More Interactive Flash Narratives

Fantastic games made by Fasco. The following links take you straight to the games...
Crimson Room
Viridian Room
Picomaru
White Chamber


P.S. The walkthrough for White Chamber, which I had to use!!

Playing: Playstation 2 - Buzz

Porcupine Tree + Anathema

Last Monday the 10th I saw the titled bands at Rock City, Notts. The first band; Anathema were not my sort of band, but they played well and seem to have quite a large amount of fans. Porcupine Tree were really good though, they put on a great show and sounded great. I took my camera, I took some really rubbish shots and only now just got round to uploading them. Enjoy!

Anathema:




Porcupine Tree:





Music: ...And You Shall Know Them By The Trail of Dead - Sigh Your Children

Student Pads (1)

This is my first piece of work for Trent TVs program; student pads.




Music: Genesis: Back In NYC

War of the Worlds

Tonight, my last night in Nottingham for a few weeks and I saw The War of the Worlds at the Ice Arena.
I can summarize the show in one sentence... room for improvement.
A shame because it's such a classic show. The problem is they haven't tried to catch up with/use today's 3D technology. Their images to me seemed quite primitive. Also the sound quality of the show was really nasty. Their voices were either too quiet and pumped full of treble or too loud and still with a lot of treble.
However, the music was fantastic. Well-written (apparently by the Moody Blues!) and exciting to watch because they involved both classical and modern rock instruments. The stage was split into two; one half had a full orchestra (I counted over 30 violins alone); and the other side of the stage had a rock band and what could've been Peter Gabriel's backing band!

The website for details.


Music: (in my head) The man that plays the blues guitar near market square

My Christmas List

Mindscape
House Of Leaves
JPOD
D-Tonate & D-Fuse
OneDotZero
Jo Jo In The Stars
Jacques Druin
Dad's Dead
Berlin Film Festival
The Piano Tuner of Earthquake
British Films

Heima - Sigur Rós

Fantastic!
The music was incredible throughout.
The images were perfect for the music and stay in my mind.
I'm feel very inspired to do something like that myself (the music; there's no way I can achieve the same visuals), but it's not easy to do this, so it's something to work on when I go back home.
If you get a chance to watch it DO NOT miss out!!




http://www.heima.co.uk/
http://www.heimafilm.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heima

p.s. i just noticed on wikipedia that it was released on my birthday :D


Music: Jeff Buckley - We All Fall In Love Sometimes (Elton John cover Live on The Music Faucet WFMU 1992)

Narrative Stage 3: Learn The Drums (Completed)

Learn The Drums by ~Jragon86 on deviantART

Narrative Stage 3 - Learn Tha Drums

Almost finished, will be finished tonight. Just couldn't wait to upload...

Icarus Ascends

There's a needless window in my room that's oposite my bed and in the mornings the sun is reflected from the opposite building through the window into my room and straight to my face.
So my first solution was to buy a piece of material (preferably tie-dye) that would hang to cover the whole window, so when the sun does shine through it's a much nicer sight.
Getting a piece of material that a. I liked and b. wasn't expensive proved to be quite difficult. So this week I had another idea.
I've painted what I intended to be psychedlic colours onto a sketch pad using watercolour paint. The first two of four are now complete and I will have the other two finished by the end of next week. It's just ashame I won't be here to enjoy my new paintings...



11/12/07 Update:
Pictures taken at 10.30am this morning, to show how the beautiful colours shine through...





Television: Nathan Barley - Episode 6

Narrative Stage 3

Done!
Yep I've finished it already, which I can't quite believe.
I think it's a good piece too if I don't say so myself.
I'll upload it here as soon as I have somewhere to host it.
But that's it now, I just need to present it all on Tuesday!


Music: 10cc - I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor

Theo Travis Quartet

Yes.
This was a wonderful gig!
I went with Alex and Hannah from the Musician Society to the Bonnington Theatre in Arnold.
They played two sets with songs mostly off the new album, combining a range of styes; Jazz, Blues, Rock and all of which filled with a lush atmosphere from various effect pedals.
They also made tribute by playing their own version of a song by the brilliant Syd Barret called See Emily Play.
And I was really looking forward to seeing him because he's played and recorded with some incredible musicians; Robert Fripp, David Sylvian, Porcupine Tree, John Etheridge - to name but a few - and I wan't disappointed. It's ashame my flat mates woke me up at 3am this morning though, I couldn't get back to sleep. Otherwise I might not have nodded off during the more atmospheric moments tonight.


