Presentations

Sitting in the Stevenson lecture theatre at 9 o'clock in the morning isn't anyones plan of an ideal Thursday morning. Fortunately, it isn't for a lecture, it's for our presentations that every group has been working on for the past month or so. At the minute, it's a case of bricking it and waiting to see someone else's presentation to be able to gauge how good ours will be in comparison.

Group 1 started off and lasted for about 25 minutes. Without sounding rude, watching their presentation settled whatever nerves I initially had. The presentation slides were nice and simple and watching them present was obvious that they hadn't rehearsed their presentation nearly as much as our group has. As irritating as it was having to come in to rehearse SO many times, it will actually pay off. I did like their app mock up though, it was really impressive and i'm jealous and want to know how the hell they did it! It genuinely looked like they actually made the app. Their website demonstration was impressive also and it's obvious they put a lot of work in to it. All their work was well thought out and visually good looking, but their presentation skills kind of let them down.

Group 2 began with all the assessors being ushered out the room under the premise that their is some sort of emergency and they had to leave right away. Not sure what is going on or how long it will take for them to come back so I decided to start doing this but it turns out the presentation is still going without them in the room. We're told that all the lecturers have been taken to an immersive room, which sounds interesting and I presume that they'll be given the same visuals and audio we have. It's a good approach of how to do the pitch. It's integrated radio quite well, which is one of the aspects i've wanted to see how each group uses it as the radio students have been kept to themselves for most of the year and this is the first time we've worked with them. Group 1 didn't appear to have a radio student so they didn't use it at all but that's fair enough.

Group 3 has taken a similar start to our group by playing a teaser video as the start of the presentation. I know this group didn't rehearse until last night but so far it's an impressive slideshow and the presenters are very confident in what they're talking about. Aw crap, now we're watching a trailer for their idea and I know i'm in it somewhere. Not looking forward to seeing myself. Trailer looks very slick and i'm not even seen :D Radio is being used to offer background stories to the characters that wouldn't be able to fit in to the show, which is pretty smart. Crap, a photo of me comes up on the screen and I look like i'm shitting myself. Great! Other than that, sounds like a good show, i'd watch it. Considering they had one rehearsal, a good presentation, well thought out plan and strategy. Complete opposite pitch to ours, as theres is all media to show, ours is mainly theoretical with a couple of examples.

Group 4 finally started after a technical glitch with the projector and they are looking at the long distance relationship brief. They have decided to start their presentation giving their statistics about their solution before actually telling us the actual idea, more of a thought process style. Ok, makes a bit more sense now that we have seen part of the first episode. It seems to be about a group of chinese students who live in the UK and dealing with their relationship back home. Nice spin on long distance relationships seeing as most will probably look at boyfriends and girlfriends. Very entertaining clips we saw, no radio student again but to be honest, I could see this being like a cult web show or something, very good writing, editing and directing. The presentation slides are very flashy and eye grabbing, they did a very good job with it. Only issue with the presentation is just the order, would of been better with the first episode shown after a quick description of their plan.

One group left to watch before our group goes up and present and bizarrely, there is sense of nervousness which is strange seeing as all I do is plug my laptop in and pressing next in powerpoint.

Group 5 have began with a trailer for their project. They've decided to look at the Arts brief, the first one yet. The video is very impressive and very professional, but that is expected seeing as their editor is Nick Perry who is a bit of a god when it comes to editing and definitely someone I see as a bit of an inspiration. Slideshow is professional as well but again, done in Keynote which is Nick's signature really. Radio is used to broadcast a art critic who is a little bit eccentric. I suppose there's not really much you can do with sound for the art brief but should have really come in to consideration at the start of the module. Oh well, the radio student was obviously happy to just go for a simple radio addition. I'm a bit proud of our radio student as she was very forceful in getting radio involved more than just the standard radio box method. She is happy with the contribution radio plays in our project, as it's a stand alone product and doesn't get ignored as it's an integral part of our project.

One thing i've noticed about all the presentations so far, before we go up and present, is that no one is giving out freebies to the panel, so we will be the first, and maybe the only group to do so. Is it a bribe? I suppose so but to be honest, it's a damn good bribe! There's also no promotional material either. So far, we seem to be the only group to go all out on the promo materials. Anyway, time to GO GO GO!!!!

STRIKE!

Due to the Lecturer's strike on Thursday, our presentation pitch got moved to the following Thursday which also meant that our essay wasn't due until the week after either. At this point, i've done 1000 words of it already, so all it requires is my final thoughts and some references to theory of cross platform practice, which i'm not entirely sure I quite understand. Ah well...

