A History of Type

From the lectures i missed i looked them up and made some notes and did a little research into the subject matter, i have included the notes that i got from looking at the lecture presentations as best i can and think that it was a good exercise to do to catch up on anything i may have missed. (THIS GOES FOR THE LAST FOUR LECTURE NOTES)

History of Advertising

Fashion as Photograph

High Culture VS Low Culture

High culture vs low culture

Digital Media Artefact

Before editing my video i looked at maybe editing only pictures to get my point across as i think my speciality is working on pictures and not on film, i produced one picture i am happy with which is the Gears of War picture, i changed the colours in the picture and simply put it changed the entire dynamic of the piece and think that it stresses the point i have been trying to make across. I did want to do this for the ODST title picture and put it on the end of my sequence but think as individual studies it works better.

This is the clip i produced for the Digital Media Artefact which demonstrates my understanding of how title sequences effect the audiences understanding of a film or game. This is my finished piece with which i am overall happy with, i think the music i have chosen to go with it suits the feel i am going for very well, and i am also happy with the edited sequence of the clips. I took the original (Below) and took all clips of the humans winning any of the fighting, i also included clips from the ODST live action trailer (In an earlier blog), again taking out all scenes with the humans winning, and edited them in for more of a variation in the piece than the original. This also gave the video another dimension in that it makes it look as if two different battles are being lost in different places at the same time, giving the impression and overall feel of loss, losing and defeat.



The original video end with another spartan coming and picking up the bomb, flying with up in to the enemies ship and throwing it in, detonation it, completing the mission and overall winning. With my piece being cut off a little earlier and with the music climaxing at a different point along with the scenes never actually showing the human force winning i think i have successfully changed the outcome opinion of the piece from, Warfare with Hope, to, Inevitable last stand defeat.



Another reason these clips were a good to edit together were the fact that they dont actually belong to a film, they are simply teasers to a film that doesnt exist and as such are perfect clips to edit as if noone has actually seen the end product these teasers or title sequences are portraying then the only concept of the film they are going to understand is that of the teaser, in which case i have edited and experimented with and hopefully changed peoples perspective of what the film to these trailers would be like.

Anything Else OUDF401 Related

A few other things that were included in the OUDF401 project that i found while checking if there was anything i missed from the module. I have included these to show i have done a little more research than only what i have posted up.

Social Media and Communication Lecture

The notes i took during the social media and communication lecture, this was a rather interesting lecture and related very much to us as it talked about Facebook and the communication age which we are all very much a part of.

I personally am not a big fan of facebook, i find its use a little limited to gossip, dont get me wrong it is very useful for making connections and arranging things but i find it is all a bit too superficial for my liking. I will long on maybe once every two months but dont want the fact that i dont really like superficial gossip to get in the way of opportunities that may arrise by making connections with people, which is why i will probably make a educational/connections version of my facebook account to make it a little more practical and useful.

*I had labeled this post OUDF401 it is now correctly labelled 402*

Visual Communication Lecture

My notes on the Visual communication lecture showing what i have learned about the subject.

Media Specificity Lecture

Notes i took during a talk about transmedia storytelling.

Communication Theory Lecture

My notes on the communication theory lecture. There are enough notes here to show that i understand the concept of signs signage and the meaning of signs communication and effectively commnicating and getting your point across on a way that you want your listener to understand.

Film Theory Lectures 1,2,3

Film Theory 1 Lecture Notes

From the notes i took in the first film theory lecture i have found things like, Hitchcock is a big figure in early film making (i have looked at him in more detail in another blog) he used things like the dolly zoom   (Hitchcock zoom) he created feelings of vertigo with mechanics new to films and he was interested a lot of the time in his films in creating shock to the audience, also suspense, and is also known for liking blondes playing characters in his films and them having a sexual or metaphoric meaning within them.

Other points were brought forward in the lecture which interested me like that birds are meant to be harbingers of doom, and are used in many of Hitchcocks films.



Film Theory 2 Lecture Notes

My notes from the second lecture show i understand things like the new wave of cinema were primarily in Britain and France, and were about things like life in paris and they used actors that were just normal people. I also understood the mechanics that were used in films like spaghetti westerns for example The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966), the mechanics used in this film were a good use of montage, cutting, use of eye shots, fragments of the body.






Film Theory Lecture 3

Film lecture 3 was about cinema and how films were considered 'not the art of scholars, but of illiterates' - Werner Herzog. It was about how cinemas became a social gathering rather than a quiet sensible place, especially in italy around the 1970s.

Postmodernism Lecture

From what i already understood of post modernism i have learnt a lot about the range and bigger picture of it all from this lecture, i now understand just how hard the subject is to categorise and that it is very hard to sum up in a simple definition when it covers such a broad variety of things, ideas, meanings, movements and opinions.

