03.19.07
Final things
Mapping
My final map animation: http://www.oholmwood.com/stuff/digitalmap.swf
And a video that Kat and Claudia have made about a nifty expanding fibre-optics variation of the kind of thing I’ve done in my map: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh1_LO1akQg
In my animated map, the different colours represent different stages along the chain mail. If you hover over the points, the names of the places will pop up as a guide. Dashed lines represent travel overseas and are to a different scale to the complete lines.
Interstices
My BBC news page, set in the year 2037 (isn’t it funny how BBC news haven’t changed their website layout and style at all in 30 years?.. hmm..) http://www.oholmwood.com/stuff/bbcnews.html The article talks about the new teleportation technology emerging at that time, and while it hasn’t yet had an impact on much, it discusses the possible ways in which it could affect things socially, environmentally and economically, all based on the ideas Claudia and I discussed.
Her Sun newspaper stuff, set in the year 2106, talks about what has gone wrong, raising similar issues to mine, and can be found at the bottom of this page in her lovely blog.
Artefact
To add to the previous blog post, here’s a photo of an A4 printout of my artefact that I got today:
I did want an A3 one, but for some technical reasons, it wasn’t possible for the printing people to do it for me. Oh well, it’s on nice shiny photo quality paper and I can at least see the point about getting all the details in on the printout, rather than sticking with a resized on-screen jpeg. It goes some way to achieving what Satoshi Matsuyama lives by.
03.18.07
The final artefact
All done now.
Here’s the original, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.
And here’s mine, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” by me.
And, because the original artist is so enthusiastic about presenting the image in full res glory, rather than only presenting resized versions for the web, here it is.
It’s very tough to get absolutely everything perfect for that kind of size, especially as I’m used to creating images that are more likely to squeeze neatly onto a monitor, and clearly not everything is absolutely perfect, due to time constraints, but I could at least see how much devotion the artist needs to have in order to attain the quality of work that he creates. I’ve tried to follow it very closely, using techniques that the artist employs, including the use of both high res photos, and drawn objects such as the tree and birds. I would have used photos of birds but every time I set my camera up towards my window, they all decided to hide away. So screw them, I can make my own. They don’t want to be in my picture, that’s fine by me.
It was very important to get the vibrancy in colour just right, though admittedly, this is easier to do when working from a “template”, as the original image was to me, than building up the colours from scratch. Starting with the background is a good idea, as it determines the precise colours and shades that the foreground objects need to have, and the red sky and almost white sun are key to the colour in this whole image. Overall, I’m very pleased with it.
03.17.07
Final dollop of mapping work
Dollop.. nice word that, isn’t it? I should use it more often.
So it’s all kicking off for the mapping project this weekend. I’m not around, as I’ve buggered off home until Sunday, so we can’t work on anything as a complete group, but we met on Friday and discussed our plan of attack. We’re going for two maps, one digital, one based on paper, and I’ll be taking on the digital one while the girls will sort something out for the paper-based one. I think they’re going to print out a large UK map from digimap on some sheets of A4, and pinpoint all of the inidividual email recipients and utilise a kind of thermal imaging system, where the most popular areas such as Plymouth and Essex will be hottest, and places like Bristol and Norwich will be cooler to certain amounts. I think that map will be less concerned about linking people up along the chains, but I’m not sure yet. I did hear talk of the use of strings and stuff.
My digital map, which will be made into a flash animation, is less concerned about pinpointing exact locations on a map, although distance is measured, the chains are illustrated in more of a branching tree style of doing things, similar to how maps of the internet are presented. I looked at Cyber Geography and found images like these quite interesting..
And particularly the kind of stuff on this site.
They’re maps of cyberspace, as messages travel through servers and things, and that’s sort of what my map will be presenting. Here’s a Photoshop image of what I have so far, and I’ll make this into a snazzy Flash animation this afternoon…
The seven stages that our replies extended to are colour coded, starting from red into purple, blue, green, yellow, etc. Stage 1, which is us four group members, extends out from the central point towards the four corners, and this is a bit like the seperation of people or ideas in a family tree or brainstorm diagram. Our following chains will extend out seperately into the four corners of the image, even if say I have someone from Bristol in my chain and Vicky has someone in Bristol on hers, they don’t appear in the exact same spot on the map because it’s more concerned with how the chains branch out and separate. It does however, vaguely measure distance, as the solid lines relate to how far the email has travelled across the country to appear in that persons inbox. The occasional deviancy of the lines as they take sudden turns on their route to the next person represents the different servers and junctions the electronic signals are changing at, in order to get there. It’s by no means completely accurate, but adds to the whole digital, cyberspace style thing, and makes it more interesting to look at, if nothing else. The dashed lines represent travel across countries, as we had a few responses from places like New York and Prague, and purely to make it easier to view, their distance is not to the same scale as the solid, UK lines are.
It’s quite abstract, which is what I think we’re supposed to come up with. I’ll see what my fellow group members think about it, and as I say, I’ll adapt it into a Flash animation with growing lines and maybe rollover places names to make it easier to see which point is which.
