December 15, 2009
Complete
I have spent the evening, updating my artefact. I made this background on photoshop, its a very basic canvas…
I feel it gives more of a feel to Tap n Tin, it picks up on the places aesthetics and matches the venue. I also put together this little logo/banner…
I used the same colours as above, its a very simple photoshop project but I wanted my pages to have something in common and no like like a standard template.
And I went through it and changed all my questions/messages to a more darker mocking tone. The artefact now has a narrative that the user is travelling from their front door to the venue and a mysterious voice guides them, questions them. The voice is sarcastic and mocking but not in a bad way that the user wont enjoy the experience.
Here are new screen prints of how my artefact looks now…
and thats the end of that.
I have tried to fill this blog with the complete process behind how this got made, mentioning all the problems and how I overcame them, all the inspirations and how I used them as well as my own personal interest in the project. The strengths of this I feel now are its look, the enjoyment level of it and the simpleness to use. I feel it met the brief as its fully interactive and depicts a journey. The weaknesses of it would be the video footage quality but then again it does add a certain feel to the journey and deffinatly although I’m proud of it. The sketch up model, from my postings here its easy to see I didn’t really see eye to eye with the software but I gave it my best shot and the end product although not terrible could be improved tenfold. Something I plan todo outside of university projects.
Yet all in all, I have enjoyed this course, learnt more software skills and added films to my “to see” list.
Cheers
December 12, 2009
Last Problem
I have just watched/viewed my entire artefact and on video six for reasons unknown my video goes to a black screen for a good 6 minutes then returns back to the video. This is something I shall have to fix on Monday in the Final Cut Suite.
Nothings Ever Simple
All Done
At last my piece is complete. I used basic Dreamweaver scripting to create an interactive journey the user must navigate through as to reach the end. The reward they receive is a virtual trip around Tap n Tin (see last post)
I found dreamweaver really easy to use after especially after reading an online help post about importing .mov video clips. I soon got the hang of it and the rest of the pages arrived smoothly. The layout is basically a message followed by a video, followed by a message and so on…
Here are some screen shots:
the pages are really basic and its my plan know to update them, maybe change the messages. I aim to have a great professional looking ethos.
Sketchup Over
after weeks of complaining, setbacks and irritations my rather “sketchy” video of inside my Tap n Tin model is done, the sound is my own edited version of a mix of songs usually played in the club but edited as to make no logical sense but provoke a sense of place within the model
it took me ages again to film using CamStudio, convert using QuickMediaConvert from .avi to .mov files and then edit together, export as a .mov then convert using QMC again to make the file small enough to put on YouTube.
But now all i need todo is add it to my Final Piece although I know it could look much better…
Enjoy
Better Moods
Done so much work this week after last weeks setbacks. Firstly I began using Final Cut Pro to redo all my footage and in total it took 9 hours of painful rendering but when that was done I was left with a 40 min journey video cut into tiny sections. So i exported it as a whole file and then re imported that to Final Cut which i would cut into a section and increase speed to 300% and after waiting for that to render, export it as another file. I did this 13 times to end up with 13 clips of the journey.
After deciding against using Flash due to my personal lack of knowledge about the software i have decided to make a html based website on Dreamweaver where every other page is a video, but to get to that the user has to click various buttons/answer questions. As I type I have 7 pages already done although I might change some of the interactive links as I feel their a bit boring. So i’m considering adding questions about the Journey as to make the user interact more by taking more notice of the route taken.
December 8, 2009
More Problem Solving
Continued from before…
I have used Final Cut to render all my footage and it has taken ages, it has resulted in me cutting down my footage into several different individual clips and rendering them one by one. When it is done i will edit them together and then add the sketchup tour once i get home.
as for making it interactive, had a whole idea change on that to overcome the main problem that i have literally forgotten everything about Flash. So now i will be using Dreamweaver to make a html based interactive route to the club.
