Work in Progress - Major Assignment

Well it certainly has been an interesting course thus far!

While I tortured myself thinking 'too big' about my final assignment and harboured badly over the written essay, a really good phone catch up with Cathie on Monday night has pulled me into line.

While I havent got any screen grabs to show examples of my Major Prac just yet I have plenty of stuff in my head so here is a bit of a written run down on where I am at.

I am pitching for financial backing for the creation of an ARG. My ARG is called HUMANOID. In Humanoid the typical Web 2.0 user is gradually overcome by too much time spent online in chat rooms and social networks and turned into Avatar and becomes completely digital!

In the digital world the Avatar will roam through 3D web simulated pages (software created by Exit Reality) where all the social network sites are represented by buidldings of the pages which look really cool.

I am going to use Machinima to simulate some footage for the digital segments I need to create (it gets a little washy here but will concrete as I get film on tape) and I will simulate this using the Second Life platform and an Avatar I created last year in Second Life for the lectures that took place at the UoN island created by Roger Quinn on 3D animation & rendering. I can use this simulation for some of the 'gone digital' time.

I also intend to film either a) myself at my computer or b)a friend using a computer in the 'real world' and then hope to use After Effects and a morphing simulation where the two worldsd 'tween' together and become one.

I have been working on some drama treatments, synopsis developments and general writing of ideas to help me cement these ideas down, and this is where I started to bog down and thinking way too big for this trimester.

I am now committing to creating 3 pieces of footage to meet the specifics of the brief, although I worry about my ideas still being too large!

The 3 ideas I am developing are:

1) 3D title sequence "Humanoid - how will YOU get escape WHICH reality"
2) Bumper - something exciting and fast paced
3) Video segments - some eye catching action from real worl to digital realm

All of these ideas are still a bit loose and will tighten up over time, but Cathie in discussion over the phone agreed that this is a good approach.

Still very excited about getting 'pen to paper' with this project, just very time poor at the moment.

As soon as I have some draft ideas exported out of After Effects I will post more regular updates here and on my YouTube page.

PS - After Effects is amazing! I love morphing using the paint brush and using 3D space to change block text stuff, I wish I knew all of this when I did my first video!

DM