Final Project Idea

For my final project I'm going to do a web based Choose Your Own Adventure game. I have already mapped out the story tree and need only write all the content and develop the pages online. Of course this all has to come after I finish my next novel segment for my independent study... but I should have time for both.

Group Project Response

I would have to say that the project that impressed me the most, especially in terms of creativity, would be the Myspace project. The closest thing I could think of to this would be people making Myspace profiles of fictional characters like Batman and Gunston. However, actually using Myspace to tell a story is something I have never encountered before, and it was pretty cool.

Our own project was a bit of a failure, primarily due to overambition in the face of other obligations. I was still pleased to see it in working condition though, even though the part I wrote never really made it into the demonstration.

Narrative!

Narrative to me is a story, in whatever form you feel like telling it to me. If two flashing cubes bouncing up in down on the moon somehow convey a story of any meaning to me, then it's a narrative. Sometimes the story can be harder to find than others, as is the case of most interactive fiction, but if there is any story to be had at all within, then narrative is present.

Group Project

Yay two posts in one day! Catch-up!

So I'm not positive what I want to do for my remix project, nor do I have a group for anything. I am interested in doing some sort of choose your own adventure game, whether that be in website/paper/c++ form is up to whoever I might group with, as I have none of the electronic skills required for those beyond typing words onto paper/screen.

Otherwise I'd be interested in doing some sort of game or flash video, though I could make neither from the technical standpoint.

Remix Project Response

Okay this is a bit late, sorry. I'm a bit behind in everything these days.

One of the Remix Projects that interested me especially was Kerri's 'Pixels:
A Collage of Pictures and Text of the Life of Jo Stevens.' (Not just because she liked mine, really!) One of the main reasons that this drew my interest was that it was a unique and interesting way to go about character development. I'm always interested in new ways to come up with characters and flesh them out, and this one is truly different from what I have seen before. The collage of images shifts and changes to draw your interests to different aspects of the character. I was never unsure of where to click next. I wish it was a bit less linear, but that fact doesn't destroy my enjoyment of the project.

As a random last minute aside: The appropriation of random images with express purpose and containing express memories in the creation of a wholly new and singular being is pretty cool. (Hmm that thought died out a little, hope I got the point across)

The best I can do right now.

Okay, way past deadline, I think I have finally figured out how to post my stupid flash video to some form of online medium. Let's hope this works. Last time I use flash, good riddance...
http://www.mediafire.com/?5oogya1ywwy

Great... all that did was give you a link to download it, instead of play it... Well back to the drawing board. I'll leave it up anyway. All you need to do to play it is right click and tell it to open with Internet Explorer. It might work with Firefox too but I haven't tested it yet.

Remix Project Complete!

So, down to the final hour, I have finished everything. Essentially what I did for my project was to take several of the more popular Aesop's Fables and scramble them using the Babelfish translation software. Then, upon having done this, I realized that it really wouldn't be very interesting to just take this scrambled text and slap it onto my website. I decided I would make it into a mini flash animation. So I went online and got a free trial of a flash editor. However when I opened the editor I realized I had never used flash before and had no idea what I was doing. So after a few hours of teaching myself flash I was done. It probably could have been better and looked prettier, and really I could have most likely done the exact same thing in Microsoft Power Point... At least I learned something new, eh?

So the sources were really not as hard to find as I thought. The Fables were on About.com, translated and made available in public domain. The Mozart came from Musopen.com, a good source for PD music. The flash editor is only a free trial, but as long as that stupid flashing watermark is up in the top left corner it's okay to publish things with it. The scrambling was courtesy a free text translation service called Babelfish that AltaVista allows everyone to use. The stories I used were The Boy who Cried Wolf, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Hare and the Tortoise.

I guess the purpose of this, other than cheap laughs and pointing out the flaws in translation software, is to show how different languages can be from each other, even if they have the same roots. The two languages I used, French and Spanish, are touted as 'romance languages.' This grouping implies some similarity, but translate some text too many times and you begin to lose coherency. On the other hand, the message of the fable usually remains intact, showing that such messages can indeed cross over multiple languages, repeatedly...

Anyway, enjoy the animation!

Remix Project Ideas

So what am I going to do for my remix project? Well I was originally thinking of making a parody of a popular movie using the game The Movies, then perhaps dubbing dialogue from said movie over it or using other techniques to enhance it. Unfortunately my roommate, who is also taking the class, is doing a very similar idea. So I don’t think that’s a viable option anymore since he published his blog post before me. (That’s the last time I bounce ideas off him) Though I’m not strictly angry since the dubbing dialogue part was his idea.

Anyway, if I ended up going with that idea (or perhaps a twist on the old idea) I would be using the computer game The Movies as well as Audacity, a free sound recording program that records whatever you’re currently playing on your computer. I would be using a movie/video in creative commons or public domain. I’ll have to check with the Professor if any of this is still usable.

Some other ideas I came up with recently.

-Take an image or famous painting and photo shop it into something else. (Not much of an artist) Tools: Photoshop

License: Creative Commons or Public Domain

-Somehow change a song by remixing it (I have no musical talent so this wouldn’t be that great.)

Tools: Some sort of music editing tool.

License: PD/CC

-Alter a famous fairy tale or legend, or other literature to make a new version of it .

Tools: Microsoft Word

License: PD

This is all I have for now, it’s not much, but since I probably can’t use my original idea I had to scrabble a bit for new stuff.

Electronic Literature Collection Musings

While perusing the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection I came across two pieces that interested me particularily, one that I viewed as a sort of video poem and the other as a narrative without words. As a quick side note I viewed all of these without reading the author or site comments, so don't shoot me if it says right there something it took me twenty minutes to discover.

Urbanalities was a really wild flash presentation that poetically displayed various aspects of urban social life. Each little chapter gave an abstract vision of a different aspect, ranging from mad progress to suspicion of neighbors. I am normally not a humongous fan of poetry per say, but the addition of music and video as well as the removal of all but key words and phrases really peaked my interest. The fact that most of the text, while pertaining to the subject, managed to be randomly generated was really cool as well. This piece is something that I expected electronic literature to be, a combination of various media forms to create something more than just words. Not to say that there is anything wrong with words, but images and sounds can have just as much meaning, if not more in certain ways.

Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, while creepy as hell, was another piece that interested me. It is a narrative fiction based on real facts without any actual words. At all. Even before I read the little summary afterwards I could sort of tell what was going on both based on the title and what occurred afterwards. The fact that it was interactive to some degree allowed me to feel like I was somehow driving or at least an active part of the story. I only have two issues with this piece. Firstly it would be a little hard to get across the exact story you want without the context of that little history writeup, which sort of ruins the whole no text thing. Secondly, a lot of the interactive stuff, while kind of interesting and musical in its own way, never amounted to anything at all. Most of those creepy plants led to nothing but strange patterns on the screen, and there were a lot of the same ones over and over. A minor gripe I suppose.

I have to say that the Electronic Literature Collection is a great place for people to get into this genre of writing, as it offers a nice array of different kinds of media for consumption. While some of the pieces were not so awesome in my opinion, there are an equal number of excellent ones to keep my interest. There is a lot of stuff here for everyone to enjoy.

Blog Start

So I finally made a blog. I'll be posting various writings for a college class of mine as well as whatever else I feel like. Enjoy.