Anyway, the printing of the posters and the postcards came out great. I didn't know we were having a photo of Dr. Phobia and Lori printed as well so that was kind of cool too as they were signed.

Now the posters I have a bit of an issue with and I didn't fully figure out until we started putting the posters up around the university. The QR, as cool and useful as it is, people aren't really going to use. The only reason i'm using it is to see if the others code actually worked. On top of that, our website doesn't really load correctly on mobile phones so at the minute a bit pointless but as a future endeavour, the website would be correctly formatted for mobile phones. The other issue I had was that I was told to put the future website name on the posters, not the current one, otherwise, it looked unprofessional. That's where the problem lies, as we don't have our website on that address, putting the posters up is kind of futile seeing as no one is actually going to be able to see our website. Maybe we should have bought the domain name but at the end of the day, it's an extra cost that is slightly unnecessary when we can save money by using a temporary website as I imagine the site won't be touched again once the presentation is over.

So balls!

On another note, I have been given, well I accepted as I knew that it was being hinted to me to do it, a new task of mocking up a tour bus that we are going to show in the presentation. It involved sticky paper and ink but I have it completed but I won't post a picture of it yet, just to save on spoilers for the presentation. Even though no-one is reading this I imagine but still, better safe than sorry.

The presentation is ready to go so everything from this point is kind of just killing time. I've been working on setting up my website which is now live and has one showreel on it, so it doesn't look too lame anymore. Will work on finishing it over Easter anyway. On top of that, me and a few others are concentrating on a 48 hour sci-fi challenge where you make a film in 48 hours, but the extension has given us all time to relax and look at that in depth.

Really, other than the posters and postcards being out and about, there isn't much else for me to blog about until after the presentation. So until then...............

Workload Overload!!!

So, today has been a rather productive day for me. I have been working since 1pm and have just finished at 7pm. Sure I spent the last half hour tidying my room but it's still pretty damn productive! Now an advance warning, this is not a fancy post with images or videos, i'm far too beat up to bother with that hoo ha, so it's literally just text.

So, since I completed the App demo, I managed to get my mate to create the spiders once more but with a closer zoom on the spiders. He did it with ease, which I appreciated as it meant I could crack on with creating the demo. The first demo didn't impress one of the producers who was expecting the hand to be moving to show the spiders crawling. Unfortunately as the camera was only booked for the one day which we only found out in the last half hour before it needed to be returned, we sort of panicked and didn't do the movements the way she would of liked them anyway. Also the screen wasn't marked up so I couldn't have the screen mask follow the phone effectively. This is something I would obviously rectify to get it right. Anyway, that was done and then we went in for a meeting on Saturday to have a time rehearsal for our presentation.

It was here that my workload began, with requests left, right and centre. The most important of all was from our writer who was dealing with getting some postcards printed. It turns out that they needed a 5mm bleed space around the edge just in case. Now, I will admit I struggled to get my head around this. So at start, I put a 5mm white border around the edge of the current design. The printers called back telling us that was wrong and the text needed to be moved in 5mm, which served for a major brain melt down, as I had to go through each design and save the text separately in order to move it differently from the background. This took forever and my brain actually physically melted by the end of it all.

While trying to sort all this out, I had people asking me to play the videos to show them with me saying no, because I need to get the postcards sorted otherwise they won't get to the printers before they closed at 2pm. Tough deadline but I met it w/ 5 minutes to spare. Didn't take in to consideration the lack of willingness for anybody to do anything when they are closing in 5 minutes. So we have to wait until Monday for them to tell us if they are correct. Dear god, they better be correct!

So then after that, I started learning how to create images with transparent backgrounds, as the director working on creating the website needed the text logo separate to put on to the website. Nice and simple really, you just create the image, put a transparent layer behind it, get rid of the stuff you don't want to see and save it as a .png format, which is a pain to find in Photoshop, you have to go through save for web & devices rather than the normal save as method. So that was done.

I also gave the radio student who is creating the powerpoint slides for the presentation the webisodes i've edited to put on to one of the slides. Apparently, the .mov files I gave her weren't playing for some reason, no idea why but that provided a further headache for me. I created a job list for myself that gave me 9 tasks to complete before 8pm. All tasks were done with ease really, it helps knowing what i'm doing in the first place.

Tomorrow we have the meeting and I will try to sort out the powerpoint situation and hopefully we will have put the postcard situation to bed. I'm very tired and this module is getting pretty intense now, but with minimal editing for me, which is sad so I'm looking forward to this all being over and getting back to some proper editing. I have a feeling the directors, radio students and writers feel the same way!!!