Music: Theo Travis - The Relegation of Pluto

Idea for Narrative Stage 3

A very basic flash drum kit using a picture of a real drum kit in the Byron Lecture Theatre
Whenever a specific part of the drum kit is selected to play a hand will appear and "play it".
I will gather sounds from the royalty free samples Apple Loops provide.

Resources:
http://www.kenbrashear.com/
http://ababasoft.com/music/drum_machine.html
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/56809
http://www.pearldrum.com/dreamkit/
http://ababasoft.com/music/drums01.htm
http://www.buckle.com/static/bscene/games/drums/drums.html


Music: Erik Satie - Pieces froides: Trois airs a faire fuir

Interactive Narrative Stage 3: MOAN!!

In this assignment i've been asked to "update my Online Journal regularly, to reflect my progress and engagement with this assignment task". Well the latest is I have less than a week in the total 2 weeks we were given and I still don't have any ideas!!!
Thus my conclusion: this assignment is bullshit!

Reference Sources:
http://magnoliathemovie.com
http://lab.constellations.co.nz
http://pulledhair.com
http://www.newgrounds.com/

Tutorials:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/action_scripts/actionscrpit_tutorial/
VLP > Learning Room > Software Tutorials > Animating in Flash / Adobe Flash CS3

Sam Winston in Lecture

Last Wednesday 28th November I sat in on a lecture directed mainly to Graphic or Fine Art students, but the e-mail I got was to all Art and Design students.
The lecture was given by a young new artist called Sam Winston who has written a book called A Dictionary Story, which is a fantastic idea along the lines (no pun intended) of: if the dictionary contains every single word there is, then why can't it tell every single story.

He's very talented and you should check out his work!

A Little Bit of Home In Nottingham

I found this CD today in a second hand vintage shop of Mansfield Road.
I have this album. They're a local band that are doing really well for themselves at the moment.
One song from the album even got played by John Peel!

Metal !!!

MESHUGGAH !



Update:
"WOAH!!" Some might say...
I've just realised that this post was my 33rd post!
33
33
33
......creepy!

Heima !!!

Spotted the poster in Broadway Cinema on Thursday...



See the website or the photoblog, which has very nice music.

Connect 4 - Completed Final Version!

It's here, it's done and i'm very pleased with it!
So much so that here is a still:

And the completed final version...

Sketches

A collection of my sketches - for visual or audial perceptions (starting with most recent)...

Zack-Preston Van-Miller III - Possible villain in Max & Wax


Kris Selditch


Hitler Caricature - first but probably not my last :)


Pewie LaRue - Inspired by Powerpuff Girls and Tim Burton


5/12/09
Goofy (scene from The Reluctant Dragon) Unfinished


1950s Russia (Unfinished)


Dog 1


Dog 2


Dog 3


Dog 4


Untitled


Jasper - The Chronicles of: The Nervously Dispositioned Shrimp


Earthworm Jim


Faust and Frank


Groucho Marx


Imagination


Hunter S Thompson


Kez


Robots

Trampoline Year 10. Surveillance City

Earlier tonight I went along to most of the events taking place today at the Broadway Cinema for Trampoline.
I started on a group walk called the "psychogeographic walk" around the town. My new pal and fellow mm student Sophie was in the group too! She didn't remember me though and that left a wound. We used maps made by Heath Bunting, who sort of led us around but left most of the decisions for us to make. This lasted for 2 hours and I thought it was a nice experience, but I came away not feeling the same as some of the others in the group. I think you could split the group into two exactly, where one half knew exactly what was going on, understood and got something out of it, while the other side didn't really understand it; I definitely stood in the latter. ...if you see any chalk markings on the ground around Nottingham town, that was us!

After this expedition Sophie and I got some coffee and made our way back to the Broadway cinema to see the films.

The first was a collection of short films titled The Surveillance City. I enjoyed the first film, titled The Bodyguard because the music was quite hypnotic; I could hear a synthetic sound that reminded me of a grasshopper, while very high pitched noises were distributed to every degree of the room.

