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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary - Day 1

Day 1:

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

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

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

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

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

Narratives: Interactive Narrative Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narratives: One Shot Film Project: The Videos

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Successful Practise – Colour and Light Online Journal Task

Double Dervish by Rebecca Partridge (2008)



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

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

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

Succesful Practise - The Rule of Thirds (Image Composition)

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

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

-Video will be added soon with comments on it-

Pixilation Project: The Final Version

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

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

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

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

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