Finished Identities Interactive

I almost forgot to talk about my finished identities project. I had been so caught up in it's creation and getting it completed for the deadline, I completely forgot about writing up a finished post.

Overall I'll say firstly that I'm very happy with the outcome of this project. I took previous techniques that I had already used in other multimedia work and Incorporated them into this project. Techniques such as stop motion and a go-to-and-stop type of storyline for the flash. I was able to create an interface based on the guitar hero fret board. The 5 buttons each represented a different part of my identity that collectively makes up a picture about myself. These included: my avatar, multimedia / stopmotion, Music, Games and Juggling.

Being able to pick up software quickly, I was able to use flash to my liking. Not to say that it was easy at all, many times just one piece of code out of place took me ages to fix! Flash worked well for the task at hand.

By choosing to make my interactive more like stopmotion, flash could run the pictures smoothly in a coherent fashion to give what seems like animation. Although animation was not required for this part of the project, I did include previous work such as my avatar and its environment to prove I could used 3D studio max. That said, i didn't feel it neccecary to create animation for the movement of the fingers. By animation fingers it would have taken much longer and the finished effect wouldn't have been as good, personaly. This would have been due to me having to create the whole hand and fret board. Not a simple task.

On the downside, the only major problem I had was choosing where I should put the logo. It just didn't seem to fit in anywhere, user testing also confirmed this. So I decided to put it at the end. This seemed to work best.

I will try upload the complete intereactive, however I did not embed the video (instead a progressive download) because if I did the framerate would have been all wrong. But enough about excuses, the screenshots should give an idea for now. The upload will come soon, when I can work out where my server space is at the uni. It's really hard to find arg! But it will be up soon enough ^_^

More machinima css source

OK well, its not strictly machinima. Ive been making another counter strike source vid, to help along with my editing skills. I learnt a few things from this one which I didn't know before, so I would say the effort has been worthwhile.

Althought not strictly machinima, since it doesn't really have a story line, it still falls into this category. An extract from Wikipedia :

machine cinema, is a collection of associated production techniques whereby computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rendered using real-time, interactive 3-D engines, such as those of games, instead of professional 3D animation software. Engines from first-person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used

Im just sorting out its compression right now so it will fit on youtube in a recognisable clip (because youtube resolution quite frankly is pants)

I have uploaded the high quality file here for anyone who wants to see it in its glory: http://files.filefront.com/testforcssidentitiesavi/;10446330;/fileinfo.html

As a matter of fact, filefront now has streaming capability, (personaly much better then youtube (one better then both of them was divix stage 6 until it got closed down because it wasn't popular enough, that one was AMAZING!)anywho...) So I will embed it below.

testforcssidentities.avi