and the unique colour sches on offer here, I just had to show them off lol.

With the 7th moodboard, I decided to focus on an area I haven't mentioned much before, my love for Nature. I'm a massive fan of landscape scenes as you can see below, I formed a moodboard using some of the pictures from my collection of Nature wallpapers. Yes I said some, not even most here XD. To be honest, I think I've created some pretty nice wallpaper here, I've been struggling to find a nature wallpaper that I want to keep as my background on my desktop for a long term basis, as I keep changing it to a different scene every now and then lolol. This moodboard however solves the problem, due to it combining several images into one, it means I get to enjoy the beauty of several nature scenes at once rather than just the one :P. Go me!

After this one, we have the final moodboard which is definitely, the biggest, most random, most demanding and most epic one out of the lot. This one is like a general moodboard about me, it's focus is self identity, and I've shown several anime and games characters as well as some of my avatars, my official logo for my work, and some people who inspire me. This isn't the complete list of people who inspire me anyways, if I did make one of those, I swear I'd collapse from exhaustion or my brain would self destruct from the sheer, unimaginable number of things in a moodboard at once!

I hope that didn;t shock you too much!^^ This is my grand finale moodboard, the mother of all moodboards I've done and so on. This was a beast to make unsurprisingly, but definitely a lot easier than intially expected, as I thought it would take absolutely ages due to it's sizeand complexity.

Oh yeah..I forgot to mention something...This verison is...the SMALL VERSION!!! It may not appear so intimidating since it's been reduced to fit in this blog, but I can tell you this comes in at around 774 KB, and it's dimensions are 800 by 1112 pixels! It's bigger, badder older brother, is the real beast, with a file size just over 2MB and it's dimensions being 1600 by 2224 pixels! I can tell you know, the larger one was the one I originally built too! Yep, I officially can be classed as mad now lol. Anyways, I'm going to call it day now as it's 1:45 am and I'm freaking knackered beyond belief, I've been awake till 2-3pm average everyday so far mostly because of uni work, so yeah, all that lost sleep is really getting to me as well as the hours spent making thse moodboards! -sobs-

I hope you guys appreciate the effort I went through to make these, I know I made them sound easy, but the sheer endurance toll they have on you alone is a real nightmare, I seriously should try and get them done in the daytime especially, lack of sleep is never a good thing! Meh anyways, if you have anymore questions about the moodboards or whatever, feel absolutely free to ask me in person or on her or anywhere else you can contact me, and please make sure it's a sensible question too...See ya anyways!

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 7

2009-02-02T17:08:00.006Z

For my 7th day on Twinity, I got invited to a party by Lars, which was being held on the rooftop of a cinema in Berlin city. The party was to celebrate the release of the film "Spirit" (Which I wanna see badly!), and as you might have guessed, it has a fancy dress theme of specials masks, inspired by the release of the film.

I decided to teleport to Berlin city centre a few minutes before the party to give me time to find the cinema, until a genius idea hit me...Twinity has a feature to teleport to any of your friend's locations, so I immediately decided to teleport to where Lars was as he was where the party was being held.

Upon arrival on the cinema rooftop, I was immediately welcome by Lars as you can see above. I couldn't see him oddly enough though, but I wanted to explore the area anyways. Oh yeah, you can see someone standing behind me wearing one of the mentioned Spirit masks there.

Shortly afterwards, quite a lot of people turned up as you can see above and flocked in front of the billboard nearby, which would soon become quite significant...

As you can see above, the party suddenly got into swing and almost everyone started dancing with some music playing of course. The guy in the middle 50 Globals (Nice Twinity based pun there), was the DJ and begun asking people for their music requests. Things didn't go so well from there though, as seeing as I don't know how to "dance", I thought to ask the people there...only to be completely blanked! I wasn't exactly happy about that..so I thought sod them, and decided to explore the area and see what I could find.

I decided to examine the billboard nearby, and discovered something pretty nifty as a result. As you can from the above screenshot, a page from the website "Youtube" has been embedded into the billboard, and seeing as there is a video on it on autoplay, it automatically provided the music for the party! That was a pretty impressive idea there, I never though of using the embedding feature of billboards like that, me likey a lot lol. Unfortunately the song playing was Men In Black, the song is great but this version of it wasn't...It was by some band called "Forever the Sickest Kids" (They sound like a "nice" group), and their cover of the Will Smith classis was a weird hybrid of rap and metal 0_0...It wasn't to my tastes at all, the original version is definitely the best =].

Also whilst exploring around, I noticed the huge promotional advertising sign for Spirit adorned on the rooftop of a nearby building, which was a pretty cool find, as it suits the surroundings well. By the way, if you like at 50 Globals in this screenshot above, it kinda looks like Superman when he's about to fly off, or failing that, he might have spotted a missile coming towards him XD.

Anyways, I decided to call it a day from this point, due to my shallow and limited experience today, hopefully my next visit will be more eventful. If there's one thing Twinity does right, it's that it does some damn impressive scenery work and such neways.

Identities: 3D Avatar Diary (Frenzoo) - Day 1 (Read Previous Blog First!)

2009-01-30T00:49:00.025Z

Okaay, I just had a look at the website, and I'm already pretty impressed with what I'm seeing. The website is still in it's beta stages, but there is still a fair bit you can do at the moment, and as I am chatting to Simon now, he's saying they do have big stuff planned for its future! It's a pretty wicked feeling to be part of a huge website/game project that's still in development, I love things like this as I find great joy in see how they develop over time, which is also something I do with my own skills, I remake my old videos in the future to see how much I'm improved and so on.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I immediately decided to create my own "Ztylist" on the site, and what you see there, is the default avatar you get before you customise it. Just before I started work on customing my character's clothes, Simon recommended that I should try creating my own clothes from my character instead and he also showed me a custom shirt he had made, using textures from a recent video game called Street Fighter IV.

As you can see in the screenshots above, that is Simon's character with the Street Fighter design on, but unfortunately, you have to upgrade to a VIP account in order to be able to add any textures of your own onto your clothes. I decided to give the clothes creation system a try anyways, as I would prefer to have my own designs rather than premade ones to wear.

As you can see in the screenshot above, this is the shirt design creator on Frenzoo. Along the bottom of the editor where the green area is, these are premade graphics that you can use to make your shirt with. There are 3 parts to a shirt that you can edit: Pattern, Detail and Cut. There is a Advanced tab too which is only for VIP members, and Im guessing it involves the ability to upload any texture you want. In the light reddish area on the left, you can edit the variables of the graphic, such as width, height and rotation.

Being a massive fan of flame designs on clothes and such, I set out to create my own flame design on my shirt anyways.

Using a seaweed graphic from the preset list, I got creative and decided to clone the graphic a fair few times, and thus resizing and flipping some of clones horizontally to create the flames you can see in the screenshot above. I didn't know at the time that there were premade flame graphics, so I could have saved myself some hassle, but I did like how I thought on the spot and made best of what I had, which is a vital skill to have.
Eventually, I did discover the flame graphics, but instead of getting rid of the flame that I created using the seaweed graphic, I decided to add them alongside on the shirt as well.

This is my shirt with the premade flame graphics added on. I quite liked the idea of having flames circling the bottom of the shirt, which is similar to some shirts I used to own and kinda gives them impression of the shirt being on fire. On the back as you can see on the blueprint, I've also added some flames on there too to fill up the space anyways.

