Due Tuesday (11/22)

Three things due from your team:

1. A sketch of the shape of your racing track, with whatever vehicle/character is taking the place of the "car" included.

2. A sketch of your title screen, which should give some indication of font style.

3. A sketch of a "story" screen, giving some context for the game. If the vehicle is a helicopter, who is the pilot, and why is she/he taking flight? Lay out the objective of your game. This should be some combination of snappily written text, and images giving a sense of character and environment. It can be one main image, or it can be several images broken down into comic-strip format. As a reference, take a look at how "blockade blitz" lays out its story:

Blockade Blitz

Download for Racing Game file

The template for the racing game can be downloaded here:

http://www.box.net/s/up69v9p83lyir4akok9p

Due Thursday (11/17)

At the beginning of Thursday's class, have a sketch of your idea for a "customized" flash racing game. The further the design is from the original racing concept, the better. You will be able to change the racing car to any other sort of object you'd like, and you'll also be able to customize the route and the look of the "track." Maybe instead of a racing car and track, it's a piece of food navigating a digestive system, or an ant navigating an ant burrow, or a comet cycling though a route in a solar system. Try to transform the original design as much as possible.

Bonus points for sketching out your title screen, and any sort of intro visual materials that will set the stage for your game.

Racing Game Tutorial

Link here:

http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2007/05/15/create-a-flash-racing-game-tutorial/

Next Tuesday: 3 pages of storyboards

At the beginning of Tuesday's class, have your three ages of storyboard for your script finished. We'll go over the storyboards, and assign roles for creating your Machinima, in class.

Next class: Script Due

At the beginning of next class, have a one or two page script for a Machinima we'll create in Second Life, using at least one of the buildings the class has created as a "movie set." As a reminder, here are the building we have at our disposal:

PARTHENON
BEACH HOUSE
CLUB
CASTLE

You don't have to limit yourselves to the ideas we came up in the brainstorm session. But for those of you who missed it, here are a few of the ideas we threw up on the whiteboard --

Self-referential story about waking up and being stuck in Second Life
Religious sacrifice made at the Parthenon
Murder at the Club House
Nutso art critic showing off the art in the club
Time traveler going back in time to the castle, and finding life is simpler there (while someone living in that time thinks it's a terrible time to be alive)

Remember the avatars that we have at our disposal. The story can be told in any sort of mode you can think of -- interior monologue, dialogue, faux-documentary. Have fun with it, and we'll read them off next class.

Building in Second Life; What's Due for Tuesday, Sept. 27

For this Thursday's class, we'll introduce some basic building concepts in Second Life. It'll probably take a little time to get oriented to the interface, and to virtual 3D construction in general, so we'll start small in class today: I want you to build a table, and two chairs. The first chair should be pretty basic, but the second chair should have a little flair to it. Your completed table and chairs will be due at the beginning of Tuesday's class.

Also due on Tuesday: a sketch of a building you'd like to construct in Second Life. Hopefully the time spent in class today will give you some ideas of some of the possibilities and the limits of the basic building tools. Since SL isn't constrained by the physics of the real world, take the opportunity to be playful and creative with your design. Take your cue from "novelty architecture" (we'll look at some examples in class) -- buildings that are perhaps more sculptural or metaphorical than practical. Here are some links to examples of novelty architecture in the real world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_architecture
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/16834
http://www.oddballdaily.com/2011/04/11/11-unusual-buildings-from-around-the-world/

You might want to make your sketches on graph paper, as that will give you some indication of relative scale, and you might be able to translate some of that information to the SL building grid.

Here are some basic tips for building in SL:

VIEWING YOUR OBJECT

Holding down the alt key and clicking in the viewer, you can use your mouse to navigate through the visual space without having to move your avatar around to see things from other angles.

HELPFUL KEY COMMANDS

Ctrl + L: Links objects
Ctrl + Shift + L: De-links objects
Shift + click + drag: Copies objects

USE THE GRID

When moving or rotating an object, you have access to a grid that will "snap" the object to specific coordinates. The grid will appear when you start moving the object; drag your cursor over the grid, and your object will snap to the grid increments. Building objects that are sized the the scale of the grid is a helpful strategy.

