Second Lifeness~~

This week in our workshop we were actually able to start 'playing' second life. Personally I do not see what all of the fuss is about, I mean, I can understand why some people would enjoy it, but personally it's not for me. I prefer to have a little more direction when starting an MMOesqe game. It's good if you want to meet some new people, but some of the features it offers are fantastic, such as; Fully customising your avatar, 3d modeling (Such as the replica of the titanic) a fully functional physics engine -- Flying, if you 'stop flying' in mid air, you'll hit the floor with a bounce -- without dying of course.

I would rather go down a pub for friend making, because it's more face to face for my liking. With the internet, it's not exactly personal, while it is at the same time. You are speaking directly with someones 'mind' when you're talking to them over the internet, but there's an absence of a face to put with this 'personality' you're getting to know. With online relationships, you have to take what is being said at face value and hpe that it's the real deal. It's a little bit harder for you to lie to someones face.


With that being said, thanks to these workshops, I actually have some direction for second life use, in the form of a machinima video.

1. Psychogeography - Using the teleport system provided by second life, we (as in our small group) could explore parts of second life that we previously have not, using a randomized way of using this particular feature. We'll be using in-game capture software in order to document this journey.

2. A documentary - using second life, or part of second life, we can discuss isssues raised by virtual worlds and how they interact with our 'real lives' and what other issues such subjects raise.

3. A creative video - So basically, a music video like subject, such as:



This is a video recorded within a game called 'Portal' also, the music on the game is totally 'new' as it is a remix of ingame sound clips along with a techno beat created by the 'owner' of this video. Fantastic song.

Second Life

In yesterdays workshop, we began to start a new block of work; Second Life Machinima. First we began with an introduction of what second life is.The first small block of the workshop was looking at 'Online communities being mediated', such as how we represent ourselves on the internet, on  social networking sites, for example. The second and more major part of the work was to being looking at second life and real people specifically.  We did this by watching some documentary videos on people who run their 'real lives' through this second virtual world.



This is the first video we looked at, there was another video clip about some woman that runs a business out of second life and began to make more money through that than she used to at her 'real job'.The very same woman actually met her spouse via this game too, they had been married for a year and a half when the video was filmed and released.

If there wasn't any technical difficulties this week, we then would've gone on to create our own second life accounts, then to just begin exploring second life. But this was not the case, as we share the same IP address at uni, the website automatically blocked it, because of the 80 plus people trying to sign up at the site at the same time. So we have to sign up for this by next wednesday.  I'm actually quite looking forwad to creating my own machinima, because i'm familiar with the concept of it from being a frequent web user for the past few years.

Participatory culture~

Personally, i'm all for participatory culture, because I like to be able to think that I am capable of doing anything that anyone else is doing (with various biological restrictions of course). So as i'm browsing the web (as I invariably do from time to time) and a large majority of this browsing is done on one of my favorite websites - http://www.deviantart.com  This website is 'digital art' website, while it does not contain such colourful forms of digital art such as those we were shown in our last lecture for this subject. It does contain images, and lots of them. While I was browsing one day, I stumbled across some pieces of 'remix culture' that I felt I was able to take part in. Manga Colouring.

Essentially manga is a japanese comic. Except they are read from back to front and are black & white. I read a lot of manga in my spare time. Sometimes I just sit there reading through them when i'm trying to relax and think 'what would that look like if it was in colour?' This is because I like to explore the potential of something. To see where its limits are.   

College helped me learn a basic to intermediate knowledge of Abobe Photoshop. This is the program I use to colour the manga cells/pages. 

But of course, anyone can colour in some pretty pictures right? Not in my opinion, the way I do it is by using some detailed shading to try and make it look as realistic as possible, while still staying true to the Cell Shading style.

http://playrone.deviantart.com/art/WIP-Cover-379-95669789

Above, we have an example of one of my previous manga colouring projects from about two years ago. As you can see, the bottom two faces have a 'basic' colour down on the lines, where as the top one has a higher level of detail.


Naruto 379 Cover by *Playrone on deviantART


This is the finished result. While it's not the best verison of this particular page you'll find on the internet,  I also believe that it is very good considering my experience at the time.

There are other things involving photoshop that I like to do in my spare time, which I also believe to come under the tag of 'participatory culture', but this is more of a test of my own ability than me exploring the potential of something to its limits, while it is, the reasons I do these is to test myself and to learn new things. 

Tutorials. These can be found on hundreds and hundreds of websites on the internet. This is where someone with the knowledge of some techniques in photoshop, want to share what they have learned with the rest of the world for free. Because while photoshop isn't a free program, knowledge should be something free. Nothing makes me happier than when i'm sitting at home trying to teach myself something new in photoshop. 

http://i45.tinypic.com/2f0cfmr.png

This is the profit of a tutorial I stumbled upon one night I was browsing tutorials. While i would link the tutorial, I cannot actually find it anymore, but I can safely say that I had no idea of how to do this before I started to read the tutorial. But I am incredibly proud of this one, because it just looks so good, I want to use it on my poster assignment for our photography module.