With the clothes editor, the Pattern tab will of course let you create patterns on the shirt, so any graphis that you choose, will automatically be resized and duplicated in the style of a normal pattern onto the shirt. The Detail tab lets you edit the graphic as a proper item onto the shirt like what I did with the seaweed graphic to produce the flames, hence it basically lets you place and edit your graphic on the shirt. And the Cut tab lets you cut away parts of the clothing depending on the shape of the graphic, e.g. a crescent moon or a star graphicused on this tab will cut out a crescent or star shape on the shirt and thus showing a bit of skin. This is something which will probably used more for feminine clothes of course, but I think I could see it being used jeans somehow.

After the shirt had been made, I decided to see what hairstyles I could get for my character. Unfortunately, due to being the site still in it's beta stages and thus new, the catalalogue was a fair bit bare of clothes, hairstlyes and the like. Therefore, I just opted for a plain blue hairstyle for now, as you cannot get red or blue spikey hair yet as far as I know.

Moving on, I decided to design myself a pair of jeans to wear, with a flame them too, hence I decided to create a range for my clothes called "Raging Inferno".

I love how my jeans turned out anyways, particularly the red flames at the bottom of them, I feel that they do look pretty awesome, even I must say so myself lol. After making them, I moved on to designing the boots for my new range, which soon turned out to be a big problem...

Notice anything missing in the above picture? Yep, that's the problem right there. Apparently as I discovered from Simon, you cannot wear these boots with jeans -_-'... After getting a bit annoyed at that, I tried to rectify the issue by designing some trainers instead...(In retrospect, it was yet another mistake for me). Before that though, I decided to make my character wear the shorts that he started off with to save him any prolong embarassment...poor fella.

Thankfully, as I found out, the shorts can be worn with both boots and trainers, hench I'm free to wear either of them now.

And now in the screenshot below, you can see the current outfit for my character due to the current limitations and issues with Frenzoo. I will speak to Simon about resolving this issue with the jeans as I would like to be able to wear them with shoes, and I also will eventually change my hairstyle once a wide range of spikey hairstyles are available.

I'm gonna call it a day from here anyways though, but i'll continue to post entries on my experiences on here, especially with what happens as the site develops furthers and so on.

A Very Helpful New Friend And Thus Awesome New Opportunities!

2009-01-30T00:31:00.005Z

I just recently got added on MSN Messenger buy a guy by the name of Simon, who so happens to be an Engineering graduate from Melbourne University in Australia! He moved to Hong Kong about 5 years ago, and now works for a company, which is building it's own 3D avatar site, similar to sites like IMVU, VSide and Twinity! Now isn't that pretty damn convienent for a Multimedia student like me, who so just happens to be studying 3D avatars as part of their Identities module? Here is the link to the website they are building anyways: Frenzoo.

If that wasn't already an interesting and potentially helpful opportunity for me, the best part is yet to come...Simon is friends with people who have graduated from Multimedia too and also knows some students still studying the course! Now, how awesome is it that I now I can meet Multimedia graduates and current students from across the world?! I'm going to see if I can get in touch with these Multimedia people anyways, and see what knowledge they can bestow upon me, but I just hope that some certain lecturers from a certain course I'm studying read this blog anyways...

I will be posting a blog detailing my experiences on the new site being developed by Simon's company anyways.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (IMVU) - Day 2

2009-01-29T23:41:00.021Z

As soon as I logged into IMVU today, I received a note saying that I had two friend requests from other users pending, which after accepting them, takes my friends total to 11 now, which is a not bad start at all :P
.
Sorry for the small screenshot, I keep forgetting to mention this, but as you may have noticed in my blogs, some screenshots get cropped out on the right hand sidefor some odd reason as part of their size, hence I can onlymake them so big. You should be able to click the pictures to make them bigger, I can at the moment so it should work.

You most likely will have noticed that my appearance has changed a fair bit here, but I will explain that later on anyways. Before I talk about my change in appearances, I would like to show you the changes I've made to my apartment so far and just generally give a tour of it, as I haven' t done that yet. Anyhoo, starting with the living room, I've took out 2 of the armchairs there as well as the table and replace them with a japanese bushido table as you can see below.

Moving on, I took out some bean bag chairs from the TV room/front room area and replaced them with a "Love Couch" for a laugh XD. Like the busido table, it was another purchase from the IMVU store anyways. Despite the name and the awkwardness of it's intended purpose (before you ask, it has some erotic/romantic poses for your characters to do whilst sitting on it, no "hurrah!" is involved thank god), I do like the colour scheme of it a lot believe it or not, especially since it matches the other look for my character.

In the outside area, I haven't done any customising yet, but at the moment as you can see below, you got a pool with inflatable chairs, some deckchairs and tables and some pretty nice plants too.

I love the outside area of my apartment to be honest, the inclusiion of the huge pool and the plants was a nice idea, especially since it reminds me of a my holiday home back in Mombasa in Kenya, Africa. I'm going to show and explain to you about my character's new appearance anyways.

As you have already seen, and can see in the screenshot above, I've been busy customising my character's appearance with some very pleasing, excellent and surpising results! The look you see above and the look I'm about to show, are the EXACT ways I absolutely love to look! Maybe with very slight changes here and there, but to be honest, these digital recreations are definitely the closest you will get to seeing who I am on the inside, and the person I'd love to be.

And in this above screenshot, you can see the other look I created for myself, which the one I prefer personally. Although to think of it, I think the first one reflects the more innocent, optimistic and crazy side of me, where as this look represents the darker, more serious side to me that your very seldom see, unless you happen to get on the wrong side of me fairly often XD.

I was absolutely amazed after making these, I'd never imagined that I'd be able to create such accurate reprensations of who I truly want to be in an online game or whatever, this is definitely a fantastic achievement for me. I'm sure the reason for this though is in the IMVU store, users can submit their own clothes, pets, furniture, rooms etc to be sold to other users via the credits system, and I think it's safe to say there are plenty of awesome, highly skilled anime fans on there! Any anime fans may recognise parts of my outfit actually, especially if you like Naruto or Bleach. Parts of outfit are actual digital recreations of the respective parts of certain characters from Naruto and Bleach. The characters who I have "borrowed" my look from are Hatake Kakashi from Naruto, Ichigo Kurosaki (In his "Bankai"state), and Zaraki Kenpachi from Bleach.

I think you can see how each character has influenced my 2 different looks anyways, but the whole outfits weren't just made up of their clothes and such, I chose some regular clothes as well, which so happen to match my tastes very well :P.

Oh yeah before I forget, I wanted to show off something neat I found in the IMVU store anyways. All I can say about it is..."Kamehameeeee haaaa!" Or even..."I'm A Firin Mah Lazor!"

For any Naruto fans out there, you can also get the Oodama and regular Rasengan to pull off during converastions for a laugh, and I'm pretty sure you can get Itachi's Giant Katon attack and Chidori/Lightning Blade too.

I wanted to show off all the pets I have by the way, so here they are XD. The little kawaii orange blob is a chibi style fox anyways. I do have other pets like a wolf, dophin and panda too, but they are classed as furniture due to that they wander round the rooms themselves and can be interacted with seperately.

I forgot to show off the rest of my apartment earlier somehow, so here is a couple of screenshots of what I missed out. You can see the dining room over there, and the kitchen area to my character's right anyways.

This room here, is my bedroom anyways. I added a picture on the wall on the left, but I haven't customised this room either to be honest. Just I was finishing my tour anyways, one of my good friends popped online after getting my invite to join IMVU. She used to be on IMVU till sometime last year, but she quit using it until now, so I decided to chat to her on here rather than MSN Messenger for a change XD.

Her avatar does resemble her fairly well, which is just more proof that IMVU is definitely the game/messenger/thingy to go for if you want the most accurate recreation of your ideal self :P.

