The Great Wall of Flyer's - My Interactive Narrative Analysis

This week i finally completed my interactive narrative, the final finished article is entitled ' The Great Wall of Bars' and is essentially just an interactive menu list of all the bars and nightclubs that ive been to so far in during my time in Nottingham. It is presented in the form of a picture of the flyers on my bedroom wall, each flyer can be clicked on and your taken to a page with a picture of that bar that i took using my digital camera, at this point the user can click on the image to be taken to that bar's official website.

This task has been an interesting learning experience for me, website progamming/design is the only area of the course in which i had prior experience so for once i had confidence in what i was doing. However it has been over 2 years since ive actually used these skills and they were very rusty so it was good to go over the basics again and refresh my memory. I also learned quite a few new things during these seminars. For example the Javascript for alerts and for rollover text boxes are something i didnt know how to do but i know have learned and implemented them in my project. Over the course of the project i encountered a few technical hitches, for example when my project was uploaded to the web initially the photo on the homepage didnt display, upon looking at the code i discovered this was due to the file extension of the image being in upper case when it should have been in lower. A relatively easy mistake to make but something as simple as that can cause your whole site to be innefective, an example of how tricky javascript can be if you just get one small detail wrong. This is good though because through troubleshooting you learn, you learn new ways to script and are quickly able to deal with future problems. I was also having problems with the way my text and images were not lining up correctly when displayed in different browsers. To fix this i made a frame and put the text box and the picture inside it and then made the frame's posistion absolute. This meant that regardless of what browser the page is opened in the text and the images line up together.


So thats the technical side of things, and i like to feel i handled it very well. The creative side of this project though is something i had more problems with. Ive spoken before about my struggles with being creative and although i am improving its still not my best area, it took me quite a while to come up with an idea that i was happy with and to be perfectly honest i'm not entirely happy with it even now its finished. There is no narrative element to my project, if i could do it again i would take more time to think of how i could incorporate a narrative story into my work. Instead this time i preferred to concentrate on the interactive element of the project and i'm happy with what ive acheived in that aspect. Of course there is always room for improvement and i wil get better as i progress. I still am a long way from being as good as i want to be and as good as i can be in this area. Website design is something i'm very much interested in and its definetly something i will pursue in greater depth next year and beyond.

During this project my idea evolved and changed direction, my initial idea was to take a picture of my room and have the user interact with indvidual objects placed in my room but i decided quickly just to concentrate on the wall with my flyers on, i thought this would be easier to do with the restrictions we had on image size.

If i was to approach this project again then i would certainly take more time to consider the direction i wanted to go in.I would also think more carefully about the size of photos i was told to produce, the photos i took were all pretty close up and hence i lost a lot of the detail when i cropped them down to web size, i could have solved this by taking wider shots. I would try and come up with an idea that easily worked within a narrative context. This is something i'm interested in and throughout the module ive seen a lot of interesting examples in Simon Perkins' lectures, these have intrigued and inspired me to try and make a convincing narrative story and make it truly interactive at the same time. You may wonder why i didnt choose this approach for this project, but i didnt think i would be able to do something like that justice at the moment. Once my skills are a little improved i will be back with an interactive narrative/story for all to enjoy!

The main things i have taken from this project are a refreshment and improvement of my Javascript/HTML programming skills and it has re-awoken my passion for this area of Multimedia. It has given me the confidence to seek oppurtunities to use these skills outside of my course, i will be assisting in the updating of the uni's radio staion Fly FM's website and have also looked into the possibility of creating a website for the Tennis Society of which i am a member of. Above all i have enjoyed this project and i very much look forward to pursuing this in the future.

Here is a screen shot of the homepage to the site, click on it to be taken to the site......





Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Urbis exhibition centre, Manchester

Hello all, recently on a visit to my girlfriend in Manchester she decided to take me to the Urbis centre. This is an exhbition centre focusing on city life and all things city related. This was an impromptu visit so i did not have my camera with me and therefore have no visual examples of what i saw, i'll do my best to explain them to you.

Before i go into more detail, here is the link for the Urbis Centre's website, visit to find out more and to see what events are coming up....

http://www.urbis.org.uk/

At the time of my visit there was a Multimedia exhibition about the Manchester bombings of 1996. I found this very interesting not only because of the subject matter which is very powerfull and cannot fail to hav an effect on you but also because of the multimedia aspect of what i was seeing.

A few things that stuck out to me in particular were a wall of tv screens that when you clicked the button beneath them a video played, each video was a different persons perspective and experience of the bombings. This was a very simple piece but extremely powerfull, the use of technology was quite basic yet effective just a simple close up shot of each person shown on a small tv screen.

Another thing i was impressed with was an interactive piece. You sat down at a computer screen and were faced with a form to fill out, just a few questions about yourself like name,where your from likes and dislikes etc then you are asked to look at a camera in the wall above you and it takes a picture of you. Then at the click of the button it is printed out onto a sticker and you can stick it on the wall behind you. There are a huge amount of stickers on this wall and it is quite fascinating seeing all the different people who have visited this display and what information they have decided to put on their sticker. Here is a picture of mine......

