Essays for "We Create Identity" & "Web Technology"

I have completed my essay for We Create Identity, as well as for Web Technology. They both deal with how I experienced the subjects, as well as which decisions I made in the assignments we had to do for these courses. The essays can be found in my online portfolio: here is the "We Create Identity" essay, and here is the "Web Technology" essay.

Bad, worse, worst

This Monday, we had to present our worst page, after which we would decide who has created the best worst site. You can find my worst page here. The first thing that you see when you go to my worst page is a loading screen, 'cause what it more annoying than waiting for something to load? As you get to the real deal, you are greeted by a flashing background, the atrocious Comic Sans font, a fake prize contest, and, if you still live in the 90's or adore advertisements, by some pop-ups, that ask for your confirmation when you try to close them.

The philosophy behind making a worst page is that by doing something as bad as possible, you will be able to do it in a very good way because of the lessons you learned from making this awfulness. While this may sound cool I'm not entirely sure about whether this works or not, but this can also be due to the fact that I like to make nice things instead of ugly things. Let's put this discussion aside for now though, because I would like to talk about the results: they were awesome!

Christopher Berg's worst page was the winner by a huge margin, and deservedly so, because his page takes the meaning of the word "annoying" to another level. The second place was for Duuk Baten's page, who used the principle "it is better to copy a good design than to come up with a crappy one yourself" to create a collage of worst pages from all CreaTe students. I do hope the philosophy has some truth to it, since we will end up with a lot of terrible portfolio's otherwise...

Do you wanna B-U-M-P?

Last week we discussed Matrices in Motion & Modelling. To demonstrate how they can be used, our teacher showed us how a simple screensaver, in which a ball flies to a wall, and bounces off of it, can be created using them.

This week we discussed Ordinary Differential Equations, which are one level higher in abstraction than formula's: they basically give you a formula of a formula.

We also have a starting point for the screensaver we will make for the final assignment. In the screensaver, a helicopter fires at people on the ground, and it will hit the person that is closest to the foreground. To spice things up a bit we also want to add an Anti-Air cannon, controlled by the men on the ground, used to demolish the 'copter. The question is of course: who will win, the Anti-Air cannon or the helicopter? For decoration purposes we want to included trees that change depending on which season it is. To us it seems this plan can be realised in Processing within the given time frame in 2D, but in the project meeting this week our teacher actually asked us to try it in 3D as well. We will first think about all the formula's needed to get this to work, and demonstrate that in 2D, and when there is time left, we will make the transition to 3D.

I'll be back

On Monday the 25th, Anton returned after a two week holiday in Portugal. In the morning, we had to present an almost working version of our interactive video. To some groups this wasn't really a problem, but to others, our group included, this posed a challenge, as there was no Ximpel-app ready to show. Our group had just finished editing, so there was no Ximpel code written yet. As Anton pointed out, this is not a smart strategy to follow, since you don't get the most out of Ximpel by starting late. Instead, it would have been wise to do some tests with Ximpel early on in the project, in order to deliver a professional result in the end. This is indeed the danger of perfectionism: when you wait with providing something presentable until the very end, because you think what you currently have is not good enough, you end up with something that hasn't been tested thoroughly, and hasn't had a lot of feedback.

In the afternoon, we discussed the exhibition on the 29th. After some discussion, we agreed on having one table per group, so that every group could present their own interactive video, with a decoration fitted to the theme of the product. As it turned out though, Inéz and Heleen had already proposed this format, but it turned out to be impossible to set up the event in this way. Due to the fact that Anton made us think that we had some choice in how the exhibition was organised, a lot of negative critique was outed to them. The thing I have learned form this is that it is best to either let a couple of people organise an event, without any interference from anybody outside of that group, or you could be transparent about what choices are being made and for what reason from the very start, adjusting things according to feedback. I think that for a study like CreaTe, the last method is preferable, because profiling ourselves is one of the things we have to learn.

The exhibit itself was, in retrospect, a success, since everybody got the chance to show their work, and people didn't loose their attention, since changing groups every half hour kept things fresh. After our demonstration, I was fairly happy with the end result, as the audience seemed to have fun with our product.

Motion & Modelling week 1 + 2

The course I haven't introduced you to yet is Motion & Modelling, in which we learn about different mathematical theories that we later on put to use by creating a screensaver. In the first week, we have learned about manipulating functions (shifting them up & down, left & right, making them bigger & smaller) and about differentiation and integration. In the second week we have learned how to work with Matlab, a program designed for mathematical computing but also suited for animation purposes. For the screensaver I have teamed up with Dmitri Kazachkov and Jelle Galgenbeld. We're not entirely sure what kind of screensaver we want to make, we will decide on that next week.

Also, it's weekend again, so time for some nice music. I recently found out that the music to the song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", performed by, amongst others, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel, is also used by Amy Winehouse, but with totally different lyrics, for the track "Tears Dry On Their Own". You can watch both of them below. Enjoy!

Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - Ain't No Mountain High Enough


Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry On Their Own

Programming for CreaTe

In Programming for CreaTe we learn how to make an animation with Processing, a visually-oriented programming language based on Java.  The advantage of Processing is that a lot of things are done for you, while you would normally have to program these things yourself. For example, to create a window for the output of your program, all you have to do is specify a size, and the rest is taken care of automatically.

In the first lesson, we learned about the drawing functions, and the final assignment for that day was to make a create that can be animated by moving your mouse. You can find my creature here. Today, in the second lesson, we learned how to use variables and loops to animate something. To check whether we understood the explanation properly, we were asked to make an animation of a ball that bounces between the left and the right of the window it is displayed in. It is up to you to judge whether I succeeded with this...

Here it is!

Let the video editing commence!

After we finished filming last Tuesday, editing has come to full force. So far, I have edited the first scene, as well as the meeting with the park manager. There are a couple of things that struck me during editing: firstly, it is difficult to get your movie to tell the story you want it to. You want to give the viewer enough information so that he or she understands what is going on, but not make it too obvious, for example by putting in a text explaining what happens, because this breaks the immersion in the story and is also a little insulting to the viewer, since it is a way of saying that the viewer is unable to figure out what the message is without any further help.

The best way of conveying a message clearly is by good dialogue, but the person who edits the video has no control over that, since you have to work with material that is already there. What can be done by the editor is putting in a voice over that explains the situation to the viewer. Another thing that is possible is to zoom in on a certain part of the video to emphasise its meaning.

The second thing that became apparent is that music is of huge importance for the atmosphere of the movie and the message it sends out to the viewer: it has the power to make or break your video. As a result, a lot of thought goes into finding music that fits with what you want the viewer to experience. For example, we have a scene in which a fisherman tells about the problems with the lake. What kind of music would fit with that? This poses a great challange, but it is a fun one to solve, since you get to listen to lots of music, which, in my opinion, is always a good thing.

I'm looking forward to presenting our final product on the 29^th, and as always, be sure to check the project website to watch our progress.