Augmented Reality App Test One

My only friend, who is a first year foundation degree animation student, created a load of spiders for me to make my app demo. He went far too much in to detail on the spider as I was literally only expecting a black circle with legs that moved on the screen. After a bit of masking, green screening and editing, I knocked up a demo. I'm getting him to re-render the spiders with the camera closer as the keying process loses the legs of the spider, and just looks like tadpoles floating around the screen. Anyway, here is the first test:

Will experiment further with the masking on the phone as it looks a lot better with the hand shaking as the camera moves. Anyway, that won't be posted until after the presentation....

The L O S T Round-Up

Now the reason I spent 3 posts on the LOST ARG. This was the most AMAZING example of Cross Media Practice, as it exhibited the same sort of media that we are now looking at. It included video, website, radio and live events. Obviously, it went a hell of a lot further than we could ever achieve, what with a book being written that was actually released, and I own, free chocolate bars given out and active mega sponsors that were included in the promotion of the ARG.

To simply put it, this is what we should be marginally trying to aim for in creating cross platform products. LOST is a show that really did push the cross platform because other than creating this ARG, they also released micro episodes that were released to Verizon mobile owners in the States, and later put online:

A video game that was available on PS3, XBOX 360 and PC:

And another three ARGs, one of which failed due to the recession but all no where near as grander scale as The Lost Experience. My favourite was the final one as it set me off on my new obsession of silk screen posters, to which I now own FAR too many but still:

And that's it! I promise not to talk about LOST anymore, from now on, I will only be talking about my XPP project. This was just how I got to grips of what Cross Platform Practice was.

L O S T (Stage Three & Four & Five)

AKA, My Favourite Stage!!!

SO.......

This stage was kicked off after the discovery that Hugh McIntyre and his mistress(?) were bumped off by the villain Thomas Werner Mittelwerk. It was all launched by our protagonist Rachel Blake at the major geekfest that is, San Diego Comic Con...

The website she shouted out for all to visit was again real, and again is now defunct. The aim of this stage was for the world, yes, THE WORLD, to join together in a collaborative way to seek out hidden codes that reveal a segment of a video, an orientation film that, if you watched LOST through the 2nd season, you would understand by now the significance of. 

The codes in question looked like this: 

Or similar anyway. These were released in stages and were found in ad breaks on ABC, Channel 4 and Channel 7 of LOST, Jimmy Kimmel Show, LOST Magazine, Sydney Harbour and the list goes on until the final two codes were released which i'll come to in a second. 

A Wristband Worn By Jorge Garcia (Hurley)
in an interview

Found In A Window In The Orient Hotel

On Jimmy Kimmel's Mug

Now the biggest part of this experience was the two 'Glyphs' that were released in the UK. One located in London and the other in Manchester, it involved a mega hunt for it. Now while I try to find more solid information on these two hunts and not rely on memory alone, I have to say that this stage overlapped Stage Four, so i'll go in to that now.

Stage Four was simple. Give out free chocolate that is also a prop from the show. 

These bars had a website printed on them, whereisalvar.com, that encouraged players to photo themselves with the wrapper and tag their location in the world to show Thomas Werner Mittlewerk how many people are fighting him. There were also a load of Gold Logos that needed to be found in order to progress the game but that was about their only relevance really. 

In the UK, in order to obtain one, you had to visit the comic book store, Forbidden Planet and say a password of the day to get a chocolate bar. Pretty awesome, especially if you were a really hungry kid who only had enough money for bus fare to get home.

Not Me Or Anyone I Know But It Is Outside The One I
Went To In Birmingham

In the US, they had a tour bus that stopped in certain states so people could go obtain them. Not as easily accessible as the UK. There were other methods for the rest of the world, I mean, people in Africa had some, but probably bought off eBay. 

The website then provided a beautiful map of all the people playing the game, which leads me to believe this stage was designed purely for the creators of the game ego massage.

Taken at the start of the campaign

Anywho.....

Back to Stage 3 and we have all but 2 codes to find. These were the ones to be found in Manchester and London.

First was Manchester, and it was blogged by Ixalon:

When we arrived at the arch there wasn't another person in sight, but within about 20 minutes, conspicious groups of two started popping up all over the place! Somehow myself and Heidi (my girlfriend) and nick managed to work out who each other was, so we chatted a for a bit whilst everyone else hung out in their groups.

A little time (and a considerable lot of rain) later we were asked to gather round (there were about 20 of us) and was told the first clue was to be found from a curly haired bloke in the nearby pagoda. I asked the chap if he had a clue for us and indeed, he handed out lanyards to everybody, showing the glyph on one side and a cryptic message on the reverse; "In a park near an area known for mardi gras, find a man that has enabled society to go far."