Unfortunately, she had loads of work to do being in uni like me, so we had to cut our conversation short for now, but it definitely was more cooler talking on her rather than MSN, the added interactivity and visuals helps to make things a fair it more interesting than just a standard text based chat.

For my next entry anyways, I'll try to give a tour of all the rooms I've bought neways, so you can see what I wasted my points on XD.

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

2009-01-27T22:06:00.017Z

In one of my recent blogs, I talked about deciding to play 2 other online games and possibly do diaries for them documenting my character's experiences in them, like I'm doing for Twinity. I've had a look at IMVU so far, and I will now show you what my 1st session was like on it anyways. I've known about IMVU for years, but it never really appealed to me, but upon sudden realisation that it was all about 3D character based messaging and such, I decided to finally give it a go and see what it was like.

After I signed up to IMVU, I soon received a variety of messages from IMVU, but some of them were quite helpful for me, as some of them came bearing free gifts like a top and a baby green dragon pet, which was a nice surprise :P As you can see in the screenshot below, that is my inbox on my profile with one of my free gifts there too.

In this screenshot below, this is what my homepage looks like on IMVU, with my main window present which is similar to the window MSN Messenger has when you load it up. Since I've just signed up recently, my profile is still quite bare at the moment, and I will give it a make over in my next session.

When you start the game, you have to choose a basic, premade avatar to use, the one I chose can be seen in the screenshot above. I noticed the character seemed to resemble one of the main characters, from an extremely popular anime show that I am watching...

It's the character called Sasuke Uchiha from Naruto and Naruto Shippuuden anyways.

Moving on, I loaded up my room for the first time, only to receive a visitor immediately! I just sat down on one of the armchairs, when suddenly, a girl literally just appeared on the left armrest.

Even though I was quite suprised by her sudden appearance, I immediately started chatting with her and the conversation actually went quite well, which was a great start for me. Whilst I was exploring the available premade animations you could try, my new friend Clare decided to teleport me to a very girliesh room and also show me how "cheesy" some of the animations were lol. As you can see in the screenshot below, whilst I was commenting on the air guitar one she showed me, she caught me off guard by giving my character a friendly kiss (it was a pleasant surprise though) XD.

As we continued our very interesting, fun (and pretty funny too) conversation, she teleported our characters into a new area, which had quite a romantic feel to be honest.
The area was the rooftop of a tall building at night within a city, but I felt it had a romantic style vibe to it, maybe I've been watching too many superhero movies, particularly Batman? XD So far, I was actually enjoying my time on IMVU, which was mostly due to Clare's company but also due to that it's quite a different experience creating a character and watching it interact with other people's characters, whilst you are chatting to the users themselves. I've always been used to chatting over instant messaging rather than in games, so this was a refreshing change for me.

Whilst we were chatting away, Clare decided to show me some more of the outfits she has for her character, she actually had some pretty awesome outfits to be honest, which meant if the girl's avatar's clothes are this good, then surely the boy's avatar's clothing range must be awesome too.

After chatting for in this area for a while, and sampling the delights of her new outfits (XD), Clare took us to a Ferris Wheel ride next, which to me is definitely a romantic location too :P.

As you can see in the above screenshots, I received a display of more of her outfits, getting skimpier each time (but I didnt mind) XD. Our conversation came to an end here anyways as I had to go, but I have to say, I've never enjoyed talking to someone in my life before, online and offline! Meeting Clare a been a real highligh in my life for me, and after our serious, down to earth and heart to heart conversation, I'm pretty damn sure she will definitely make an excellent and treasured friend for me or more! She's a big fan of parodies, which is a huge bonus for me, and she lives in Wales so meeting up in the future is a good possibility. To be honest, if I hadn't bothered to sign up to IMVU particularly at the time I did, I most likely would never have met her and thus probbaly never experience a conversation and friendship as enjoyable as this one! It's funny how life works isn't it? But from the way I'm talking anyways, I think you've probably realised that IMVU is a real winner for me, and I definitely will be sticking it for for social and personal reasons as well as to continue my avatar diary work in it.

Identities: A Photo Based Summary of Me

2009-01-27T18:20:00.015Z

After seeing Tebby's blog, and what he did, I decided to try for myself what he did. I've taken a photo of a lot of items that I believe can summarise who I am pretty well and reflect my personality as a Multimedia practitioner.

1. This is a giant white tiger plushie I won during a raffle at a Diwali festival at my local temple, and it's one of my most prized possessions. I love animals like white tigers, huskies, foxes, wolves and so on thus you can probably get an idea of how much I'm attached to this.

2. This is a collection of games and DVDs I took out which I believed could summarise my personality due to what genres they are. I do like a fair few action films as you can see, but I do prefer comedy films the most, particularly spoof ones such as Kung Fu Hustle, Kung Pow and Shaolin Soccer. There are also a couple of Tim Burton films there, Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. I am a fan of of his work, and I finally got to see what inspired him to create his style, after seeing the film; "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari". There are also some "Point-and-Click" PC Games there which I am a keen fan of, I particularly enjoy playing the ones shown, due to their brilliant, unrivalled humour.

3. This is the official manga series of the "Legend of Zelda" game series, which I'm a massive fan of, and hence decided to try reading the manga for it, as I'm extremely keen on reading manga and watching anime. I love the uniqueness of the games, I started playing from "Ocarina of Time" on the Nintendo 64 and fell in love with the series from there.

4. Over here, we have a doll made for me as a Christmas present back in 2007, by my best friend. This is another treasured possession of mine, as my friend spent a week making this, in order to replicate the look I had at the time. I treat it as a mini version of myself anyways, and it's a good way fo symbolising my personality.

5. This is a Christmas card I received in 2008 from the same friend, and I chose to show this because of the Japanese design of it. As I've mentioned in previous blogs, I'm very keen on Japanese anime/manga, music, culture, history and so on, hence this card was a nice gift for me.

6. This shirt is one of the many Wolf shirts I own, as I said earlier, I love animals particularly the canine family such as dogs, wolves, foxes and coyotes. I love Native American shirts and jewellery, so when I discovered them on eBay, I was in paradise! To be honest, this is something that I cannot be described without mentioning, I am fairly keen on Native American culture too.

7. And over here, we have one of the most important items to describe me, Phoenix Wright. Anyone who follows my blogs or work on Youtube, will know about my tribute to the Phoenix Wrong spoof series and this is the official manga of the game series anyways. I'm extremely passionate about the Phoenix Wright games, hence why I went onto making my Phoenix Wrong spoofs, and also one of the reasons why I chose to become an animation artist for the games industry now.

8. I think it's safe to say I'm a fan of Chuck Norris here XD. Just like Mr T, I have a lot of respect and admiration for him (believe it or not). I love making Chuck Norris and Mr T related jokes, and hence I link this to my life long passion for comedy. I've alwasy been passionate about comedy, and making people laugh with what I do whether intentional or not, has always been a life long priority for me. If you miss out my passion for comedy, you practically removing my entire personality away from me as at least almost everything I am and do, is related to comedy in one way or another! I'm also very keen on martial arts, both practising it and watching it, which can also link me back to the Kung Fu films from earlier. I've only ever done Karate for one year-ish, but I'm keen on learning Tai Chi after picking up a book on it.

9 and 10. Over here, we have another manga volume and an anime dvd. Manga and anime have a very important role in my life now, and I always feel that I can connect with and thus relate to the characters in them, especially since of them have gone through similar experiences to me. I love their sheer randomness, hilarity and their uniqueness, which are all very important factors in describing who I am! Being as unique as possible, without following the crowd whenever possible, being who I am and as funny as I can be for others are extremely important objectives for me. The manga volume shown is I swear one of the most random anime/manga series ever, if not the most! It has no real plot most of the time, the characters are literally everything and anything, and that principle also applies to what will happen next. You really cannot predict what this anime/manga series will throw at you, it's pratically the embodiment of randomness!

