03.09.07
Movie Database update
Probably about time I updated the news on our movie database project.
It’s going.. ok, but still a bit theoretical at the moment, as we have all our ideas sorted and we know what we’re going to do, we’re just waiting to be able to start capturing video. Vicky’s going to be doing that at home as she has the equipment, but not the knowledge of how to use it, and her Dad isn’t available to help her, but anyway, if we haven’t got anything by the start of next week, we’ll start getting it captured in Babbage 213, even though previous attempts at that have not been successful because it hasn’t been working.
We’ve got a video of four black and white films that I’ve recorded from Channel 4 daytime TV and last wednesday the group got together to look at some of this footage and make notes of the points that contain particularly emotional content (love scenes, people looking sad, etc), so we’re all ready to just capture those scenes. We also discussed other sources that we could use aswell, as we agreed that many of the emotional scenes across all of those movies were very similar, for example two people in love would end up having very similar conversations to the couple in another film, with similar music, etc. So we threw around some more modern film titles that we could use, and have access to, so we’ll also be adding those to our databse of clips.
We also decided on roles for each team member, and it was my task to develop a script in Visual Basic that can be given the total number of clips that we have, and arrange all of the numbers within that range in a completely random order, also ensuring that the numbers in the list don’t repeat. We can then use this to dictate the order of our clips, in conjuction with a database that contains all of the content details for the clips. This script has now been developed, and although it doesn’t appear to work on some computers, it does at least do the job on my laptop, so as long as it can be used effectively.
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.
03.02.07
Asteroids
The final assignment for 102 requires us to develop an Asteroids style game in Flash, where the user navigates a small space ship around the stage using the mouse, firing missiles by clicking. The object is to avoid being hit by the asteroids floating around and to destroy them using the missiles. When hit, the asteroids break into two smaller pieces which also need to be destroyed.
Some of this code can be borrowed from the cannon game that we’ve been working on during the lectures, so my first step was to transfer this code into the flash starter file provided, and it contained the necessary actionscript to make the ship rotate according to the position of the cursor, and to fire missiles. My first challenge was to make the ship move towards the cursor, with decreasing speed the closer it gets to it, as shown in the example. This was achieved slightly more easily than expected, and I worked out that for both the y and x coordinates, you subtract the cursor location from the ship location, convert both to a positive value (for when it yields a negative when the mouse is on the other side), add both x and y distances together to get a single figure that represents the distance between the two points. Then state that the speed of the ship is equal to this amount of distance, divided by 50, which ensures a relationship between the two, so the further away the ship is from the mouse, the faster it moves, to catch up to it. Complex stuff, but it’s great when it actually works, and you know you figured it out all by yourself! At first I was trying some sort of complex trigonometry thing, but turns out it wasn’t necessary. Mostly written in the SpaceObject.as file, so it can be reused by something else if necessary.
Today, I started work on the large asteroids, just getting them to rotate and move in a random direction. This would be slightly different code to that used for the ship, because it needs to rotate continually, by itself, yet also move in a single direction, which isn’t influenced by the rotation. In the generate function of the asteroid class, a random number between 1 and 5 is generated which represents both the speed of movement, and speed of rotation. The SpaceObject class then uses a function, called on every frame, to add the current rotation value of the object to this rotation speed. A seperate number between 0 and 359 is also generated to represent a random direction (in degrees) for the asteroid to start moving in, and this is used as a parameter for the moveForward function. The result is 20 asteroids that each hurtle through space at a random speed (rotating accordingly), and in a random direction.
That’s enough for now, but next I’ll be trying to make sure that the asteroids reappear on the other side of the stage when they go off of it, and then start to tackle the collision between missiles and asteroids, and the creation of the smaller ones. So far so good though, and I’m really enjoying this project. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to add extra features such as power ups that make your missiles faster and larger, or perhaps create a health system so that it takes two hits from the smaller asteroids to kill the player, not just one.
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.
Mapping webpages
In the hope of getting things moving, this weekend I went ahead and pretty much built up the webpage aspect of our mapping project; the site which recipients of our chain email will be directed to, and they are asked to fill in a short form, which is then sent to an email address so we can find out roughly where they are located, without them having to disclose these details to other people in the chain, etc.
I was going to purchase some web space of my own for other personal projects anyway, so now seemed a good time to do so so that we could also use it for this project. On Thursday we agreed that it might be a good idea to send out two different chain emails. One on a smaller scale, which required sufficient details that we could actually link specific senders to recievers and construct the chains, and another that simply asks for the person’s location, and allows them to send the email to as many people as they want. This one will measure how the email spreads across the country over time. As we can’t be certain how many responses we’ll get back, it does seem like a good idea to try both ideas and see what works best, or maybe use both in the end.
The webpages are now online here and here respectively. Don’t submit anything though please, as you might screw up our results! After running through a bit of form validation in javascript, a nifty formmail cgi (or something like that) script already on the server sends off the results to an email address under my domain, which in turn forwards it to our group email address set up for this project, idatstudents@hotmail.co.uk which we can all access. The date on the emails that we recieve there will indicate when the forms were filled in. We can then gather all this data and present it on a map of some sort.
