Lotti's Blog: May 2013

A few months ago, we have started working on a group project in order to demonstrate that we are able to create either an animation, interactive story or a video narrative using our own skills combined with relevant theoretical and practical work. We have created a screen-based interactive story which encompasses a variety of mixed media, different techniques and an instructive story-line. The project is not aimed at a particular age group, because it is for anyone who feels or has felt that they were stuck in a routine and their lives were dull or boring and wished that they could take a look at their lives in a different perspective.

Therefore, we have created a character and we let it on a journey in order to demonstrate how many people currently feel frustrated, stressed, monotone in life and by using him, we tried to show that there are opportunities in life that can make our lives more colourful, happier and make us realise that we can’t accept one set of routine, it is up to us what we make out of situations and how we perceive the world around us.

The project’s main goal was to share this message and make use of moving image and audio. The message is intended to make people think about their lives, but it is not designed to change people’s lives. It is only an idea, a thought that users could start thinking about. We have divided up the roles diversely so that everyone could contribute to the project with their own skills as well as learning form one another. Catherine has drawn the character and the different positions we needed him to be, I drew most of the backgrounds and the ‘candy world’ and Mai put the scenes together. Later on, Catherine and I worked on buttons in Flash in order to make the story interactive and connect some options with certain scenes. Unfortunately we have encountered some problems during the development of buttons in Flash so we were not able to use those for our project.

We have successfully achieved to create moving image, make use of audio and incorporate our sketches by using a variety of Softwares such as Adobe Photoshop, Flash and Sony Vegas. However, we have also encountered some problems whilst we were working on the project such as time, technical difficulties and issues with following the same idea as we had planned in our minds. It was difficult to adapt to each other from time to time as everyone had other duties to do besides the project; therefore, it was harder to find time when we were all free to meet up and keep working on the project and developing it. Another issue arose from the fact that we had a certain image in our minds and we couldn’t quite produce the same outcome as we had imagined it.

The main problem happened towards the end of the project because we were not able to deliver the interactive story in Flash due to technical difficulties and unexpected personal events. Therefore, we have decided to upload it on YouTube as it made it possible for some of the video-features and interactive parts to work properly.

We have achieved a colourful and exciting piece of work, but some of the scenes visibly differ from each other in look and quality because they look quite unprofessional. But then again, it has to be kept in mind that we are not professionals. In the future this could be improved by carrying out more practical work and developing our skillset further by exploring certain Softwares and relevant theories in more depth.

However, I would say that we have managed to work very well as a group and constantly helped each other when it was needed. We have found our strengths and weaknesses but we tried to focus on how we can make this story as best as possible, which could only come true because we all added our own and individual skills to it. Thus we became a very effective group and managed to achieve our best.

Overall, I think that it was important to think about the digital media theories in order to use practical skills and pursue our goals. This was certainly achieved by taking part on lectures and workshops which personally helped me a lot because I have learnt to accomplish new skills and get to work with different media platforms that I have never used before and didn’t have much knowledge on, such as Photoshop and Flash. Our project became effective through the application of this newly gained knowledge and our individual skills which define our work and show the audience the creative interactive story with a message to think about.