Heres a link to something I came across on youtube today that I thought was interesting as it was relative to the Interactive Narrative project that we're doing.

The Meal Project

The Meal Project is a collaboration between students at NTU and Shangai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA). This is an opportunity that only my tutorial group have been offered and although it doesn't count towards our degree, i think it could provide me with valuable experience and a chance to work with students from other cultures.

Task One: Documenting Your Day

Take 1 photograph every minute for each hour of you waking day (not that you will need to annotate these afterwards with a short discription of what you were doing in each specific photo.

We have been discussing our thoughts on this task during the last few tutorials and there has been a few concerns about what we are doing with the project, which were unable to be cleared up due to cultural and language differences between NTU and SIVA. I however planned to complete this task today to the best of my understanding today, with it being my only free day this week, although in the end I decided to wait until tomorrow to take the photos because it could provide a more interesting and accurate resemblance of my daily routine, including walking around town and to university. I will upload these photos as soon as I've found a suitable server to upload so many photos.

This week I continued with the Interactive Narrative module by choosing one of my favourite 3 ideas to develop in order to produce an interactive narrative of my own. I wanted to choose an idea that could be used to target a particular cause or problem in a similar way to that of the 'Choose a Different Ending' videos. I therefore chose to use my firework display narrative idea. I began to develop this idea by noting down things that could potentially be included in the narrative, including the decisions that would have to be made and general notes on associated ideas such as camera shots, scenery and setting etc. I also produced a quick plan of how this narrative could be structured to allow it to lead to the different final outcomes. Below is a scanned image of the plan i made:

INSERT PLAN DIAGRAM HERE

Introduction to Interactive Narrative

Last week we I was introduced to Interactive Narrative module of the Multimedia course. I had a previous understanding of what interactive narrative was before this session and it seemed like something I didn't think I'd be very interested in so I was a bit apprehensive about completing this part of the course. However, to my surprise I enjoyed this session as I found i had to think quite deeply about the structure of my interactive narrative ideas.

We were briefly introduced to flash in this session and I feel it looks quite complex and is something I want to get started on learning as soon as possible in order to get my final interactive narrative completed to a high standard. I will begin to look into this before next weeks seminar in order to gain some degree of understanding of Flash beforehand.

Choose a different ending:

An interactive narrative that focuses on raising awareness about knife crime. The user can make choices that lead to the outcome showing the consequences of knife crime, including the death or arrest of a character. This is a interactive narrative that I had heard of previous to beginning this course as it has been quite popular on TV over the past year or so. It consists of a number of short videos shot in first person from the viewers point of view, placing the audience directly into the narrative. Each shot shows a situation and then places the audience with a decision to make, for exmaple to take the knife or not. I think it is a very good example of interactive narrative and that it fulfills its objective of raising awareness of the potential dangers of knife crime.

I also began to brainstorm some initial ideas for what my interactive narrative could be, and my favourites were:

- Narrative raising awareness of the dangers associated with a firework display.

- Narrative of daily routine and how decisions made have a direct effect on your action (i.e. being late for work)

- Narrative of decisions made in order to get a sick person help as soon as possible (could raise awareness of diseases/illnesses and how to prevent them or what to do in an emergency situation)

I will begin to look at these ideas in more detail before the next seminar and begin to produce a plan of how my chosen interactive narrative will be structured.

Draft Edit of Film

Below is the first draft edit of our groups film. We decided upon the title 'An Apple A Day' for the film which I feel works very well as the films based on a doctor/patient scenario.

I think our film works well, but there are a few things i would like to change to improve it. When watching back the film I feel its a bit long winded and a lot of the content could be taken out to make the film a bit shorter. The story has a clear start and finnish, both of which work well, although I think the main content of the film is a bit dull with not a lot to keep the viewer entertained. I think that this could be improved by adding additional content, for example the doctor being rushed for time whilst a patient feels they require all the time in the world. This would provide some tension that could keep the audience interested, as opposed to a simple, boring conversation.

The other thing that I think needs improvement is the editing. The blur effect comes over the screen instantly when it appears and I think it should come into effect gradually and smoothly in order to give a better effect of the patient coming in and out of consciousness. The patient could also seem more realistic if I had used a voice which made me sound more ill.

In order to correct the film to be how I would like it, there would be no other option than to reshoot the film. But with film potentially being an area that I'd like to progress into this is something that I'm considering doing providing I have the time to do so.

My most recent creative project in terms of visual design was my FMP for my art foundation course. This was an 8 week long self directed project for which I decided to work for a real client. My client was King Of Slugs, and unsigned acoustic duo from Nottingham. I designed for them a collection of 3 CD front covers and a back cover for their promotional album. With collaborations with artists from a variety of genres, the bands music is of a unique style which cannot be pinpointed to an existing genre and I therefore wanted to also incorporate something unique and interesting in the design. I did this by creating a front cover design that allowed users to get more involved by completing a dot to dot to create the imagery on the cover. I also felt that this unusual aspect of the design could attract even more attention to the band potentially increasing awareness of them and their music.