Also there was a small room where you sit on a chair and look at a webcam, this webcam then transfers the image to a large projection screen infront of you and re-draws you in a very cool way which i cant really explain, its like someone scribbling a pen randomly and coming out with a distorted picture of you, it was very impressive and i would very much like to find out more about the technology used within the display.

There were plenty more interesting examples of interactive multimedia on display and rather than go on listing them i'll just make an observation that really stood out to me. All the displays i saw were very simple ideas and because of that i thought they were very effective. They were all easy to interact with and required minimal instruction to get working. Now i'm sure the process behind the creation of these displays was quite complex and time consuming but the concepts were all very simple and i think that will be important for me to remember as i go through this course and possibly create similar pieces of work.

Thats all for my post today, if anyone reading this ever finds themselves in Manchester city centre i urge you to visit the Urbis centre as it is a very interesting experience and one that i enjoyed very much.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Post It - The Filming of a Masterpiece (?!)

Hello everyone, time for another update on my progress.

Today was an exciting and important day for me. It was the first day of full filming i have taken part in and i enjoyed it a lot. I am very interested in this aspect of the course and i'm anxious to improve in this area as quickly as i possibly can. As with everything in life there were plenty of lessons to be learned from this experience, we were slightly under-prepared and because of that it took a lot longer than anticipated to set up our set. Once we had all that sorted the filming began and between the 4 of us we managed to get some really good shots that will look fantastic once weve got them into the edit suite and applied the audio soundtrack.

Due to the length of time we took to set up we werent able to get all of the shots we needed on the day so we now need to re-book the equipment and film again. Hopefully next time we will all benefit from the previous experience and be able to start filiming much quicker and get more done in the time we have recording.

Thats all for now i must get back to work on our film, no time to sit here and chat!!

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

YouTube Video Response

Hello all, this blog entry is about my YouTube video response task. I have been asked to choose a video on YouTube and post a video response to it, this has actually been a very frustrating task as it is rather hard to choose something to respond to and to think of what to say. Now originally i was going to comment on a video where a man called Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years and puts it all together in a film with some cool music. For those of you interested you can view that by clicking the link here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo .

However before i filmed my response to that i stumbled across this little beauty, its a video of a drunken George W. Bush at a wedding talking to an interviewer and taking the piss out of some american people. I could not pass up the oppurtunity to poke fun at our friend President Bush. Me and fellow Multimedia student and all round top man Will decided to film our own 'drunken' conversation in response to this video*.

To view the original film please click on the player below....

*Please note this video response is just a bit of fun and in no way reflects our own personal opinions, if anyone important in america views this, i like George Bush!


Here is my response to this video, in my head it seemed a lot better and with a bit more planning it could have been better but the general point still comes across as i hoped. Hope you enjoy it

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Narratives- Both interactive and traditional

Hello again, its been a week or so since ive last been in touch so i thought it was time to get back into the swing of things and let you know whats going on in my world of Multimedia.

The two main things dominating my time at the moment are playing Pro Evo and Football Manager. No only joking!, the two things are my narrative film project and my interactive narrative project. They both have provided problems and headaches but ultimatly i am enjoying them both and learning a great deal in the process.

Narrative film

Last friday my group had to present their final ideas for the film before production commenced. This was my first experience of presenting in such a serious manner and i was quite nervous going into it but i was pleasantly suprised with how things turned out. The feedback we received was largely positive and the negative feedback we did receive will only help us in the future and we'll definetly learn from our mistakes. We are now in the stage of producing our film. We are meeting tomorow to decide on the final details of this process then its down to business. I am personally quite excited about this as its the first time ive really had the chance to get to grips with filming something and editing the footage we get. I aim to learn a great deal from my group colleagues who have more experience in this than me. Check back soon for updates on the progress of our filiming, i may even put a sneak preview for the film on here for you all to watch and get excited about!

Interactive Narrative



I have really enjoyed the seminars on this subject, i have a great interest in website progamming and design and its been really good to polish up my skills in this as its been quite a while since ive had to use them. My chosen idea was to take a picture of the wall of flyers my room and then to have the user click on each one and be taken to a page with a picture of that bar and some information on it. At first i thought this would be sufficent but after i started construction of this and after looking at previous examples of this work (Which can be found at www.coalesce.eu) i have had a change of direction.

I have decided to try and think of a more interesting way to guide the user through my narrative. I want to try and incorporate more of a story, i touched upon this in my previous post about interactive narratives. I dont want this to just be interactive for no reason, tis all well and good clicking on the pictures and seeing a nice picture of the bars but really whats the point of that? I am going to think up a story, maybe based on a bar crawl type scenario where the user can choose multiple ways through the story and can end up in a variety of places.

One of the frustrating things about this project is that weve been given a specific size that the pictures have to be. 800x350 in width and height. This has caused me problems as its very difficult to get good shot of a building in a picture that size. However those be the rules and i have managed to work within them and hopefully the end result will be a good one.

Thats it for today, hope you enjoyed my thoughts and experiences

Farewell and Have a nice day!

David Walker