The next film was quite interesting. It was the video diary of a man (Casper Below - direct video link) trying to gain access to the CCTV footage of himself from different shops that he went into during the course of one afternoon one day. In the end he had no luck from any company and he had to go through weeks of stupid bureaucratic letters. I felt I could relate to this because of the problems I had video recording on a tram a few weeks back, and also because earlier on, on the walk with Heath Bunting at the Broadmarsh Centre, we were stopped by a couple of security people telling us not to take pictures or record anymore (documenting the walk)! The person in this film also went through similar trouble when he tried to film at important buildings around London, such as the back of 10 Downing Street. This piece was called Sensitive Building. I like it!

Another film I really didn't understand especially how it related to the surveillance theme, was a film of many jolty, unpleasing to the eye quick shots/video recordings of someone doing there washing up-i think. You couldn't really tell what they were doing, you just saw water, bubbles and heard the noises from the movements. So basically I fell asleep a couple of times because it was SO dull! Reminded me of the Bill Bailey joke on Part Troll though :D

Then I stopped to have another coffee with Sophie.
The she went home.
Then I had a wee.

I went upstairs to the Mezzanine bar because an interesting experiment was supposed to be taking place called "Fortechnique/Fontechniquer" by Cormac Faulkner. I was a bit late and when I got up there there was nothing happening, just a bar.

Then I bumped into Steve who was working there and we went down to the studio where they had an experiment taking place called Satellite Bereau "Join". This was a very cool idea... They hand you a GPS telephone and a bluetooth device. Then they tell you to walk around town for a about half an hour. The GPS device will track everywhere you go, send a message back to them and then project your movements onto a wall, which is then drawn on top of with a highlighter pen. So the idea we had was to go outside and walk the shape of a penis, just to see how i might turn out. They may even well tell us that we cocked/ballsed up their experiment!..that would've been perfect. However, 20 minutes later we got back and they said it tracked it fine and we could see it on the wall. The first question they asked us though was "were you trying to make a shape?" I turned to look at Steve and we both convincingly and innocently said no. It turned out to look like an aircraft, though Steve said it was more like a leaf.

Then an insane man called Frank Abbott performed his "Hoose Memory" in the bar at Broadway. It was so bizarre! He stood there underneath a spot light, holding a remote control connected to two mini amps that had the horns from a fog horn stuck on it. All this connected to a pole he was holding, like a pole used to hold various liquids given to those who are really sick in hospitals. He told an anecdote about the time he was in New York, killing a mongoose, meeting a Jewish couple and how the law prohibited him from driving with the Jewish couple as his passengers with a dead mongoose in boot of his car at the same time.....
It was weird!

Finally I watched the last of the short films.
Here is one of the final films I watched and managed to find on the tube. It is Jeroen Offerman performing the entire Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven backwards and then later reversed the video. It's really amazing!



An eventful evening you might say.


Update:
Here are some more things i've found from Trampoline on the net...

A still image from another short film called A Veritable Logorrhea. It used beautiful language, most of which I couldn't understand though.


A stop motion film I really liked called Lisa and Jean. It was filmed in Nottingham, here's a still.


Here are some films similar to the ones I saw at Trampoline (and by the same people who has their work at Trampoline)...




And here is something cool but I can't figure out how to embed the video like the ones above!

My Second Self/Alter Ego [1]

This is so funny!

Reflecting on Todays Lecture

It was great to finally discover whose painting i've been using as an avatar/profile picture all this time (pictured above: Not To Be Reproduced). It is René Magritte, here are some other of his works that I've also seen before and liked but never knew who it was...




I love the work of surrealists. Their images stir something inside of me more than any other art genre or artist i've come across.

Here is a famous painting by Hans Holbein; a German Rennaissance painter and it's called The Ambassadors. The first time I saw this was on a TV program like the Culture Show where the image had been blown up onto a wall somewhere in London and the presenter was talking about it very fondly describing the significance of every object. Then talked in great depth about the skull at the bottom that you can only see by positioning yourself up against the wall looking down at it. I think this could be an early example of surrealist work... perhaps Ernst and Dali et al liked this painting too?



This is an image by John Heartfield; a German Photomantage artist and it's called The Spirit of Geneva



And finally M.C. Escher. Another artists whose name I didn't know but was already very familier with his work. He used mathematics, polyhedras and geometric distortions (amongst others) to make the impossible realities look real. in Eschers world everything is relative.







Franz Ferdinand took the cover of their second album:

from:

This is a poster by Alexander Rodchenko where he has used the face of Lilya Brik. Read this

That's enough typey-clicky-cutty-pastey for today!