Simply put post modernism is the era after modernism, when people started to reject the ideas and principles about what a piece of art is and started to think more about what the meaning of art is and essentially is everything art if looked at in a different way. It led away from traditional oil on canvas paintings and anything typically like that, and instead tried to tell stories with the work being produced, the paintings became more of subject matter containing street life in paris or a busy bar scene or compositions that are meant to be similar to photographs (people half way out of the shot), also much work let the way the piece was composed to tell the story of the work, like the man on a balcony in paris painting by N.F. Karlins. 

In conclusion post modernism has always been a confusing subject for me and i have learned a confusing subject for most people who debate post modernism, as it does not have a sound basis for being described it is recognised as many things in one, movements, ideas and concepts and even though i know i will never fully understand postmodernism i feel i have come to understand more of it at least.

Mists of Pandaria Beta Test

Since I opted in for the Blizzard game Mists of Pandaria beta, I thought it would be a good idea to review what I thought of the game since I was accepted into the beta and got to test all of the new content or at least a portion of it that Blizzard had to offer.

I took a few screenshots while in the game and this is what I initially found.

Well it seems since my hard drive has broken, I have taken a screenshot from google to elaborate a little bit on.

This is the initial starting area of the beta and i found straight away that the game was completely over populated because clever blizzard decided to make 4 servers for about 3 million people, apart from the lag issues and overcrowding, the game was overly similar to that of the game already, there didn't seem to be any direct improvements that i could see so after a short 5 mins on the beta i decided to leave it there and do some work on my OUDF406 module, creating objects and textures for my environment. 

I think overall though that when the games comes out properly and a lot more of the issues that have been taken note of in the beta are fixed, then there will be opportunity for real feedback from a huge fan base to be presented and for blizzard to address these issues. 

How to Speed Paint a Dragon

I was told about a video on youtube about how to speed paint really well, since my classmates regarded this vid so highly i thought i would have a look at it since i always want to improve on my digital painting. I was actually surprised at how good the video actually was and it was what inspired me and helped me processwise work on my Diablo 3 artwork competition artwork. I feel i have learned a lot simply from this one video and have felt that looking at tutorials and lessons has taught me more than i had at first expected.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzoHhgrHrEg

Kill bill Review

Movie Info

I recently watched the movies kill bill and kill bill 2, i never used to like Tarantinos work but it has grown on me since i watched Resivour Dogs, and Pulp Fiction, one of my favourite films since seeing it, i really liked his style of filming and recently watched a clip on youtube of all the upwards shots used in all off Tarantinos films. It made me see how his style of filmmaking and useage of shots and tention in scenes can work really well. Below are reviews of the films which i found on rotten tomatoes, i think they are relevant and expresses the views which mostly i share.

Perhaps the most highly anticipated film of 2003, Kill Bill Vol. 1 marked the return of renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino after a six-year hiatus. Re-teaming the director with Uma Thurman for the first time since 1994's Pulp Fiction, the film was originally the first half of what was to be a three-hour-plus movie before being split into two films. Thurman stars as The Bride, one-fifth of a team of assassins called DiVAS. When The Bride opts to leave the outfit for a life of marital bliss, it doesn't sit well with her boss, Bill (David Carradine), so he has her former cohorts, played by Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen, show up at the nuptials, leaving behind a blood bath. Miraculously, The Bride survives a bullet to the head and, four years later, she sets out for revenge against her four assassins and their employer. The story is concluded in Kill Bill Vol. 2, released six months later. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

Quentin Tarantino's sprawling homage to action films of both the East and the West reaches its conclusion in this continuation of 2003's ultra-violent Kill Bill Vol. 1. Having dispatched several of her arch-enemies in the first film, The Bride (Uma Thurman) continues in Kill Bill Vol. 2 on her deadly pursuit of her former partners in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, who, in a furious assault, attempted to murder her and her unborn child on her wedding day. As The Bride faces off against allies-turned-nemeses Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), she flashes back to the day of her deadly wedding, and we learn of how she was recruited to join the DiVAS, her training under unforgiving martial arts master Pai Mei (Liu Chia-hui), and her relationship with Squad leader Bill (David Carradine), which changed from love to violent hatred. Originally planned as a single film, Kill Bill grew into an epic-scale two-part project totaling more than four hours in length; as with the first film, Kill Bill Vol. 2 includes appearances by genre-film icons Sonny Chiba, Michael Parks, Larry Bishop, and Sid Haig; Wu-Tang Clan producer and turntablist RZA and filmmaker and composer Robert Rodriguez both contributed to the musical score. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kill_bill_vol_2/

Unlimited Detail

Unlimited Detail is believed by many to be the one of, and possibly the most significant piece of technology of the decade.