11. Yes...it's hair gel. Since I had my hair restyled, having "funky", "wild" and "crazy" hair is a non-negotiable decision for me, which is partially influence by my love for anime and manga. I'm not me, if I don't have a ridiculous hairstyle involving spikes in it, and colour too preferably.

12. Ah my MP3 player, this is my equivalent of Oxygen! Not the MP3 player itself, but music. I definitely could never live happy in a world without music in it. Music is as important to me as Oxygen is, and as you've probably guessed, I'm extremely passionate about it too! My music taste is very wide ranged now, due to experimenting with several genres over the years and having an open mind. I use music to help me get through life anyways, from helping me to revise, to lifting my spirits when I'm depressed or stressed.

13. Seeing as I've already made my point clear about loving almost everything Japanese, I shouldn't need to explain this, except for that it is the textbook we use for my Japanese course at NTU which I study alongisde Multimedia as a supplementary course.

14. This is my Nintendo DS Lite, which I have redecorated using some free Zelda stickers I received from a games magazine. Games are extremely important in my life too, they are also like Oxygen to me (Wow, I have so much that I can't live with, by the looks of it! XD), I only really got into them when I moved to the United Kingdom, as I was a sporty person before I came here (yeah, you better believe it!). My ideal career that I'm aiming for no matter what now, is to become an animation artist for a games company, hence games are important for my career too now.

15. I'm very keen on drawing actually, I can draw a lot of existing manga/anime characters fairly well, although my skills do need a lot of refinement. My feelings about drawings do vary a lot like a stormy sea, but I would love to be able to draw professionally, even though I do not want to become a character designer anymore (which was the reason I took Multimedia before I started the course!). I'm so busy with university work as well other things going on in my life, it's very difficult for me to squeeze time in to do drawings, hence I cannot make a regular commitment to it which I need in order to continually improve my skills further.

16. Finally, we come to the rabbit mousemat (yeah, go ahead...laugh), but I do love rabbits a lot, and I used to own 2 of them back in Kenya, but unfortunately I lost one of them on the same day that I got them, due to one of my stupid dogs and it just happened to be my 7th birthday too... But yeah anyways, as you may have noticed, it says Krazy Kakashi on the mousemat, which is my new nickname for myself, one that I am very attached to. Its is the nickname I used for my Phoenix Wrong series, and I've had people saying to me what an awesome name it is! XD

Here is my logo for my work anyways, which will appear in my portfolio for this module too:

Actually, there is one more thing that I could mention, that would summarise me well...I forgot to include it in the picture >_<. I own this reprint poster of an original painting of an African Masaii sitting underneath a tree in the Savannah. I was born in Kenya in Africa, and lived there for 8 years before moving here, hence Africa has had it's important role in my life.

Rising From The Ashes Like A Phoenix (Wright)

2009-01-25T20:46:00.004Z

A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned a Youtube related incident involving my video tributes to the Phoenix Wrong spoof series, but I said I would explain what happened in a future blog, hence that is what I am going to do now.

Anyways, the whole shebang started with me logging into my Youtube account a few days ago, only to discover one of my videos has suddenly had it's audio removed due to a copyright claim. If that wasn't bad enough, I checked on the rest of my videos, only to find the 7th video removed for the same reason! The same people who made the complaint about my 3rd video over the Sailor Moon (oh yes) sketch UMG, complained about my 7th video too. This is not the first time it's happened to me, especially since I used to make parodies of anime shows, but it greatly distressed me more than ever this time. The main reasons were that I worked really hard on this series, and I was hoping for it to stay on there without any problems, as well as the fact that I use the same account to upload all the videos for my university work. Hence if my account got suspended, I would have lost all the video links that I used for all pieces of work, and it would have caused me fairly unbearable stress, hassle and grief.

I didn't want Youtube to get the better of me though, especially since I'm so passionate about this series, it's one of the first and only things I'm good at, and it makes hundreds of people laugh! I set to work devising an alternate method of publishing my work, and then it hit me...Newgrounds! Newgrounds is a Flash and Audio sharing website dedicated to hosting Flash and Audio submissions by people and sharing them with millions of other people worldwide, a lot like Youtube in face. But here's a very critical difference, it's completely fan-based unlike Youtube, so I will not have to worry about petty, selfish corporations attacking me for my work on there, its a safe haven for people like me.

I also discovered the Phoenix Wrong series on there, and it's a site I've been using for many years now. The reason I did not submit my work to there instead of Youtube is (as I've mentioned before), because of my lack of skills with and also reluctance to learn Macromedia Flash at the time. I do regret it now, as it could have saved me so much hassle, grief and so on, if I had put in the time back then to learn it, as things could have turned a lot differently for me now. Anyways, like my other mistakes from my past, I'm solely determined to redeem what I did, and set it straight, which yet again, taking this course is really helpful for me.

I pulled off all my videos except the ones for my course off Youtube anyways, and I posted a new video detailing to my fans what had happened to me, how to keep in touch with me and to continue seeing my work and so on. The video generated a lot of controversy with my fans, and I received a lot of positive responses from my fans saying how heartbroken they were that this had happened to me, as well as support with what's happened, where I can be found now (the new website), and also their Youtube related horror stories. Here is the video for you to see anyways, although it just echoes what I already have said:

Unfortunately, I cannot show you the content of the personal messages I received on Youtube, but I think you can get a general idea of the response of my fans from the comments on the video. My fans have been really supportive me of anyways, and it's thanks to them, I'm still making Phoenix Wrongs now and still finding the courage to do it as well, despite the situation.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 6

2009-01-24T20:11:00.012Z

In today's session, I thought of exploring the Welcome Area in the game as I mentioned I would in the previous diary entry. As you can see in the screenshot above, this is the outdoors part of the Welcome Area anyways. What caught my attention here, was the appearance of James Bond in a billboard in front of me there, as well as the Britfilm 2008. Since the little blue squares are present, it is evident that you can click on them to go somewhere, but I haven't tried it yet, although it is a possibility for the future. I decided to go into the large building nearby instead and explore what is inside it anyways.

The inside of the building was a fairly impressive sight actually, as you can see in the screenshot above, there is a pond in the middle of the room on the ground floor with a tree in it as well. I really liked this touch actually, as I am fan of landscape scenery and all that. The fact that there were also little streams flowing around the room was a pretty cool touch, and the abundance of lily pads everywhere just added to the beauty of the room.

After having a walk around on the ground floor, I decided to have look at the upper floor too and found out something quite amusing.
You may have already noticed it in the screenshot above, but I'll say what it was in a second. I sat down at a chair neways, and I randomly just right click on everything around me to see how I could interact with them...only to find the report abuse option that normally is used for reporting abuse related to other users, was available for inanimate objects too! It was tempting to try and report abuse on the plants, but I just wondered if the support staff would really see the funny side of it XD.

Anyways at that point, I remembered I was supposed to visit the real estate office to try and get my own place as I said I would in the past, hence that became my next destination. The real estate office had to be accessed via the website for Twinity, and I soon discovered that getting my own place might be an idea worth reconsidering to be honest. You can buy apartments for an astonishingly low price, but you have to upgrade your membership to premium first though. I'm not too keen on upgrading to be honest, as I only go on this game every now and then, I'm not a serious user of it, hence paying to use it would most likely end up with money being spent for next to no reason to be honest. You can rent apartments though, but then again like I thought, Im not a serious user on this game, so it wouldn't be worth it really, as I would need to keep earning Globals (the game's currency) through doing odd jobs or replenshing the total myself, which are normally things a more regular player would do, rather than such as casual one.

