freakin out

k now I'm freakin out. final year project seems to be slippin away from us. We had this great idea of doin a super narrative, thinkin yeah we could use different platforms of mediaie. audio (radio stuff), video, text, animation, graphic novel, to try and get across a story. All the different platforms will tie in with one another and maybe hint at something else that is goin on in a different platform. See if the same people are going from one platform to the other to piece together the whole story. And I've just been on the home and away website and they got a blog from saslly, meet the characters, pic's from the whole weeks episodes, which adds to the story line thus making it pretty much a form of a supernarrative.
how can we improve it though?
what will make ours better than home and away?
How can we get people to follow our charaters lives?
I know bebo and myspace an alll that jazz, but is it gonna work?
we gotta get crackin'.

Yet another thought, why thats the most thoughts I've had since I was a little girl!

Over the weekend I was rackin' my brains as to what I might consider researching for my dissertation. What will tie in with my course? What am I interested in? What has potential to actually be a research paper? What will I be able to do primary and secondary rearch on?

I don't know, I don't know!

Until I was in my mates house on Saturday nite havin' a couple a 'Dutch Gold' and the rest of 'em decided to put on 'South Park'. Ok, I thought, but aren't we gonna have to watch it on the computer and there aren't enough seats and we'll all have to stand......

I think we all know at this stage 'South Park' is more than just an animated Tv show. The creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone deal with important issues that sometimes othere people wouldn't have thought of, or are afraid to comment on.
This particular episode was about the very popular computer game 'World of Warcraft'. Not a very eye brow raising issue there! But it dealt with how ordinary people live their life through a computer game in a whole other world, building communities, making friends, buying, selling dealing with crisis situations, being a better person than they may or may not be in the real world. And how some peoples health can deteriorate so badly when they just sit in front of a computer all day for days and days.



After watching the episode I asked my friends did they know anything about this game and them being the nerds they are, of course they did! Silly me!
I got alot of info off them, even found out that some people I know play the game on a regular basis, which may come in handy for my primary research! One of the lads character in the game is a girl and alot of male players buy him/her stuff, I thought that was quite funny. Maybe I'll do an interview with him??
I'm not sure what angle I am gonna take with the research yet.
But I'll work on it a bit more.

slan go foil

Ideal work space

Hmmmmmm I cant't help but think I'm missing something??

Ahhhhhh!!! A chair, 'twould be very helpful.


Oh yes, thats the one!!


slan go foil

mood board

Me mood board. What the hell is it about?
Its a blend of a couple of different art Genre's mixed into one . I like the contrast of the old style comic book, poster of The Misfits artwork to the contemporary, modern style of the Graffiti. Graffiti seems to be looked on as rather a 'sub-culture' of youths whom destroy and/or deface property, but I reckon its an art movement! Maybe i could do my research paper on 'Graffiti as an Art Form', it's prob been done? jus thinkin as I type here. Anyho, as i was sayin' this is kinda how I've been thinkin lately. Starting to see more and more really excullent graffiti everywhere and i wanna be able to do it. I have been reasearching how you do graffiti, for Fiachra's A0 poster cause i wanna do sumit like that and, I found some really great tutorials online that showe you how to create a stencil from photoshop and illustrator, which can be printed out and then alll you have to do is cut it out and spray.
So here's a link to a pretty cool site that supports tutorials for first time stencilers and t-shirt printing
stencil tuts


slan go foil

I've Been Thinkin'

What am I gonna do for my research paper?
Dunno yet!
I have a few ideas, but none of them seem to be solid enough to research thouroughly. Nothing original.

I'm inclined to be leaning towards film and tv meets the internet and the possibilities of a kind of 'Multimedia' T.V series.
People like to mimic TV characters and follow their lives on screen so why not let the viewer commincate with the character, or learn more about the character when they are not on the tv screen. What i'm trying to say is give the character more life than just what you see on the tv screen. Video blogs of the character, the characters could have a 'My Space' account,the real character not the actor of the character, creating more life for the character Something in which the viewer could get to know the character and identify with them thus making the show more real to the viewer.
I dunno I jus think TV can be more thyan just TV, there's so much more you can do with it. Crossing over narrative from one form to another, creating new narrative in another form that ties in with the story being told. Kinda like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.
You have all these parts and when you put them together you get so much more than just TV show.

Manoi the Humanoid Robot

Soon to take of as the next big thing in Japan, is 'Manoi' AT01 the robot. The name, 'Manoi', comes from the word humanoid, or rather inspired by (thats what the article I read says).
Here's a link to the article

'Manoi' is a self assemble robot for the home. It's not even out on the maket yet, but there's a pretty big market for these household robots. 10,000 and the company that makes them, Kyosho Corp. says that thats more than enough

The cool thing about 'Manoi' is, according to the article I read to get this info, you don't have to be a scientist to assemble the thing.
It took the reporter a mere eight hours to assemble, ha ha ha only eight hours!!
But he did of course have the help of Kazuho Shiroma. this guy's a robot expert who has been know to put three of these bad boys together in one session.

The price of Manoi is $1,260, which is about this 993.3775 much Euro. (thank you free currency coverter!)

There has been alot of robot activity in japan lately, but what makes this one really cool is, you can download the actions for it ie. walk, sit, wave, run etc.
and you dont't neccessarily have to program it yourself.


Here's a pic that explains where Manoi got his/her/its name.

Watch a video of manoi

Initial research and all links came from the bloggers of slashdot.org

The pics were taken from Here the Kyosho companies website, who design and manufacture 'Manoi'

And the Video Is thanks to another Blogger on 'slashdot' who did a bit of online research to find it, so cheers to that blogger.


Slan go Foil

I think I'm turning Japanese..... I really think so

What's this Crazy gal at??

Well she is recieving information from a poster, in Shinjuku station.
It's an application for your mobile called Mobile Suica.
Here's the Wikipedia explanation of what Mobile-Suica is.

"Mobile Suica (モバイルSuica, Mobairu Suika^?) is a service for Osaifu Keitai mobile phones, first released on January 28, 2006 by NTT DoCoMo and au in Japan. Suica is a prepaid rechargeable contactless smart card mainly used to pay for fares on the JR East railway network.

Just like traditional Suica cards, Mobile Suica can also be charged when the remaining balance gets low. Other features supported by the mobile phone includes the ability to review past Suica transactions via the mobile's display. Suica uses Sony's FeliCa chip for its main functionalities. Mobile Suica interacts with the FeliCa chip using Java technology."

So now we know!

This application is an add on of Mobile-Suica called SuiPo, which means Suica + Poster. Very smart indeed.



So basically you just move your mobile past the scanners on the poster and information about the poster is sent to your phone, cool! Handy for films and stuff I guess. You can probably get the cinema times or if it was a poster for a gig I'd imagine you could get ticket prices and dates thus leaving the poster free for more art than info.


Information Taken from here
Images Taken fromhere
^
This site has more info about SuiPo but its in Japanese so Good Luck!

Slan go Foil

4th year dissertation stuff

As my lawor, I just thought you should know... I've killed alot of people...


Maybe thats how I got into 4th year multimedia, maybe not or maybe we'll never know how it happened. The main thing is I'm here (in 4th year, not inside your computer).


This year I'll be mostly eating borboun biscuits and researching for my dissertation, which is due in around Easter. I'll also be trying to come up with a fantastic concept for a final year project that will astound and amaze people.


But the first thing I have to do is, get this blog up and running, start researching and blog some more!


Slan go foil