Week 10.

This week will be a continuation of our group work in progress. This week has been quite busy as we have taught ourself how to green screen, using the Chroma Key and also using motion path.

Here is our example of the sims green diamond. We achieved this by using still images of the sims diamond, then putting them side by side in the timeline then changing the speed to give the appearance that the diamond is spinning.

This image shows footage from Pong. In our original footage we had our protagonist running back and for, we then changed this to the prog becoming the 'ball' and curls up. In order for us to achieve this, we photoshopped this image and in fact it is two images with the layer of the protagonist covered. We then put this into final cut pro, where we will use motion path of our curled up protagonist that is shown in the previous blog.

For guitar hero, we filmed our protagonist in front of a blue screen. In final cut pro, we imported footage from the guitar hero game- the song 'Raining Blood' by Slayer as this is classed as an 'Expert' level within the game and thought it would be quite interesting to use. After importing the footage, we added the video filter, Chroma key so that it removed the blue screen. We then layered our guitar playing protagonist with the footage of guitar hero and then added a posterize effect to the protagonist so that to some extent it looked authentic of guitar hero. We also used the colour changer effect on guitar hero so that it was lighter and easier to see. Here is an example of the guitar hero footage without effects and our protagonist on the blue screen. The final edit will be shown within the finished video.

Within the mario 'level' we are incorporating found footage, which links Mario and Street fighter quite nicely as after 'mario' goes through the tunnel he comes up as street fighter. This works well as it is quite a fluid transition.

Week 9.

With only a few weeks left,  the project is a GO GO GO! This week I am really pleased that we have managed to collate all our graphics and sound clips we wish to use and also we had another shooting day which went really well. Below is also examples of work before and after discussions with group and tutors;

Here's the start of the process in replicating the DOOM bar;

Within Final Cut Pro, we will animate the bar so that the faces will change every so often.

This is the health bar from Street Fighter, we will animate this so that when Player 1 is hit by the Hadouken, the health depletes and the KO image will appear similar to the image shown below.

(the Hadouken we will use)

Here's an image manipulated through a timely process of importing/exporting numerous times due to lag in Flash. Below shows the main protagonist curled up to represent the ball in pong. Here you can see we manipulated the background so that it acted like a green screen. In final cut pro we will use the Chroma key so that we can incorporate our 'ball' to our footage ;

To achieve the 'spin', we nested the 300 odd png files and changed the speed in final cut pro to achieve the above clip. we nested the images so that it remained as 1 file within the timeline without any gaps. 

Whilst thinking about our project we are still in the process of how to creatively show our final project, today I came up with the idea of having a flash player embedded within a PSP interface where the user can press the buttons to start/pause/stop/<</>> and so forth. Below is a mock-up of how it will be realised;

From watching We Live in Public, I saw similarities to a site that hosts Little Sister which is a cctv drama and 24hr online surveillance soap (2000) which similarly as WLIP focuses on voyeuristic networking technology;

http://www.azapp.de/littlesister/

Week 8

During the MCS Leeds field trip, I visited the royal armouries . Within the 'peace' exhibition I came across examples of hacking;

The images below show objects made out of guns in an attempt to protest against guns and war;

This week we are working on making a taster of our project so we can visualize how it will eventually look and how it is going to work. We are hoping to use the motion path in final cut pro to direct the animations. This weekend, we are finishing the rest of the shots so that all the footage will be filmed and ready for editing. During the workshop this week, we constructed the replica doom health bar, we also began animating the graphics from each game. The next couple of weeks are going to be very busy but hopefully we will stay on target and not fall behind. This week I have been reading the following books which I'm finding very interesting and can see Wiener's theory of Cybernetics and the idea of feedback being integrated and recognizable within the everyday;

-Marshall, M. (1967) The medium is the massage. Penguin group: London.

What I found particularly interesting is the idea that the electricity circuit is an extension of the central nervous system. 

- Harkin,J. (2009) Cyburbia: The dangerous idea that's changing how we live and who we are. Little, Brown: UK.

  

I particularly found interesting the power struggle between technology and humans;

' ... most previous social theorists, include Wiener and Brand, saw technology and media as tools to be used by humans for their own purposes, McLuhan preferred to think of them as having become so much a part of ourselves that it was difficult to know who was in control. 'We shape our tools' said McLuhan 'and thereafter they shape us'... we are no longer masters of our media technology but slaves'.