There is another reason for me not wanting my own place here too, there are 2 other online games I want to look at, which are World of Warcraft and IMVU (well its more of just a massive, online 3D chat messenging program but it seems like a game). My attention will be divided between these 3 games as a result, so I cannot undergo hobbies and and such in one game that will require a lot of time and attention, as I will be playing through 3 different games at once, and I know WoW is an absolute social life destroyer, so I'm am not completely sure I will go for it to be honest.

Sorry for the sudden change of plans, I'll have a look what else I can do in Twinity anyways, especially exploring all the major locations and landmarks for a start. I may reconsider getting my own place in the future, but for now, I'm not so sure it is a good idea.

Successful Practise and Principles: What Am I Doing As A Multimedia Practitioner?

2009-01-22T22:21:00.008Z

We were recently asked by Jools to blog about what we are doing as Multimedia Practitioners in our free time and how it contributes to our course if it does. So yeah, here is a list of things I'm currently doing in my free time (or trying to get done) anyways:

My Phoenix Wrong work:

At the moment, I've been working on my Phoenix Wrong series, and I currently have uploaded the 12th video to Youtube recently and working on the 13th. Due to recent problems though, I had to take all my videos off Youtube bar my university ones (which I will explain in another blog), and now I'm going to upload them to Newgrounds which only uses Flash formats, which meant converting all my videos to .flv in order to upload them. I'm also currently trying to figure how to make a Phoenix Wrong video in Flash as I am not very well experienced with it, hence it's proving to be quite a taxing problem for me.

The reason this contributes to my course is because it's all centered around using animation to produce these videos, and also audio/visual production as I was using the animated gifs from the games to produce spoof videos. I also based my Interactive Narratives project from Narratives around the original series that my videos parody, and thus used the same gif sprites to produce the Interactive Narrative project. This also can contribute to the Games Design area of Multimedia quite easily too.

Anime Studio:

Anime Studio is a 2D animation program, which is very similar to Macromedia Flash, albeit being much, much more cheaper but unfortunately more limited in some areas as a result. I've always been keen on learning how to use the program as I was attracted to the interface of it and also it's features, price and what it is capable of. I will feature a blog on it soon all about Anime Studio and my experiences with it anyways. At the moment, I'm currently still learning how to use it, as I don't have a massive amount of free time due to studying Japanese as a supplementary course alongside Multimedia. Again, this contributes to Multimedia due to being centered around animation and such, and it also contributes to the games design area as well.

Vue 6:

Vue 6 is a 3D modelling and animation program which is pretty similar to programs like 3DS Max, Maya and Blender. It is actually designed to work alongside them as when you first load it up, it will ask you on what 3D modelling program you have experience with or still currently use, and it will thus customise it's interface, shortcuts and so on to try and replicate the chosen program. I'm only using the evaluation version of the program at the moment, but I will be purchasing it in the future anyways. It was used in production of the Pirates of the Carribean films too actually, so it's got a pretty impressive background, and current reviews of it says, it works like a dream alongside Maya. Again this contributes to the Animation and Games Design sides of Multimedia, due to being centered around 3D modelling and animation.

Reading Manga, Drawing Manga Style and Watching Anime:

I've been reading manga, and watching anime for a good few years now, so I am very familiar with the artistic style used for them, as well as picking bits of Japanese from watching anime. These can help contribute to the games design area of Multimedia particularly character concept design as they can be used as inspiration and guidance for developing new characters. I also am trying to learn to draw in the manga style as much as possible, but I need to get back to doing it as I have't drawn anything for months. I don't believe my drawing skills are that great at it yet, I can replicate existing characters from various manga fairly well, but I struggle to come up with my own characters, as well draw on a smaller scale and draw more polished, and detailed characters. It's something I definitely need as much practise with as possible, but I'm currently finding it difficult to find time for it as I've got so much going on in life inside and outside of university.

Studying Japanese:

I am currently studying Japanese as a supplementary couse alongside Multimedia, and it may not have any direct influence on my course, but I'm focusing on it's future prospects for me due to learning it. Once I am fluent in it, I am planning to move to Japan eventually (its a life long dream!), and work as a games designer for one of the bigger games companies such as Nintendo, Capcom or Sega one day, thus this course and learning Japanese will both be vital for this. The idea is to work for a games company here, and eventually work my way up to bigger companies hopefully via experience and skills gained, with me eventually upgrading to the gaming mecca that is Japan.

Macromedia Flash and 3DS Max:

I don't think these programs needs introducing to be honest as they are pretty well known, but I'm currently trying to learn as much as I can on how to use them at the moment. This course does require us to be familiar with them in order to build our projects and such, hence as well as wanting to learn how to use them, it's a necessary requirements too. Again, these contribute to the animation and games design areas of Multimedia, but can contribute to other areas too I imagine.

GameMaker:

Gamemaker is a program developed by YoyoGames to enable people of all ages to build 2D games, using a simple interface (there is an advanced one too available), but you can also build 3D games if you upgrade to the Professional version of it. I tried to learn it in the past, but had to leave it due to lack fo free time, and I also went to a workshop on it during Gamecity last year in order to refresh my memory on it. I do want to learn how to use it, but I need to find time for it like everything else. It contributes to the Games Design area of Multimedia anyways.

Twinity, IMVU and World of Warcraft:

I am currently researching online games for my Identities module, and had to produce a 4 week diary (minimum) of my character's adventures in the game I chose. I decided to try Twinity due to a recommendation from a friend, and hence as you can see in my earlier blog posts, I've been recording a diary of my experiences on it. I'm also keen on using IMVU and playing through World of Warcraft too, both which I will eventually produce diaries for too. All these games contribute to the Identities module of the 1st year of this course, but they help to contribute to Games Design in general as well.

Stop Motion/Pixilation:

I'm currently trying to develop ideas for a new Pixilation/Stop Motion video to contribute to my portfolio for Identities as well as for personal reasons, and hence this contributes to the Animation area of Multimedia as well as Audio/Visual Production I suppose.

I think this is the entire list of everything I'm currently doing in my free time as a Multimedia Practitioner anyway, I cannot think of anything else that I'm doing.

A Couple of Amazing and Random Videos I Found

2009-01-22T12:56:00.003Z

I was just browsing Youtube out of boredome, and I found a couple of pretty awesome videos on there that I just have to show!
This first one, is a live action parody of Star Wars, starring the video owner's cat and a chew toy with a lightsaber... It's a lot better than it sounds, trust me! XD

I was pretty impressed with the actual editing and creativity of this video. Making the chew toy bounce around like some real life, beanie version of Yoda was a pretty cool idea as it looks like it's bouncing around all over the place like Yoda did when he fought the Chancellor I think it was? As you also saw, he added a mini, hand made lightsaber onto the toy and then got the cat to play with it to make it look like a fight between the mai characters from Star Wars. The way he synched the sound effects from Star Wars was also very impressive, as they work prefectly with the timing of the "Jedi Mouse's" jumping.

And now this one is just PLAIN AMAZING! It's pretty unsurprising that the Japanese did this anyways, but basically it's a chimpanzee riding a segway! Now how awesome is that?^^ Have a gander for yourselves neways, and be amazed:

This one was just a random video I wanted to incldue for it's awesomeness, hilarity and randomness XD.