CUTTING HOLES IN OBJECTS

To create a hole in your object, in the build menu, select "edit" in the top menu, and "object" in the sub-menu. You have an option to "hollow" the object (and "path cut" will begin to slice into the shape of your object).

RIGHT-CLICKING ON OBJECTS

Right clicking on your object gives you several options, including editing, deleting, and "taking" your object. "taking" the object is like saving it -- it gets saved to your inventory. To keep your inventory organized, you should name you objects -- do that in your "Build" menu, under "Edit," in the "General" sub-menu.

Here are a few SL building tutorials on youtube:

Assignment for Thurs, 9/22

Your assignment for the beginning of Thursday's class:

Post two pictures to the blog. One is a picture of your avatar (or maybe two pictures, if you want a full-body shot and also a closeup), as well as a snapshot of yourself (you can take the shot with your computer, or you can pull a recent shot off facebook or elsewhere.

Under each picture, write a paragraph describing what assumptions an average person would make about the avatar or the person in the photo. What sort of personality do they have? What sort of personal background do you think they have? What sort of attitude?

Assignment for Tues, 9/20

The assignment over the weekend, due at the start of Tuesday's class, is to make a blog post at this blog, with two parts to it. The first part is to upload three snapshots from your virtual fieldtrip in Second Life, with a brief sentence or two about each location. The second part is to respond to an online article about the game company Zynga.

Please read the article "Virtual Products, Real Profits," online at the Wall STreet Journal here, and in your blog post, answer the following questions:

1. What is Zynga's biggest "edge" as a game company?

2. What is the infrastructure Zynga uses for distributing its games? And how is that infrastructure different from more traditional game distribution systems?

3. List a couple design choices that were made in Zynga games that proved to be successful.

4. Have you ever bought "virtual goods"? If so, what were they, and why did you buy them?

5. There seems to have been tension within Zynga between designs and choices driven by data, and choices driven by game designers. Whose side, in general, would you personally align yourself with, and why?

Assignment for Thurs: Pick three places to visit in Second Life

So, for Thursday, please got to the Second Life Destination Guide, linked below:

http://secondlife.com/destinations

And pick three destinations you'll visit on our virtual "field trip" during Thursday's class. I'll check in with everyone to hear their three picks at the start of Thursday's class.

Here are the videos we looked at in today's class:

Sign up for Second Life before Tuesday, Xtranormal posting to blog, and some links

You need to do two things before Tuesday's class:

1. Post your finished Xtranormal short to this blog (use the "embed" code)

2. Sign up for an account on Second Life

Second Life main web page

Link to sign up for an account:

Second Life account registration

You'll go through the steps of choosing an avatar (which you can later change), creating a username, and entering your email, birthdate, and password.

Here's short article on what makes writing memorable (we'll read it in class):

"Facts are Feeble Fare," by Alain de Botton

And here's a link Gabor passed along, about using "atoms" rather than polygons to create graphics:

Assignment for Thursday: Chelsea's punchline

A mini-assignment for Thursday: everybody needs to come to class with an ending for Chelsea's Xtranormal short, to punch it up. Hopefully between all of us we can come up with something that has a bit more punch.

Assignment for Tuesday 7/6

Now that you've seen some of the characters that Xtranormal uses, I'd like you to invent a character that isn't part of their "canned" character sets. If you don't feel you have any drawing skill, don't sweat it -- this isn't about being Michaelangelo, it's about communicating an idea, and a crude drawing can probably get the job done. The character doesn't have to look human -- it could be an animal character, an insect character, and so on. Come to Tuesday's class with your drawing on an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, with a front view of your character. Include a background with an environment for them to inhabit. Include a brief 3-5 sentence description of the personality qualities you think your character embodies. Imagine that you're from a design and animation company who's pitching character designs to Xtranormal, in the hopes that they'll pay you to design and execute the characters for them. In a brief paragraph, explain who you think the characters will appeal to, and why you think they will be popular characters for Xtranormal's service.