Since unlimited detail is thought to be the most significant piece of technology of the decade, i thought it warranted a look at and post about. It doesn't really go in to much detail when explaining how these new graphics mechanics work but it does keep stressing the fact that 'look at how good and fast our graphics run compared to other stuff' shown in the comparison examples below.

It is best explained as follows:

Every time a new 3d graphics card or games console (Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation) is built, they make it more powerful in order to run more geometry (Put more objects on the screen and make them look more rounded). Games today still have a long way to go before they look like 3d movies (Shrek, Nemo, Toy story); billions are spent every year on R&D to make hardware more powerful. Unlimited Detail is a software algorithm that gives unlimited geometry. When we say “unlimited geometry” we really do mean it. It really is unlimited, infinite, endless power, for 3D graphics.
 

Most 3D graphics today are based on what’s called the polygon system; it’s a system that builds things out of little flat shapes called polygons. Games today all suffer from such problems as tree bases with only 6 sides or objects that are suppose to be round are hexagons. (See Fig 1.1 & Fig 1.2)

 

As computers increase their power, they will be able to have more of these little shapes, more shapes means more roundness and more objects on screen.

 

If we were to keep increasing computer power to make more polygons, and we were to make the polygons smaller to add more roundness, then in about 50 years time they would be so small that they would just be little dots, (think of like little floating atoms). When technology reaches this stage we now have true roundness and it is hoped that in about 50 year’s time we will have enough computing power to run these 3d 'atoms' in vast quantities. When this stage is reached, the graphics will be declared to be at “true realism standard” because they will be made of 3d atoms like our real world.

All of that was thought to be in the distant future, until a recent discovery was made:

It turns out there is a very, very different way to make 3D graphics, one that isn’t based on polygons, but can still import them, convert them and run them (thus making a compatible bridge between old and new technologies), we call this process the “Unlimited Detail algorithm”. (See fig 1.3)
 

 

Fig 1.1 showed a tree base from one of today’s games with 3 flat sides, Fig 1.3 shows a tree base made on Unlimited Detail with 300,000 flat sides, the polygon tree needs special high powered graphics cards and multi-core computers to run it.  The Unlimited Detail tree will run on anything from a PC to a mobile phone and no special graphics cards are needed. (See Fig 1.4)

Fig 1.4 shows some strange creatures with very complicated modeling, there are no straight or flat edges to be seen on them. Considering their high level models it is fair to say we could probably display about 4 of them on screen at once if you used today’s polygon system.(See Fig 1.5)

 

Here are thousands of them being displayed on an ordinary laptop, using only one core, no special 3D graphics hardware is being used, and it all runs in real-time.

 

How does it work?

If you have a background in the industry you know the above pictures are impossible. A computer can’t have unlimited power and it can’t process unlimited point cloud data because every time you process a point it must take up some processor time. But I assure you, it's real and it all works.

Unlimited Detail's method is very different to any 3D method that has been invented so far. The three current systems used in 3D graphics are ray tracing polygons and point clouds/voxels, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Polygons run fast but have poor geometry, ray-tracing and voxels have perfect geometry but run very slowly.

Unlimited Detail is a fourth system, which is more like a search algorithm than a 3D engine. It is best explained like this: if you had a word document and you went to the search tool and typed in a word like 'money' the search tool quickly searches for every place that word appeared in the document. Google and Bing are also search engines that go looking for things very quickly. Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm. We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small. The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen it doesn’t touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024*768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen. It has a few tricky things to work out, like: what objects are closest to the camera, what objects cover each other, how big should an object be as it gets further back. But all of this is done by a new sort of method that we call "mass connected processing". Mass connected processing is where  we have a way of processing masses of data at the same time and then applying the small changes to each part at the end.

The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software.

From reading all of the above I have a little more insight into how the system works, in my own words I would describe it as only showing the bare minimum on the screen that it has to show but without compromising on detail. This is a very clever system and even says that it is inspired by search engines such as google and the search feature in microsoft word. 

It is a very practical solution to creating more and more powerful hardware but with one large problem which I can foresee, I understand that having more detail in a game is never a bad thing but when it comes to huge scale games which have to scale down on detail to big up on game space there will be a problem with time, unless game developers develop a more dvanced mechanic for randomising terrain the amount of time consumed creating more detailed objects in a game will counteract the time saved by using this new system, overall I think this is breakthrough technology but im just saying there must be some factor which is a downside to this idea otherwise this tech would be sweeping over the game industry right now.