Some More Avatar Goodness: Face Your Manga and Simpsons Avatar Maker

2009-01-21T23:09:00.009Z

As you probably can guess from the title of this blog, I got my hands on two pretty neat avatar creating websites. I found them whilst looking for an online game that I knew, I somehow ended up finding them after looking for the game, but I can't remember how now XD. Anyways, I explored these two sites, and to my delight, I was able to create some fairly decent new avatars, but only 2D still ones I'm afraid.
As you can see on the left, these are the results of some quick experimentation on the two websites I looked at. The one on the far left is from a website called "Face Your Manga" and as the name suggests, it allows you to create manga style avatars of yourself. Like I did with Twinity, I decided to create an avatar that is a digital representation of my ideal appearance as well as my personality. Upon experimentation with the fairly decent amount of options available, I created that beauty of an avatar you see up there. Even though it is meant to be a digital representation of me, I can't help but get the feeling it bears a very similar resemblance to the main antagonist of a video game series that I love a lot, and also produce my own spoofs of...

See what I mean? This is Phoenix Wright, the main hero from the game series of the same name. With some slight adjustments here and there, I could end up with a avatar bearing an extreme resemlance to the pointy haired antagonist on the left! In fact, I'm going to do that right now!

-Couple minutes later...-

TAAA DAAAA! Here is my avatar based rendition of Phoenix Wright!^^ I'm quite chuffed with the results actually, it does look a fair bit like him to be honest :P. Here is the link to the website by the way:
Face Your Manga

Anyways moving on, the second website I used was the "Simpsons Avatar Creator" on the official website for "The Simpsons Movie". The link to it is:
Simpsons Movie Site Avatar Maker

On the website as the name suggests, you can create an avatar of yourself as a Simpsons character! On the left here, I have the Simpsons equivalents of myself and one of my friends. To think of it, the avatar for me on the left looks quite familiar, but I don't know why...The avtar maker is pretty good though, unlike the other site which charges you (well its only £1.30ish I suppose) for extra services for your avatar, this one has similar features for it at no extra cost. The previous site does let you save your avatar to your computer though for free which is good, but on this one, you can print it out, make it into DVD box art and embed it with animation into a blog or Myspace profile or whatever as I'll try to show below.

And that's it from me really, you can feel free to check out the websites though and let me know what you think of them as well as showing me what characters you end up developing :P. Peace out, Krazy Kakashi.

My Favourite Music - An Insight Into My Musical Taste

2009-01-20T16:27:00.004Z

I'm extremely passionate about music, and I cannot live with in my life especially in the majority of situations. One of my improvements after the 10 minute review I had was to post more personal blogs about my self on here so that everyone can get a clearer impression of who I am as a Multimedia practionier, hence in this blog, I'm going to mention what my favourite songs are of all time.

Starting with the songs I definitely cannot live without:

Eric Prydz - Pjanoo
Mika - Happy Ending
Koyashu Takehito - Hyakuman Kai no Juuchi
Britney Spears - Stronger
Crush 40 - What I'm Made Of (Metal Overload)
Derek and The Dominoes - Layla
Hazel Fernandes - Number One
Leah - Calling
Ikimono Gakari - Blue Bird
Yasuharu Takahashi - Reverse Situation/Hero (Naruto Shippudden)
Lostprophets - 4Am Forever/ Can't Catch Tomorrow
Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal/Earth Song
Muse - Knights of Cydonia
Nickelback - Savin' Me/ If Everyone Cared
Chad Kroeger - Hero
Santana ft Rob Thompson - Smooth
Santana ft Chad Kroeger - Into the Night
Nightwish - Last Of The Wilds/Moondance
Within Temptation - Memories
Linkin Park - Breaking the Habit
Iron Maiden - No More Lies/ Blood Brothers (Orchestral Remix)
The Offspring - Dammit I Changed Again/ Gotta Get Away/ Cant Repeat/ The Kids Arent Alright
Phoenix Wright/Cadenza - Pursuit - Cornered Remix
Pink - Who Knew
Spice Girls - Viva Forever (Dont judge me, this is one of the songs I grew up with!)
Texas - Summer Son/Black Eyed Boy
The Rasmus - Guilty / No Fear
Ana Johnsson - We Are
Vic Mignogna - Brothers (Full Metal Alchemist)
Akeboshi - Wind (Naruto)

Yeah I have a feeling I know what you are thinking..."WTF?!!" But yeah, this is my ultimate list of music that I love, I know it's a hell of a lot of songs, but that's me for you. I have had an extremely varied taste in music since I first moved here, as I was introduced to music properly and hence I experimented with the majority of genres at least, and thus found a lot of songs that I feel very passionately about, and that have helped me to get through the tougher situations in life. Most of the mentioned songs at least have helped me to keep myself motivated and strong throughout my life regardless of what happened, as at the end of the day, I had these songs to revitalise my spirit after any emotional beatings that I took. If you were to sum up my personality through music alone, this is a pretty good indiciation of what it would be like.

I've always been passionate about music from day one, and to this day it only seems to become more important for me now. The music I've listened to certainly has had it's role in shaping me into the person I am today as well as continuing to motivate me further. I am definitely happy with my current tastes in music at the moment, and this is the one I will choose to remain with until the end of time, as I've never felt so comfortable about the music I listen to until now. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask me anyways.

An Exceptionally Good Disaster...

2009-01-18T18:15:00.011Z

I've been playing a fair few new games lately, but there's a few that I have played which have caused some very unexpected reactions to them that I thought I should mention. I'll do a blog for each game anyways.

Firstly, there is the truly epic, hilario

us, and brilliant (I could go on) Disaster: Day of Crisis for Nintendo Wii. The best way I would describe this game is like a video game crossover of 24 with The Day After Tomorrow. The game is all about an ex marine soldier who has been r

ecruited to fight a newly formed

terrorist group made up of his fellow comrades from his final mission as a marine. But here's the catch, they were as good as dead back then, as he saw the helicopter carrying said people crash after being hit b

y a flaming boulder during a volcanic eruption. To make matter

s worse, they have kidnapped a Professor of Seisomology along with his grandaughter w

ho is the younger sister of his own best mate that died in

front of him during his final marine mission. And the real icing on the cake is that the terrorists have somehow taken control of the weather itself, and thus managed to cause natural disasters left right and centre all over the city including volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and so on...And you thought you had it bad!

Basically, as well as battling terrorists, the main cha

racter Ray also has to deal with the very worst of Mother Nature's wrath, thus leading to one hell of a situation for him and then some. The game is an actio

n adventure type, focused solely on survival of course, and it plays like

a 3rd person shooter with platforming elements and first person shooting sections. It's a lot like games like Jet Force Gemini, Tomb Raider and Resident Evil for instanc

e. As your character makes his way through the continually weather ravaged city, he will avoid to avoid all the consqeunces of the disasters including explosions, falling buildings, cars crashing and flooding whilst having to fight members from the terrorist group and rescue people who are in dan

ger.

I actually loved the concept of the game from first hearing about it, and I wasn't disappointed upon playing it! I'm a big fan of more unique, individual games, and I saw this going for £15 in the GAME sale, so I had to buy it. The game is amazing to play and watch though, the most

amazing part is how the city is contiunally being destroyed around you and how the increasing amount of damage actually affects your progess and so on. For example, I was trying to reach someone in distress nearby who was quite high up but there was no way of reaching them due to immense amounts of building

damage and rubble nearby. All of a sudden though, a b

us comes crashing down along with a dumpster (somehow due to the earthquake, which is the theme of the second level as well as the first), and due to the way they landed,

they created a makeshift ramp up to the person in distress which really impressed me for it's sheer creativity and ingenousity.