ALSO, A REMINDER:

A rough cut of your Xtranormal short is due at the neginning of class on Tuesday as well.

Xtranormal Project: What's due Tuesday

Here is a brief article on Xtranormal from Fast Company magazine:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/moviemaking-for-the-masses.html

Here is a Beginner's Guide to using Xtranormal:

http://xtranormal.zendesk.com/entries/387760-making-a-movie-in-xtranormal-movie-maker-the-beginner-s-guide

And here are some Xtranormal shorts I'll show in class:

Geico commercials made in Xtranormal







"What's A Meme" by jtoeman

Pickup Line Fail
by: dweed

Orchestral Percussionist
by: mconradd

THE ASSIGNMENT

On Tuesday, a printed-out copy of a script for an Xtranormal short is due. We'll work on executing the short in class. The script should be roughly three double-spaced pages. For screenplays, in general one page of script equals one minute of screen time – the finished short should run about three minutes in length.

Write the script out in the form of a play, including some notes on gestures the characters make, like so:

BOB
How's the weather?

SUE
(Shrugs) I don't know. You tell me.

BOB
(Frowns) I asked you first.

You are constrained, by the format of Xtranormal, to a dialogue between two characters. One thing that makes dialogue interesting is when each character has a distinct personality, and a distinct speaking style. The pre-recorded voices of Xtranormal have a similarly flat affect, but word choice in dialogue can still give the characters distinct personalities. For instance, the following exchange sets up two characters with very different temperaments:

BOB
My head is like, totally foggy, man. It's like, I don't know if up is up, or up is down. You know what I mean?

SUE
I do have some inkling of what you're trying to say, despite the vague and muddled manner in which you've chosen to vocalize it.

As an exercise to help get you thinking about the different personalities of your characters, in addition to the script itself, you must also write a one-paragraph "Bio" of each character. What is their background? Their style? Their outlook on life? You should choose Xtranormal characters that somehow reflect, in their character design, the type of personality you want them to project.

SOME NOTES ON DIALOGUE

Your dialogue will probably have more impact on an audience if it builds to some culmination or punchline, and if there is some suspense as to what the outcome will be. The cliche is that drama is driven by conflict (though "conflict" can be more subtle than a straight-ahead battle between two people).

The scene I showed from "Inception" is really an exposition scene -- explaining the fictional parameters of the movie's world. But it's built with a little shock at the end, when Ariadne's character is surprised to learn she's in the dream. It gives the scene a little punch at the end -- a sense of climax that gives the scene a feeling of closure, rather than just letting things trail off into the next scene.

Here are a few types of dialogue, which might help give you a structure for giving your scene a bit of an "arc," with a sense of resolution or closure at the end.

ARGUMENT

This is the most direct form of conflict: one character is arguing with another. The suspense that's built into this is: who will win the argument? Another element of suspense might be: who is actually right (the person who wins the argument, after all, might just win by being a better bully, and not actually by being right)?

PERSUASION

One character is trying to convince another character of something. If the character being persuaded is skeptical, this provides some conflict (though not as direct a conflict as a full-blown argument). Suspense arises from the question: will the skeptic be persuaded, or resist all the way to the end?

INTERROGATION

One character trying to learn a secret from another character. The suspense can come both from wondering if the interrogated character is going to give in, and what the nature of the secret itself is. The classic example of this would be the interrogation of a suspect in a police drama, but it could be as small-scale as a mother suspecting their kid did something naughty, and trying to figure out what it was.

CONFESSION

The flip side of one character hiding something from another is one character deliberately revealing something to another. The suspense here tends not to be whether the confessing character will reveal something, since the character is willingly opening up -- it's more suspense toward what the nature of the confession will be, and what the reaction will be of the person being confessed to.

TELLING A LIE OR TALL TALE

One character lies to another. Some suspense comes from whether the character being lied to will end up believing or disbelieving the lie. If the liar is telling a particularly extravagant tall tale, there can be suspense in wondering how far the liar will push it.