For good measure, here’s some workbook stuff, including notes we made about linking people up and a rough idea I sketched out for my flash map.
03.15.07
Neeearly done..!
I’m losing count, but about 10-12 hours in now I’d say, and a whopping 169 megs. Not quite the 30 gigs of the original, but it’s by far the biggest .psd I’ve ever worked with, and the G5’s can still handle it pretty well too. It would probably kill my laptop if I gave this to it.
So, nearly done and now it’s all coming together quite nicely and looking pretty darn sexy. The spiny plants on the right were taking absolutely ages to cut out, and I was only halfway through, so I cheated a bit and just duplicated the half, flipped one of them horizontally and made whole ones out of that. Whether or not Matsuyama-San does that on a regular basis, I don’t know, but I bet he does. The layer for the tree in the background has had the “multiply” feature applied to it, to seperate the background from the tree, and the contrast has been kicked up to help it along, which is a big help if you’re working with things like silhouettes. Still need to make some adjustments to that, then I’ve got to add some large leaves in the foreground, in the top right hand corner, plus the birds and make some general tightening up, and hopefully I’ll then be all done.
Don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’ve mostly been using layer masks to cut out all the objects, so that if I need to bring anything back, after going a bit overboard with all the cutting, it’s easy enough to do so.
03.13.07
Mapping Results
Our email mapping project, where we’ve been receiving responses all week about the chain email we sent out last monday, has been going well. We made the “closing date” yesterday and got a total of 36 responses within the week, so that’s pretty good. Now we have one more week to sort through the data and create a map, maybe two actually, about it.
Our email responses.
The contents of a response.
A table of all of the locations of everyone who responded, plus the location of the person they recieved the email from.
Some thinking I did about how the map might look.
Yesterday, we looked at the results together, and made a list of everyone’s location and the location of the person who sent them the email. Using the stage numbers they filled in, it was possible to link up some people fairly easily, which Claudia and I attempted to do today, but there are many people for whom it’s going to be really hard to link up, as can be seen in the spreadsheet above, put together by Kat. There are an awful lot of Plymouth’s and in many cases, people haven’t been specific enough about the locations, so it’s impossible to know for sure who sent it where, for some. Particularly in the later stages. Perhaps this is a fault with how we organised it, and might have been better if we risked breaking fairly invisible confidentiality concerns and asked for emails, so we could at least link them better. Still, we’re pleased with the amount of responses we’ve receieved.
We’ve been discussing how we’re going to present it and we seem to be going for two alternate maps. One based in Flash that shows a branching series of lines, depicting the chains that reach out to different areas of the country, colour coded according to the stages, much like some depictions of the internet. Another is an actual, physical map of the country, probably Digimap printouts, using pins and strings and stuff to mark out the locations. Not sure about that one, but we’ll discuss more soon, and start to build it.
03.10.07
Cutting out leaves takes too long
An update on the ‘ol artefact. Going well. I’m about 7-8 hours in now, and I’d say maybe about halfway through. Ish. I have a week to get it finished, so should be ok. Previously, I had drawn out my tree using the polygonal lasso tool, as I wanted it to look enough like the tree in the original, and I didn’t want to spend ages hunting around for a tree in a very specific shape so I could take a photo of it. Yesterday I started tackling the leaves, and they’re rather a pain in the arse, as you have to do a lot of cutting out and masking to make sure some of the background gets through, convincingly. Looks ok at this resolution but close up, they’ll need more work still. Today, I did a bit more of that, and textured the tree using closing up photos of tree bark, plus I added the grass and bushes. The clone stamp tool came in handy for the grass. Some of the colours are looking a bit too bland at the moment, which goes against the Satoshi Matsuyama way, but it’ll all come together when I add the other elements.
03.07.07
Artefact Progress
I’ve been working on the artefact today, and am making pretty good progress. About 4 or 5 hours in now and here’s where I’m at;
I’m quite pleased actually, I think it looks pretty cool. Things like the sun and its rays, and the background colours are made from simple Photoshop brushes and gradients etc, but everything else is made from a variety of photos, with heavy use of the Curves tool to alter the colours according to what I want.
It certainly looks very idealised, and while you wouldn’t mistake it for an actual photo, it does look rather detailed and very colourful, which is exactly what the original artist goes for. Satoshi Matsuyama says “Even the most impossible dream is made possible with Photoshop” as he takes you to a beautiful, serene desert island, staring at a fantastic maroon sunset filled with clouds of all varieties and extremely vibrant colours. It’s so supposed to be an image of paradise and a representation of dreams. Detail is very important, and he doesn’t want his works to just be shown on the web in sizes that will fit a monitor, they should be blown up big and in high res, to fill up a whole wall. I won’t be doing that, probably nor will I be working from 4am to 6pm everyday on it, like he does – that doesn’t seem healthy to me – but I will be ensuring that pretty much the whole piece looks very good when viewed at 100% resolution (4101 x 3200 pixels), and not just at 50% or 25%, etc. That’s tough, but it’s made easier just by the resolution of my photographs, as they don’t usually need to be resized much when they’re brought into the .psd files, so there’s no need to worry about adding certain details by hand. I just need to ensure that all the photos blend well with each other and are the right colours.