Although this game has similarities to other gam

es out there, it still is very unique and it has turned out better than the magazines have said to be honest. Ray has a Stamina bar as well as a Health bar, which depletes gradually over time but quicker if you're fighting terrorists, sprinting, lifting something and so o

n. You can replenish your Stamina bar like your Life bar, but if it goes down to zero, your Health will suffer instead and you will due if that reaches zero too. As well as those two bars, Ray has a Lungs/Oxygen meter, which is affected by smoke in an area. If there is smoke present, Ray will choke and his lungs will become polluted rapidly which is shown by the meter. You will have to sprint through the area to make it out alive, and once you are in the clear, you can exhale the smoke whilst breathing in oxygen to recover. You can hold down the Z but

ton to speed the process up, and if you press it again at the right time, he w

ill slap his cheeks (0_0) and gain bonus points.

As well as the standard combat and movement abilities found in other games, Ray can also call out to people to see if anyone needs help nearby and thus find t

hem. Once you choose to rescue them, the rescue process initiates, and depending on the situation, you will be required to do something specific such as treating wounds, carrying someone to safe spot, reaching your hand out for them to grab, give them CPR and so on. I love this part, as I find saving people in this game quite a rewarding and pleasing experience, in cont

rast to killing them in various games.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Ray is currently trying to resuscitate an unconscious person. In that situation, you would have to push down with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck to try

and recreate the real life coutnerpart of this. That added amount of interactivity is definitely perfect for this sort of game,

and I thinkthis is why the game was chosen to be developed on the Wii, or even f

ormed in the first place.

The ultimate highlight of this game though is the natural disasters in it. The way that vario

us buildings come crashing down,

or vehicles that come flying past and so on, is just a breathtak

ing and exhilarating surprise. Your just walking along

waiting to see what the game has in store for you, then all of a sudden...BAM!!! a building collapses right in front of you.

If that wasn't bad enough, during certain moments in the game, you will be chased by a chain reaction of events

caused by a natural disaster such as the upper floor of the building your in collapsing due to an earthquake,

or a series of explosions due to a fire, or even a raging flood. You have to wave the Wii Remote and Nunchuck

up and down like mad to outrun these chain reactions otherwise you go bye bye.

One final thing I want to mention about with the game is the bonus missions you get for cleared levels. When you back

to a level you have beaten, you get extra objectives to fu

lfil on this turn round, and the one for the first level

had me in stitches. The mission was to collect these campaign f

lags that were scattered around the level

but the funny part was the message you got through the Wii Remote speaker when you collected one.

You suddenly had this jive talking, funky 70's style voice s

houting praise at you like

"Smooth Brother!" and "Funking Fresh!". I don't know what me laugh more, the sheer randomness of the

whole thing, or the voice itself!

I've included some more screenshots of the game below for your vie

wing pleasure anyways.

Yep, that's how big the food is in the game. You can eat

food that you find to recover Stamina and Life, but since when did burgers and cola cartons become bigger than a human's head?!

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 5

2009-01-11T16:22:00.013Z

Today was a very busy day for me actually. Recalling the events from the last session, I decided to head out to where the christmas tree was once again and this time manage to get a screenshot of it. Luck was on my side today as I immediately went to the Brandenburg Tor and saw the tree in it's whole behemoth glory.

The screenshot doesn't do the tree enough justice unfortunately, you have to be there yourself to truly see how bewildering the height of the tree is, it is phenomenal. Something like this could easily make as a famous landmark to be honest. Moving on anyways, I decided to take more screenshots of the surrounding area as promised, which can be seen below. As I was admiring the scenery, another player suddenly appeared alongside me and said hello to me. Unfortunately for him, I was too distracted by the fact the guy HAD NO CHEST... I had to look at him twice as he was stood there as a floating head and arms above a pair of legs. I figured something must have gone wrong with the rendering but it didn't stop me finding it pretty funny though :P. The guy seemed like an alright person but then I discovered soon how rude he actually was. He asked me where I come from and then I asked him and he said Berlin. Whilst continuing the conversation onwards on Berlin itself, he interrupted me to say he does not like my language or something? 0_0... And then says he cannot understand me before disappearing off to wherever he went, leaving me standing there quite bemused. I would like to mention what my reaction was, but I feat it may be a tad too rude for the innocent eyes reading this...

After the other player's sudden disappearance, I decided to explore the area and see what there was for me to discover. After lots of random running around, I found a pretty neat feature which grabbed my attention as soon as it appeared.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I found a digital reaction of the fabled Sword in the Stone from the King Arthur mythologies. I was quite impressed to find it in this game, but it did make me wonder why it was in Berlin though? Examining the sword caused a blue door icon to appear which means it can be used to teleport to a specific location like the billboards, hence I decided to have a look to see where this would take me. I wasn't really expecting to go to Camelot though, although that would be an awesome touch regardless :P.

After being teleported by the sword, this is where I ended up which wasn't Camelot unfortunately but it'll do. I wasn't sure where I was, and just like where I was just now, it was deserted of all digital life (apart from plants and trees of course), and after running around the area, I noticed quite a few massive cranes which could mean the construction of a new building, which is an interesting touch to see in a game :P.

After seeing this area, I decided to call it a day for now anyway. On the next visit though, I'm gonna have a more in depth look around the Tutorial Area as I still haven't explored there properly and also I will visit the Real Estate office to find out about getting my own property. So yeah, in a dodgy and extremely pun of Toy Story...To Twinity and Beyond!

Sorry, that was bad.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 4

2009-01-09T18:44:00.005Z

With my 4th day with Twinity, I have to say it was my best experience on it so far, which I will explain why in a minute. As soon as I logged in today, I was alerted that I had received a message from someone called Lars who turned out to be one of the staff of Twinity. Lars had contacted me to tell me he had read my blog on Day 3 of Twinity and he offered to take me to see the tree as it turns out it was still there! This was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise, especially as I felt I had come across very angsty in the blog, which was a conseqeuence of all the personal problems I'm having at the moment. I actually panicked a little, but upon conversation with Lars, it turned out he actually liked my blog a lot mainly because it was so objectionable.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I'm in the midst of my conversation with Lars but this was later on after my computer crashed. Before I logged back on and took this screenshot, I was shown the route to the christmas tree, which really embrassingly was accesible via using the sign BEHIND me to teleport there...yep -_-' Somehow, I managed to miss that... But anyways, the christmas tree was an amazing sight to see, it literally was gigantic as depicted in the advertisements for it, and Lars told me the tree itself stands at around 50 feet tall! The sight of the tree was definitely worth the effort and journey to reach, that was my highlight of today's adventure. Lars gave me a quick description of the area, including the German market stalls (just like the ones in Market Square in Nottingham at the moment!^^) and the British Embassy. Unfortunately though, whilst Lars was giving me a talk about the area, my game suddenly crashed without warning on me and I was forced to restart my computer, thus losing all the screenshots that I had built up in my image editor , which was extremely frustrating.

I really appreciate the time and effort Lars went into to help me out today though as well as his patience with dealing with me as well, and I would just like to say a big thanks to him and I would recommend seeking him out if you have any troubles in the game yourselves.

After logging back in and talking to Lars again, I went off back to Brandenburg Tor to see if I could retake my screenshots of the area including the tree, but unfortunately I think something went wrong then. When I arrived there, the tree was now a silhouette instead which was an odd sight, I'm not sure if it was due to the sun setting at the time or the rendering of the tree messing up. Hence due to that, I'm going back to area on my next visit which will be very soon and make sure I do get some screenshots of the tree as I would love to show it off ...I mean let everyone see how awesome the tree is. I took a quick screenshot of the stalls though, which can be viewed below:

I will include more screenshots of the area with my next visit definitely, but for now I'm done with today's session and I'll see you after my next visit to Twinity!

