PIXELATION

"KIDPIX"

BRAINSLOSH

So without warning, I've changed my idea around entirely. But maybe not so much - it might still apply to my "brainslosh," or perhaps still serve as an autobiographical piece.

This is Gr333nman and PiNkBabee, two characters I came up with for my flash alpha project.
They're going to be clickable and chatty, and I'm considering having them have the following conversation:

G.M.: Toot that thang up mami, make it roll, once you pop pop lock it for me girl get low, if ya Mama gave it to ya babygirl let it show, once you pop lock drop it for me maybe we can roll! (oh!)
P.B.: I can't see any ice creams, I can't see any customers, cuz I'm a fuckin' Smurf!

The first quote is a line from a Souljah Boy song, and the second one is Snooki from MTV's Jersey Shore. These seemed like relevant people to take knowledge from for this 'conversation piece'. I was also considering using a Confucius or Zhuang Zi quote for one character and use the Snooki or Souljah Boy quote for the other. But I thought that might make this conversation seem too obviously ironic and not very unified. Snooki and Souljah Boy seemed unified enough for me.

Anyway, as for functionality, these characters will be animated buttons. They will have a default "Up" state - probably a droning "um um um um um uhhhh". Their "Over" state - a single frame hold. Their "Down" state - one word being spoken. My original plan was to have a set of random words to be randomly said when the characters are clicked resulting in a very disconnected and haphazard conversation. But now I'm thinking they should be saying a long string of sequential words, hence the Snooki and Soulja Boy quotes, but their speech will still be very fragmented. You could even alternate clicking characters to have them say their quotes one click at a time respectively.

As far my progress so far, I've got the "Up" and "Down" states animated as a cycle. I just need to figure out the coding to make them work as talking characters, and to record their words one at a time.

http://www.robbiecooper.org/
[from Alter Ego]
This is such a cool photo! The "world without strangers" shirt really pulls it together. And I can't help but be really into the smoothies and ice cream too. I was pretty surprised when I read the accompanying text to this photo. I was wondering if the Korean university professor being photographed had anything to say about sexuality and his avatar. But apparently the little girl look is mostly a ploy for commercial exchange. And apparently Everquest has a complex economy within its virtual world, something this professor has spent a great amount of time analyzing. While I was looking through this photo series, I was under the impression that most of the avatars revealed something about the players' wants and desires in terms of self image.

I'm pretty self-conscious, and I tend to monitor my thoughts at all times. It's sort of a way of keeping myself in perspective. There's always just too much going on in someone's brain, and I forget that sometimes. 

So my idea for my Beta project is likely going to be some kind of representation of what goes on in a brain, particularly my brain. The video I've attached is a rough sketch animation of a possible idea. This footprints video is mostly about the progression of a thought (the video being revealed) being realized and comprehended over a progression of time (the footprints). The actual design and look of this application is likely going to stray from this, but I'm not yet sure. 

On another note, I've also been thinking about the dreams I've been having lately. They always leave me with some kind of lasting impression of myself. My dreams reveal very interesting things about me that I often overlook, like deeply-rooted problems I've had and how I feel about certain people and places. So, because I want my Beta project to be an introspection of my mind, I want to have some focus on dreams and subconscious thoughts. All of this could tie together as a self-portrait of myself. 

The form of this piece is probably going to be a web-based flash game. I'm thinking it'll function like a linear abstract narrative. I've always been fascinated with Han Hoogerbrugge's flash work and would like to learn how to achieve this kind of minimal and surreal look. (A good example of his work: http://www.hoogerbrugge.com/Other/spin/) The content surrounding this piece is likely to be based mostly around personal imagery and sounds. I want it to be visually stimulating, or satisfying or reflective, but I also want it to have a sound score that suites it because I've always thought sound is very important, especially in animation. Though it'll probably turn out as an autobiographical piece, I would hope that it offers some kind of self-reflection on the viewer's part. Regardless, I tend to be my only audience much of the time and I want to make a piece that I'm satisfied with, but otherwise my target audience would be the people in my generation who can identify with the ideas I'm presenting. By the end of the semester, I would like to have a basic construction of this idea, even if it is very minimal or abstract or even just an animated demonstration of what this flash project will someday be. But because the internet is and always has been a valuable resource, I'm going to want to take the aesthetic concepts of this project further to develop a website for myself.

A thought process...

WHAT HAVE I DONE

Not too much.
But if anything can be said about what I've been working on and/or thinking about in the past few weeks, it's mostly been music and animations. Take a listen if you'd like:

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]


Animation done in After Effects, music by me:

Butterflies from Ricardo Manlapig on Vimeo.

super cool

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

At first I was pretty convinced the dude was inside a box under a glass sheet. But he definitely stutters and moves like a digital video. It's funny that they designed a computer interface as a sped up human. It's kind of true. But even a sped up human isn't as fast as a computer these days.

"PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE
The internet is heaven! Speaking of sped up humans, I couldn't follow some parts of the text. It was going pretty fast. I guess it's appropriate that way, otherwise you might get bored. Then again, it refers to itself as boring. But I still gave it my full attention and couldn't look away. It's a good portrait of the internet.

"...Therefore, if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is, the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art." - excerpt from "Hamlet on the Holodeck" by Janet H. Murray (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/hoh/excerpt3.html)

 Janet raises the important question of how we can progress as storytellers in an age where technology has basically combined all media into "multimedia", as well as how we can escape making merely "additive" forms of art when we mix media. Being a youngster myself, and having grown up with technological advancements based around the world wide web, I think it's the "youngsters" that have the task of pushing the mediums in which we work.

If there's anything I've come to realize about a person's natural reaction to a film or story or even a song is that our attention spans have been compressed and simplified. I think we've been dumbed down by instant gratification on the internet, being able to read anything we want, listen to any music we want, and watch any video we want on command. That's not to say film viewers at the dawn of film-making were any smarter than us. If anything, film-viewing virginity seemed to produce a more gullible audience, such as the audience that supposedly fled in panic when viewing the "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" by the Lumiére brothers. As for myself, I know I've become lazy, easily bored, and easily distracted because of the brilliant speed of entertainment being shared on the internet. 

I don't want to think of the audience as dimwitted or impatient. But because it's in my best interest to understand my viewers, and because my viewers would most likely be within my age group, I need to analyze myself. And because I've become familiar with my reactions to media in our digital age, I would think we need to work towards a simplification of the narrative within the constraints of digital media given our own tendencies towards distraction and loss of interest. That said, I also realize that, like the inventors of storytelling in film at the dawn of film, we're going to have to realize what can and can't be done to make something more than just an "additive" art form. But since I'm a youngster, and I have yet to really experiment with the mechanics of digital media, the answers are still pretty fuzzy.