I’ve been having alot of fun with this and so far the G5’s in Babbage have been doing an excellent job of keeping up with working with this now 85MB big file. I’m expecting it to go into maybe 2 or 3 hundred by the end! I’ve been using my graphics tablet to help me cut out the images and erase the unwanted edges. Still feels a bit “fluffy” here and there, where it’s hard to seperate quite vague clouds from their background, but there will be alot of tightening up and finishing touches at the end.
03.05.07
Instant Teleportation
Claudia and I had another brainstorm for our interstices project today, this time focusing on our chosen idea; instant teleportation devices. We’re going to do two written articles about them, one a news website article based on the technology when it first emerges, highlighting all the possible implications for its introduction into society, aswell as the negative ones. I’ll write that, while Claud will make a tabloid newspaper article that highlights the destructive power and scandals about the technology going wrong, and having a large scale negative impact, based in the later years when the technology has become well established, and vital for our day to day life.
Initially, the teleportation device will take the form of booths situated all over the world, like phone booths, which people can use at a cost to travel anywhere they like. Further in the future, everyone will have their own handheld device that can instantly transport them away anywhere in the whole world they want, very specifically.
The repercussions of which could be massive. For one, all other methods of transportation could become obsolete. No more cars or roads, no more planes. Less pollution, although perhaps the machines emit more dangerous radiation that can have an impact on our health. The social implications would be the breakdown of boundaries between territories, as it will become much easier for cultures and nationalities to blend in with each other. Everyone will become more similar, have increased understanding of each other and there could be fewer wars or disputes. Distance no longer means that we have to see any less of family and friends who live far away, and less time spent travelling means more time for everyone, so perhaps more work or more social lives for all. It also adds to the desire people will have for everything to be instant, and time can no longer be wasted waiting for things, and this can affect all manner of the way we see things. And then in her article set later on, Claudia will be examining what happens when things go wrong, and the radiation gets too much or the teleportation devices, at this point now integral to our daily life, suddenly stop working properly, sending only bits of people across the world, disfiguring them forever. What happens when our trust in this technology is lost when isolated cases like this happen and people are too afraid to make use of it, after abandonning all other alternatives.
Just a few ideas we’ve had so far. I’m thinking it might be a bit too far fetched for what the brief wants, but we’ll tailor it. I’d like to get Mike’s opinion before we start anything definate.
Mapping email: Sent
We finally sent off the first emails for our mapping project today, after finalising the contents of them, which read thusly;
“Hi,
We’re students in Plymouth University, and we have a project that we were hoping you could help us out with. Basically all you have to do is visit this website, fill in the form, and pass this e-mail on to at least five friends.
We know we all hate chain mails but this would really help us out.
The site is http://www.oholmwood.com/mapping
Thank you for your time.”
With the website all set up and the form able to email its contents to us, we’re now ready to send it off and see where it goes. The first stage is the four of us, and the email has been sent off to our respective addresses, and we’re now each going to forward it on to five people, who, being our friends, should be helpful and forward it on to five of their friends. From then on, it’s anyone’s guess how many responses we’ll get back, but whatever happens, I’m sure we’ll find ways of working with our results. How we’re going to map them all out though is the hard part.
If things are a bit quiet for this week, we’ll try the alternative method and have a new email that’s passed on to as many people as humanly possible, not worry about linking up the senders and recievers, and just get back as many locations as possible.
02.25.07
Artefact first steps
I’ve been ignoring the artefact project so far so I thought I’d make something of a start today. I have however, been building up my library of useful photos so they’re ready to be brought right into photoshop and placed together. The image I’m reconstructing is..
“Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.
And as the creator did, I’ll be assembling an image as close to that as I possibly can, using my own photographs and Photoshop skills. I have been taking photos of various bushes, gulls and the ocean, to go along with photos I already had of the sky and trees, from previous projects and things. One of the things that’s key for this artist is for the work to be in very high resolution, crafted with meticulous detail and intended to be blown up on print rather than only being seen through a monitor, in a size that will fit comfortably on it. His .psd files regularly lie between 30 and 60 gigabytes, which is ludicrously big, but fortunately Mike isn’t going to make me stick to that, and the printout need only be A3, so that’s what I’m going for. Here’s what I have so far…
A Photoshop screenshot. Not much is it really? But at least it’s a start! Just a few coloured shapes and some markings using my tablet to help me sort out where everything’s going. It’s 400% bigger than the original, based on the exact same dimensions, and I reckon that’ll be detailed enough. It may not come to 30 gigs but I’m willing to bet that the .psd will be pretty damn chunky in file size anyway, so I’m going to keep it on my 1gb usb pendrive (which should be able to hold it, I hope) and work on it on the G5’s in Babbage from now on, as I don’t think my laptop, well behaved as it is, will be able to handle it.