My Interactive Narrative Project: Objection!

2009-01-09T18:35:00.003Z

I just realised that I still haven't posted up a blog with a link to my interactive narrative project on deviantART which is pretty shocking actually. Anyways, here is the link to my project:
http://krazykakashi234.deviantart.com/art/Objection-106115621

This is version is nowhere near as complete as the version I had throughout my head whilst I was working on it, hence I'm planning on creating a more complex, detailed and interactive version of this project as part of my porfolio for the Identities module. Please don't judge this too harshly, as I did try my best to get as much as I could done with it and if I only had more time, I could have created something better but Im still proud of what I managed to achieve regardless.

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

2009-01-06T21:25:00.005Z

With the 3rd day, things started to look up for me. I didn't have much time to spend on the game today, due to being busy but a couple of pretty interesting things happened anyway though. When I loaded up the game, I found that someone has requested a friendship with me which surprised me, as I haven't done much in the game so far. The person's name was Josie and I decided to accept the request and see what happens. I haven't spoken to her yet, but I will send a message to her on my next visit to Twinity. It was a pleasant surprise to have made a friend already, and I hope to do make a fair few more on this game as I spend more time on it in the future.

After the friend request was sorted, I decided to have a quick look around Berlin City Centre. This is where I discovered something pretty useful, all thanks to a fair bit of curiosity.

If you look in the screenshot above, my character is standing in front of some of the previous mentioned billboards. As well as being able to embed websites into them, I learned that billboards have another more useful and efficient feature. There are certain billboards in the City Centre (as well as other main areas I imagine), where pictures of the various landmarks and tourist hotspots that you can visit are embedded in them. They are not there just for show though, if you click one of these billboards, it will teleport you to the area represented in their respective image. I found this out after clicking on the billboard with the Musuem on and suddenly being whisked away to the Musuem area. This was definitely a great discovery as it makes it easier than going into the main menu and finding the area you wanting to teleport to there, and I think the less significant areas that you cannot teleport to usually also appear on the billboards.

I'm afraid I really didn't cover much in today's post, but I will spend more time with the game in each session and thus have more to talk about in the diary. The original plan was to continue looking for the christmas tree at Brandenburg Gate, but I didn't have the time or motivation to do it unfortunately. Actually, if you look at the left billboard in the screenshot, there is the advert for the christmas tree that I saw, but you cannot use it to teleport due to some technical problems. One thing I would like to mention before I finish for today though is that when I logged in, I noticed a couple of people having a conversation but it happened to be in German which was an odd but definitely intriguing experience. I was so used to seeing everything and talking in English, that I forgot that there would be players native to Germany and similar countries playing this as well and also talking in German to each other, especially seeing as the game was built in and based on Germany itself. If only I had studied German from past Key Stage 3 level, I might have stood a chance of communication with some German players, but alas I am reaping the consequences of not taking German all those years ago. Now if only I could find a game based in Japan (preferably with romanized subtitles or no kanji if thats even possible), things would certainly become very incredible and fun for me =].

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 2

2009-01-01T21:25:00.005Z

With my 2nd day on Twinity, I was pleasantly surprised with the sudden and friendly welcome I received from nearby players as soon as I logged into the game. The first person who welcomed me was called Simone, and upon further conversation with her, I discovered she was actually a member of the support staff. Although, running into a member of staff was quite beneficial for me as I was able to ask her for some help I needed, including my difficulties with the camera controls. The camera is pretty horrendous in this to be honest, if you turn around for instance, it will swing around immediately and this can get very confusing and nauseating if end up turning a lot at once. I tried zooming the camera out to reduce the problem, but it still kept doing it, which was pretty annoying. I decided to ignore it and continue in the end, although the movement controls do still annoy me a fair bit at the moment. You can only move around with the keyboard, the mouse cannot be used to move around by the looks of it which is annoying, as I hate playing games with a lack of mouse based movement.

On a brighter note, whilst I was chatted to Simone, I discovered the game was completely German based, hence explaining why there is a digital recreation of Berlin in the game. She also told me about websites being embedded into billboards which can be seen in the screenshot below. I found this quite impressive especially seeing as you can embed any website you want in your own apartment as well by the use of blank photo frames in the game. Although to be honest, with the freedom to embed "any" website you want, this feature could easily be abused by the naughtier variety of players out there :P.
As you can see in the screenshot above, I managed to get into conversation with 2 other players as well, as they greeted me whilst I was talking to Simone. They did not say very much though, but one of them was new to the game like me so I assumed they were taking some time to familiarise themselves with the interface and controls.

Whilst I was waiting for the game to load the Welcome Area earlier, I noticed an advert on the loading screen, which mentioned the display of a gigantic christmas tree at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin City. This immediately grabbed my attention and I decided to set off on a hunt to find where the tree is, which I ultimately regretted. You know when they say the game is digital recreation of Berlin city...they aren't exaggerating! I teleported to the centre of Berlin city, and assumed I'd be able to find this tree in no time. Within minutes of arriving there, I was just as lost as the next guy. Due to the camera still being a nuisance and the limited movement controls, I wasn't up for running around especially considering how huge the city actually was!
I immediately went back to the Welcome Area and asked Simone for the best route there in roder to make my life a hell of a lot easier.

After speaking with Simone, I learned I could teleport to where the tree was located directly, which pleased me a lot but it wouldn't last long... Ironically, I wasn't sure why but you could not teleport there for the time being due to some technical problems, which really annoyed me. I dont mean to rant, but why go to all the effort of creating a magnificient, eye teasingly good chritmas tree for curious people to hunt and discover if you cannot even teleport to the location for the duration of the time the tree is up? It was only up until the 5th so I a few days left to go find it, buy my search eventually become very uneventful and disappointing.

Simone told me I could reach the Brandenburg Gate area by walking from the Musuem area, so I thought I'd give it shot and see what happened. I teleported to the Musuem area, only to get a kick of deja vu. As this is is a digital recreation of a city, the Musuem area alone was fairly huge which intimidated me a lot, and it did not help I forgot to ask Simone what direction I should walk in when at the Musuem, which was a very "clever" move. Seeing as I have no knowledge of the geography of Berlin at all, and that my patience and enthusiasm were fading, I decided to give up on finding the tree, as I could end up going in circles or going a considerable distance in the wrong direction even.

My impressions of the game actually have become fairly negative now due to my experiences today, but I'm nowhere near creating a final impression of it. There is still a fair amount of things to do in the game, and seeing as I'm new to this game as well as a complete greenhorn to online games, I've decided to ride this wave along and see where it takes me. Who knows after all, I may actually end up enjoying my experience after all in the future...I am interested in the fact that you can buy your own apartment and customise it to how you see fit, so that is something I will definitely look at in the the future.

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

2008-12-28T15:09:00.009Z

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

2008-12-28T14:03:00.006Z

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

2008-12-05T10:41:00.004Z

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

2008-11-27T10:58:00.002Z

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

2008-11-27T09:54:00.006Z

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

2008-11-23T13:21:00.004Z

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)

2008-11-08T17:18:00.008Z

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

2008-11-04T13:44:00.008Z

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?

2008-10-30T10:57:00.012Z

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

2008-10-28T18:45:00.005Z

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

2008-10-23T18:07:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-22T09:19:00.001+01:00

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

2008-10-15T20:47:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-07T12:20:00.000+01:00

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.