I guess I got a bit carried away with it though. I wanted to get it all ready and working perfectly in time for Monday so that we just needed to fine tune it according to group decisions, and then compose the email together and get things going, because until now it’s all just been theoretical. I should have let my fellow team members know a little more about what I was doing though, and when I showed them what I had done in an MSN conversation earlier today, Vicky and Kat were, understandably, a bit upset that I had decided to go ahead and do it by myself, and we found that not everyone was clear on certain aspects of what we were doing. I take responsibility for that and apologised, but we agreed now that we would ensure everyone is kept perfectly up to date with what’s going on in the project and knew exactly what each member was doing if they had to do individual work. I think we’ll produce some better quality stuff as a result.
Sorry, guys! Won’t happen again. 
02.22.07
Movie database project scores thumbs up
We presented our idea to Sarah today for the movie database project, and she seemed to really like it, which is encouraging.
The idea is to incorporate scenes from a variety of sources, including the supplied archive space DVD plus a number of old black and white films that I’m recording from Channel 4 in the daytime, but only utilising the scenes based on emotional content. For example in the movies, scenes were romance takes place or where people are looking like they’re conveying an emotion, or in the space DVD, scenes of triumph such as a rocket launching or sadness, where a news reporter is informing about a sad story. We were going to record our own footage aswell, but we’re not really sure what to shoot and probably won’t need it anyway, so it’s probably not worth the bother.
Taking all these clips, we’ll assemble them in a database, referencing the files by id, source, length, starting and ending frames and emotional content etc, and using this we can extract any footage that conveys love, for example. The final movie will be based on a random ordering (using vbscript) of these clips, so it will contain a number of narratives within it, based on the different sources and emotional contents. Furthermore, all audio will be separated from the clips and also arranged in its own random order, so as to create an additional narrative alongside the video, so what the viewer is hearing won’t necessarily match what they are seeing, at the time.
Now we need to get on and do it. I already have a couple of film recordings that I want to bring in tomorrow and start recording into digital format. Possibly requiring Musaab’s assistance, as I’m not really sure what kind of facilities the university provides to do that, although I have done video capturing before. Hopefully the girls will stick around to be involved in it aswell. May also start capturing stuff from the DVD too, which we still need to take a proper look at.
02.20.07
How animals will enslave the human race.
Yesterday, Claudia and I teamed up to tackle the until now rather silently lurking interstices project, which Mike told us all about, but didn’t really seem to mention it to anyone else. It’s all about inventing a future technology (flying cars, teleportation machines, telepathy devices, whatever) and considering the social impact that it’s likely to have on the world, in the same way that the internet or mobile phones have a had a huge impact on the way we live now.
We threw around a number of ideas. Some just plain daft, albeit highly humourous ones such as devices to make animals able to talk to us, the repercussions being that they begin to talk to each other and form a huge rebellion against the human race, ultimately destroying us and then waging wars between the species until there’s nothing left. But then I think it says in the brief that it can’t really be stupid things like that, which is a shame. Hovering things, like hoverboards, hover cars etc seemed interesting, as did telepathic devices, though the technology behind that needs some clarification. I think our most promising idea at this point might be instant teleportation machines, where anyone can go just about anywhere instantly, thus eliminating pretty much all other forms of transport and the inability to see people anywhere in the world. This will make everyone alot more connected to each other, it’ll be easier to live anywhere else (which has good and bad aspects) and cultural identity will begin to deminish because of this. There’s lots of things you could speculate there, and I have done so a bit in my workbook this afternoon, but I want to do more brainstorming with Claudia, and not just think about it all by myself.
More email mapping
We’re a little clearer on what we’re doing now with our email mapping project, and Mike seems to like it. Essentially, we’re going to send out an email just to one person (or possibly five). That email will contain a URL to a small page we’ll put up, and instructions to forward the email to five of their closest friends, so we create a chain email that spreads out across many different people. The URL will contain a short form which participants will have to fill out and submit to our email address so we can track them, including where they live, and where the person who sent them the email lives (in order to identify who is linked to whom). A number will also be written in the email, which identifies the stage at which the person is in along the chain, so it’ll be 1 when we first send it. When they forward the email, they need to add 1 to that number, and the form will also allow them to tell us which number is written in the email they recieved.
From all this information, we can determine exactly where the email goes across the country, and by combining the stage number and sender location for each recipient, we can link people together. There are a few problems, mainly regarding how likely people will want to respond to us, so we need to keep the things we’re asking them to do to an absolute minimum. Secondly, we’re identifying people by where they live (only as far as city or district) in order to ensure privacy of their information, and not asking them to give us names or email addresses. If multiple people in a single stage live in the same place, it’s going to be alot harder to determine which one sent it to certain people in the following stage. We may also get joke responses and plenty of cases where the chain goes dead, but the further out it goes, the more people will read it, so this balances out the fact that they’ll be more likely to ignore it as they won’t know us.
As far as actually mapping it out goes, we haven’t really decided yet. We could use google maps or another free mapping site that allows you to place markers in specfic places, so we could gradually build it up, or use an actual, physical map.
