Night Life Blog

As we have shifted the project to focus more on the pre-gathering of user generated content, we are currently in the process of attempting to secure sponsorship which would allow us to offer an incentive for users to participate which would hopefully result in a greater input.

With this in mind, this morning I arranged a meeting with the Societies Officer of CIT.

The thinking behind this was that many of the societies organise events sponsored by companies or arrange competitions which offer high value prizes. The hope was that in meeting with the Officer that she would be able to suggest any companies or organisations that were particularly open to sponsoring student undertakings.  We could then contact these organisations greatly reducing the time spent seeking sponsorship.

Unfortunately, she was unable to recommend anyone, simply suggesting that we approach businesses that we think may be interested.  Of course, this was always the next logical step but it does mean that more time shall need to be devoted to this task as we try to find a sponsor.

As we have decided to shift the interactive element of the project to pre-production, we will no longer be going ahead with the installation that we had planned to implement.

As a result of this, the script has needed to be re-written with the branching narratives being removed.

Below is a link to the updated version of the script…

http://www.mediafire.com/?er6244phva63zfx

Today we had a meeting with Trevor in order to discuss the current direction that the Night life project is currently taking basically giving him an overview of what we have done so far and out intent going forward.

In discussion he suggested that maybe a good route to go down would be to focus less on the Interactive installation portion of the project and instead shift the interaction more heavily towards the pre-production stage with our gathering of user-generated content.

Citing the work of Aaron Koblin, specifically his video tribute to Johnny Cash, he showed the potential that this method offered. In the piece, Koblin took the music video for Cash’s song ‘Ain’t No Grave’, and broke it down frame-by-frame. He then asked users to select a frame of the video and then to draw it in whatever style or way that they chose to. The video in question is viewable at the link below.

 http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com

As you can see the result is very impressive, literally each frame is a unique individuals contribution and they all combine to create an interesting animation collage. The project members present agreed that the effect created in Koblin’s work was very impressive and seeing it in action we have decided to go one step further with our asset collection stage, and possibly remove the installation portion.

We still need to work out specific details and will post them here once we are decided.

Today we discussed the project with Trevor and the conversation led us in a slightly different but still exciting direction for the project. We’re gonna rework the public contributions aspect to be much more engaging and easy to use, and focus on that as the interaction aspect of the project, doing away with the installation idea.

Implications this will have on the project:

• Website - the website will be downgraded to a “coming soon” type of set-up for the time being, and all promotion will be withdrawn, until it’s ready for public use again.
• Contributions - the main part of the conversation was about reworking the way we collect work from the public. Instead of leaving people to their own means and ways of generating content, we will instead provide the tools, i.e. a drawing application (Flash or HTML5) with a colour pallet and brush sizes prescribed by us, allowing the user to trace over a preloaded image. More on the tracing and its context in the next post.
• Production timeline - the immediate focus will now shift to the storyboarding; decided on exactly what shots we want in terms of cinematography/composition/etc. so that we know exactly what we want from the public, or more importantly, so that they know what we want from them.
• No more installation - this frees up so much time on production as we no longer have to research and implement physical technologies, meaning a quicker and easier set-up for the exhibit also.

Another important point Trevor made was that despite this is primarily an animation project, we have yet to show any actual animation work, so experimentation with that needs to commence very soon.

As mentioned previously, the script for Night Life as been finished.

If you feel like contributing art or textures you can get an idea of the sorts of things we’re looking for by clicking on the download link below.

http://www.mediafire.com/?8723frld6x0j9lf

This morning we met with Paul to discuss the current state of the project. The meeting went well. We were advised to adjust the website to make it clearer what we are asking the public for, which will be fixed soon.

We were also advised to engage in user testing for the website, which not only will help find any problems on the website that we overlooked, but will also look good in the hand-up document at the end of the semester.

We also discussed our approaching schools to collect work, and we agreed that primary school students are more ideal as at that age they are more open minded and enthusiastic about art, especially the type of art we are looking for.

We were also advised to give examples on the website of the sort of imagery we are looking for.