Copyright and Remix Culture.

This week we are doing presentations about Remix culture, the class was divided up into three groups and we were each given a different subject to research and write a presentation about.

My group was group 2: We had to study remix culture and consider arguments about what would happen to remix culture if copyright laws were to change.

Personally, I did some research on mash up bands, such as girl talk --





I found out about this band because of the 'rip 2.0' article found on this website;

http://www.opensourcecinema.org/project/rip2.0

  After doing this, I started a little research about copyright infringement in general and I found out that agencies in the United States believe that over 30 percent of all software is illegally obtained with in the U.S.


I then went on to talk about how there is copyright free media on the web, but it's not as good as the things you can 'steal' from the professional artists that do it for a living. But while saying that, the royalty free media is also useful for flash projects.


With that being said, free media isn't all that bad. You can also get hold of copyright free sound effects, for use in small films or flash movies for example.

Film remixes such as; http://www.angryalien.com/

These are 30 second flash movies summarising blockbuster movies with the characters altered into the form of rabbits. This is the same as the mash up remixes. while this is a new movie, it's essentially copying the movie while adding a new twist on to it. No real new content, except for them being condensed into a very short version and into a vector based animation.


But then you have to think, as long as all of this content is being publish in a totally public forum, such as the internet and more specifically, youtube and similar mediums, where the creators of the media are not profiting from the remixes, but just doing it because they can, is that really a problem?


The Itallics above are an extract from my notes on the subject.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become all the rage in recent years. To put it in basic terms, cloud computing is a technological practice that allows for data to be accessed from any location that has a computer and an internet connection. The way this works is, everytime a specific program is opened, it downloads the latest copy of the information that was saved for the particular user I.D. on that set of servers, once the same program is closed, it then uploads a newer version of the same file, presumably with new information. Once this has been done, you can then go to another computer in another part of the world, connect to the same program and you will be able to resume your progress on the same file.


Personally, I think cloud computing is great. It allows me to travel to and from different houses, while allowing me to do the same things, without any complex data transfer procedures. If I had to save files onto an external hard drive or a memory stick, there's a chance that i could loose said data while in transit. where as if it's internet based, then I can just merrily make my way between locations without having to worry about loosing the important information.

I could use google docs as an example of cloud computing, but that's rather uninteresting from my stand point. So i am going to use something that I enjoy as an example. Steam. Steam is a game delivery platform that allows customers to pay and download new games without having to mail order or go to a shop that could be too far away. It only requires an internet connection. Within the last year, Valve, the games company responsible for bringing us Steam has introduced the 'Steam Cloud' which is a way of storing the game save data in a remote server, allowing people to play from many varying locations. I play two games that i know of that utilizes this steam cloud technology. Left 4 Dead 2 (a first person zombie survival game) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I go home on the weekends in order to see family, but when i want to relax and have a little alone time, then I go into my room and play some video games for a couple of hours. Now while I would know where to look in the game files to save it to a memory stick or something similar, not everyone else would. So if they were in the same posistion as me and clound computing wasn't around, then the only way they could play their game is by playing it on the same computer that you started it on. But thanks to cloud computing, it makes it far easier and much more flexible

The Magical Lizard Walk!

Last week we went out into the city of Leicester and started taking photographs of where we were walking around and talking for two-ish hours. We took the photographs with a mobile phone of one of the group members, uploaded them to facebook and then we mapped out the route on google maps and added annotations to the points on the map. 


View The Magic Lizard Crawl in a larger map

Psychogeography!

This week in our Digital Media Workshop, we started a small section of work on Psychogeography to carry us to the end of the Autum term on the 18th of december.

We started off by going over some of the stuff from the last Digital Media lecture we had last tuesday.

Then we broke off into groups and started to plan our very own piece of Psychogeography from around Leicester. First off, one of the group members suggested we walk around leicester and got random passers by to hold up lyrics from a bob marley song. While going around a route that resembled a Smiley Face.

After a little while of looking, we realised that there wasnt anywhere near the university campus to get this done, so we went back to the drawing board. While sticking with the BOB theme, we went back to google maps and we decided that this was far easier for us to plan out, after planning out a route, we decided that we were going to just take pictures of the route while walking along the BOB path in the city centre.  This looks like it could be fun, I enjoyed planning it and working with some of my friends from University.

I look forwad to next week when we have to go out and get the pictures taken. It should prove to be something very new for me, as I have never really taken part in a photography project on this level before.

fun times ahead. I also look forwad to setting it up for publishing on the web, I do not know how it will be done, but i'm sure we'll figure something out when it comes down to it.