At this point 2 folks ran off into the distance (obviously locals) and here's me and Heidi having no clue about the festivities of Manchester. Thankfully the pagoda was next to a carpark so we went off with Nick to ask the parking attendant who happily gave us pretty good directions. A few minutes later we found ourselves at the Alan Turing Memorial statue in Sackville Park! Whilst attempting to avoid the omnipresent photographer (must be a Hanso Clone) we read a sign which told us to "go to the buidling that celebrates discovery and change, where you will find a baby who will give you the answer you are looking for. You have until 5pm!"

I knew the answer to this one; the science museum (the only tourist attraction I knew about in Manchester having past it on the train). A quick walk and yet more very very wet rain later, we arrived. Having no clue where to go, we approached the ticket desk, where a friendly museum employee told us we were looking rather LOST. She told us we had to go head towards the back of the building. Thankfully my wonderful girlfriend picked up a guide to the museum and had noticed that "The Baby" was on the 2nd floor of building 2, so after a quick detour around an exhibition on the textile industry, we found ourself in the right building. Strangely enough floor 2 was sealed - no access for the public. Thankfully yet more highly useful museum employees told us to jump over the felt rope (mmmmm... felt rope) and head up the stairs.

We were there! We were greeted by what seemed like a crowd of Channel 4 employees and warned "DO NOT TOUCH". A little hunt later we found what we were looking for; "The Baby", a replica of the world's first computer built in Manchester back in 1948. A laptop was placed in front of it, cycling through an animation of the glyph... Argh! Panic! No code! Thankfully someone hinted "be patient" and an agonising minute or two later, the code popped up! I fired it into HE.com there and then via my mobile and that was that! :)

London was the following day and there is a detailed account of that hunt HERE

And a picture of ALL the glyphs and where they were discovered can be found HERE

And the video that all these glyphs were for can be seen HERE:

So this leads us to the final phase, Stage 5! Actually, balls to it, it's short so i'll make this Stage 3,4 and 5.

STAGE 5

This came in the form of an online podcast that broadcasted live on the internet the 2nd year anniversary of the crash of Flight 815, part of DJ Dan's radio show that was ongoing throughout the whole ARG. The radio show had the supposed death of the villain while calling in to the show, I think he blew something up. Later on it was found out he isn't dead but still...

There was a final video with Alvar Hanso declaring that he is the father of our protagonist and he was kept prisoner by Mittelwerk all this time.

The End!

A XPP Example NOT Related To LOST

Here we have the comic book series, Scott Pilgrim:

They are 6 books that focus on the life of 23 year old Scott Pilgrim who has to fight his new girlfriends seven evil exes' in order to really be her boyfriend. I've only recently completed reading them and they are extremely enjoyable reading, it constantly breaks the fourth wall, throws in random story segments, like volume two gives you a vegan shepherds pie recipe while telling the story as well, and overall appeals to many a geek who enjoys playing video games and watching films.




In August 2010, the amazing director, Edgar Wright, of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, added his first Hollywood title to his belt, an adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim Trilogy.

It was a great film, not loved by many, didn't do well at the box office but got great critical acclaim. It is a shame that it didn't do so well, but it is an episodic film and since watching it all the way through, re-watches have consisted in pausing and revisiting hours, days or weeks later like a TV show.

The XPP of all this though I only discovered this morning. Like all good book adaptations, (NOT GOING IN TO ADAPTATION THEORY, THAT IS NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS!!!) there are certain parts of the book that get left out of the story. In this regards, it was the backstory between the characters Scott Pilgrim and Kim Pine. So before, or during it's run in cinemas, a short animation showing how they met and started dating was made and why they split. It was shown on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] in America, don't think it got a showing in the UK but ho hum, it's on the internet.

Now a short TV prequel to what was supposed to be a big blockbuster hit seems like a good Cross Platform example. Also, it was animated and voiced by the respective actors in the film. Except Lisa who never turned up in the film. Anyway, the reason i'm talking about this is because a) Mike Histon was going to talk about it before me and b) it shows that XPP can allow you to keep all your fans happy, especially when it comes to book adaptations when the fans are very difficult to please. 

Edgar Wright DID NOT fail with or without this but still....

OOOOO, this reminds me, LOST did a similar thing to appease the fans that hated (and I mean HATED) the series finale. They produced a small little 20 minute Epilogue available on the Season 6 DVD that answered A LOT of the questions that were never answered on the show. I have yet to show it to my mom who is one of those who HATED it, so I will see how well it did appease the fans but still it, oh crap, I said I wasn't going to talk about LOST. Ok, i'm going to go on to Stage 3 of my LOST babbling!