Each page will have a video clip of the journey or an image or a question/play button the user clicks on to continue the journey, resulting in a 3D tour of Tap n Tin. this will save lots of time being as i only have a week left and have more expreriance with dreamweaver than flash.
i am currently waiting for my footage to complete rendering, although i have learnt as to overcome this problem in the future i may import the footage straight from the camera to Final Cut.
or reluctantly buy a new camera
Problem Solving
After last nights “issues” i am now sitting in Ellen Terry basement with another basket of problems.
One: as thought my project from Premier Pro wont open on Final Cut meaning i have to edit all footage again from scratch
Two: Final Cut for some reason wont render it, apparently insufficiant disk space on my external hard drive
Three: I still am unsure about Flash encoding and scripting as to make artifact interactive
But i have discovered about the Adobe Video Encoder which i have used to change all my raw footage into a .flv file for flash then uploading it into flash as a movie file. i feel this is a improvement step forward from all these issues .
December 7, 2009
Annoyed
This weekend was spent waiting for my finalised video footage to render, i started it Saturday night and today at 88.90% Premier Pro CRASHED on me.. this means the last three days have more or less been wasted, as i couldn’t load up sketchup or flash with my laptop so busy..
so i will now have to export my unrendered footagte and try to upload it in to final cut tomorrow, this is irritating to say the least.
December 5, 2009
Sketchup
i have come to conclusion i rather dislike Sketchup, i have spent all day on it, finalising my Tap n Tin model. the problems i have had to overcome have included:
Walls disappearing, floors disappearing, doors not working, stairs being out of scale and roofs being deleted.
but all n all, i have a model of the club i am at least happy with. I began with the basic model i have had saved for the last couple of weeks and became determined to finish it and i think where i am at the moment is a improved version than before.
i managed to create the courtyard, groundfloor, first floor, second floor, rock room and pool room but alas i have missed out the whole middle section of the ground floor including the cloak room and lounge room. but rather than destroy what i had already i decided to allow this and continue anyway. it is annoying as i would like it to be perfect but i cant risk damaging the rest at this moment in time. Also i have had to briefly put in the toilets, as i got confused with the exact layout of them and it took about over an hour to sort out as to allow room for the rock room. Also another point i dont like is the scale of the staircases. I used google 3D search to find wooden stairs and spent ages rotating them and rescaling them as to fit where i need them.
But i got it all under control in the end. another issue was the colour scheme. the actual venue is bricks, either painted green or white or graffti’d, the outside wall of the courtyard fro example has the design i am currently using as my banner on this blog. when i made all the brick walls, have the brick formatting, it looked way too dark to the extent it looked burned down. so i made the decision to use a variety of off white, dark green and grey to add colour and effect to my model.
Uploading: i am currently trying to upload my model on to Google Earth but am having issues with the location, it began by uploading it to Birmingham and then after i changed the co-ordinates to what i believed to be Chatham, Kent it wound up in the Cornwall Area as below…
its still a work in progress…
I have also edited my footage finally and as i was walking in the rain at the time, i have deleted all the parts where i stop to clean the camera or focus purely on sound. but i got bored watching it, so therefore so would my audience so i will definitely use time-lapse sped up on my final piece. At this moment in time, i need to tweek my Sketchup Model, Render my footage one last time and Get flash under control.
December 3, 2009
Getting there
Yesterday i left my footage processing, it took nearly 12hours todo 7minutes of footage, and it came out perfectly, all plays smoothly and is easier to edit. Inspired by this, Thursday morning i put another footage clip through rendering, this one 44mins long
its been 12 hours and its just reached 43%, i’ll leave it going as when its done, its done
i have taken this time, to ask my friends about Flash and remembering the script. I fear to use flash on my laptop while the footage run’s out of knowing it will probably crash on me, so the plan is, in my freetime to create the flash based player and buttons in Ellen Terry, until i can use all my elements on one computer.
in the most positive way… its getting there
Luke Murphy's 'Interactive' Blog 