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