Final project

In this final project, I am going to create an interactive children story book that is based on myth of the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn festival. Animations and characters will be designed based on the traditional style but will not totally follow its genre. The game structure is quite linear; user will have to find hidden movieclips in order to proceed to the next scene of the story. The game will consist of 4-5 scenes with two basic point/click or point/shoot mingames.

Final Project Ideas

1. Storybook
I want to develop an environment, a storytelling interactive similar to the Alice project I have introduced in my previous blog. By adding music, characters movements and background designs to build a believable environment of the story. Users will be able to make choices in the story and they will control the storyline by using hidden mouse events to control movie clips.

The first idea of the story will be a classic Cinderella story with a twist. The second idea would be a story pick from a children storybook in an environment like you would read a book in real life except you'll see animated movie clips along with the pages when you "flip" the book electronically.

2. Theme Park
Basically mini games within a bigger game. User will be able to choose a boy or girl character, and be able to walk around this theme park to choose what kind of "attractions" they want to play. Mini attractions including rollcoaster, merry-go-around, shooting balloon game, etc.

3. Video, Music jukebox
This last idea is to build a video and music jukebox interface by using Flash. Users will be able to choose what videos they want to see and also what music to listen to. I'd like this project to be able to post online with preloaders build in, etc.

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I personally am most excited with idea #1 and #3 because I have already built a game project for Multimedia 1. #3 is much more practically in real life while #1 seems to be a really fun project...

John William Waterhouse

JW Waterhouse is one of my favorite artist/painter whose on the traditional side. He was born in Rome in 1849. His work are very classical; they are paintings mostly surrounding the theme of poetry, myth particularly female mythical characters . They are all very romantic and "dreamy"..telling the story. The female in his paintings look very gentle, creating a sense of softness. The way he paints the drapery, water, implies shadowing and textures all suggests movement, weight and dimensions.

It is quite ironic to me that I like JW Waterhouse as well as Kathe Kollwitz as his work delivers the good, the dream world, while Kathe's brings the evil side and reality.

http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/

2nd artist

The 2nd artist that I have always very interested in is Kathe Kollwitz. She's married to a doctor and they both lived in Berlin to help with the sick and ill. Her life span brought her to suffer from WWI and WWII. She lost her son during WWI and lost her grandson during WWII. It is hard for me to imagine the pain she -in a personal level - has to go through, and to see others go through. She lived in the country whom was one of the "axis of evil" during WWII...The artworks that she created brought the story from the flip side of the same coin, I guess the innocents suffer doesn't matter where you live as long as you are involved with the war.

Most of her artworks show pain and suffering war has brought to the innocents... death, sick, poor, despair. Life is cruel; human beings are evil. What I am most impressed with is that only from looking at shapes, line contours, BW Kathe's printmaking work, I can sense the greatest sadness she wanted us to know and understand and feel.

Kathe's art make us aware; her art records history and also bring us pain.

http://www.dhm.de/museen/kollwitz/english/works.htm

Artist/company 1 - FGA studio

I came across this studio by surfing through the web. Feel Good Anyway studio is based in Portland, OR. Reason why I choose this company is because of this "Alice project they've worked on. http://www.feelgoodanyway.com/interactive/alice.html

I think they have done a great job to attract my attention in this project... particularly in the part where I have to roll over the mouth to review the story...I like also like their drawing style.

I feel that this inspires me for a possible final project idea as I am very interested in vector graphics, fairy tales stories and using Flash for storytelling.

Listening

I found the "Listening to myself listen" article quite interesting. In fact, it refreshes my memory of a Music Appreication class that I took a few years back. My teacher in that class thought that there's no other universal art other than music because almost every single human being started to listen to music or beat back when we were in the womb. I found that statement to be very true. Music delivers feeling and mood like any other art form. I feel that music can create much more influence to audiences perhaps even more than visual art alone. The same piece of visual art if played with different background music will definately have different impact to audience.

The sonic environment" is also very interesting theory to me. I never paid attention to this before I read this article that human has the ability to "unfocus" certain sounds in an environment. Like our brain can decide whether to focus our attention to our conversation in the coffee shop or to the sound of dishes and plates sound. And yet, there is always certain sound that breaks our attention such as a loud beeping sound or a warning signal.

http://www.geocities.com/duul_drv/listening.htm

Netart is art. It is an artform that requires skill, concept and creativity just like any other "traditional art". Netart is usually created with the electronic media as medium and its end purpose is to publish it on the internet as showcase/exhibition. It has a much larger outreach range than any other traditional arts.

Just like any artform, a piece of netart should involve a strong concept/content, craftmanship skills and aesthetics. When creating netart, we also need to keep the file size and the level of interactivity in mind.

I believe I created netart this past week and so as most of my classmates.