Week 7

This week and the following week, my group and I are planning to get all the sound together for the individual games and also animate graphics in Flash. Having had feedback from the presentation, we have taken on board what has been said- we are planning on re-shooting next week as there are parts of the footage we have had further ideas about and that can be shot better. What was interesting when researching video games and theories we were able to relate theories of immediacy, remediation and immersive media for our project as ultimately our idea explores video gaming conventions and iconography through remediation into the video form. By intentionally using the video form, we are reiterating theories of immediacy and simulation within an ever-growing technologically advancing society. The games we have chosen reflect iconic moments  within video gaming history that, through technological innovation, has resulted in a shift towards immersive game play.

Whilst thinking about the theories that can be related to our project, the one that we found most fitting and imperative to the project was the idea of the blurring of realities and how this is most common in video-game play. What is interesting about video-games in particular is its move from non photo-realistic such as Pong to more immersive, photo-realistic gaming such as The Sims where the users sense of control is magnified. The suggestion that the gaming medium is a unique cultural form is reiterated in Kings’s argument that ‘there’s no other cultural medium that, like games, reinvents its own technical abilities every few years. New game technologies mean more depth, more complexity and more ways to play. Technology drives innovation’.

Further influencing our project was the theory of immediacy. In using the video form we intend our project to be fully immersive and as a group we made a decision to reject putting the video in a website format as the user would be far more aware of the interface and therefore be a participant of hypermediacy which we are trying to avoid as little as possible. As Bolter suggests, ‘‘The logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in a race car or standing on a mountaintop’- in our instance being the character/main protagonist within our representation on blurring realities.

The inspirations for our project was firstly the movie adapted version of the comic book, Scott Pilgrim vs the world which remediates gaming conventions into the video form. From looking at this particular screenshot from within the film,  it is just to say it is similar to our project it blurs reality with virtual reality, in this instance through the iconography of the ‘life’ image. The justification for our project to have a narrative is proposed through Giddings’ argument that ‘Films based on games and games based on films bring into focus the distinctiveness of the act of playing a game from other forms of screen media consumption. A sense of ‘being in’ the game is central to understanding the nature of player-game interaction and potentially, therefore a key element in the pleasure of digital gaming.

The second inspiration is from the film Existenz where the viewer along with the main protagonists are taken on a journey through to a ‘new world’ where the blurring of reality and virtual reality becomes apparent and even to the extent that the main progs and the viewer question which is which. This type of gaming is indeed very immersive and we chose Janet Murray’s explanation of the term as it is fitting to our project and apt towards the critical approach we are attempting to take- ‘Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality’.

Comparing our vision of Doom to the actual game footage examples.

Footage taken from shots (DOOM and PONG) - Working progress/ still issues with PONG and 

the recreation of this game.

Week 5/6

The presentation is closer than I first thought- well it's gone quite quickly! I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's working progress but I'm also quite nervous about presenting ours so fingers crossed it goes to plan! These 2 weeks, my group have been working on the presentation and bringing all the prep we have done to date together into a coherent PowerPoint as we felt this was the best way to present our idea and also give our presentation some visuals to look at whilst we explain our idea and thoughts.

Whilst looking over the footage we have shot to date, I realised that we don't need to heavily rely on Flash as I'd first thought i.e. not taking everything from a video game to make it recognizable. I wanted the 'look' to be subtle and recognizable through maybe one or two iconic factors of each game and not the whole interface. Like the example of Scott Pilgrim, the uses of video gaming iconography such as 'extra lives' etc replicate/ transform into a representation of reality to an extent without being too OTT or blurring with an actual video game. From doing research about game theory, to some extent there are many similarities between video and video-gaming, i.e. the emphasis on a narrative/ the restoration of the equilibrium.  I think video-gaming is very much personal as you indeed become the controller and character within the game (POV shots for example) you cannot help but become the first person rather than controlling through the third person which in fact is what you're actually doing- the third person being an avatar. Steven Poole in Game On: The history and culture of video games argues, ' a video game character is the game's star: the central figure that you control and, to some extent perhaps, become'.

We intended our project to have a narrative or have a point at least. Within our brief film we wanted to portray and emphasis  the blurring of reality and virtual reality through the idea that maybe the game world IS the world. Arguably, narratives have a beginning and an ending- in which video games also adhere to and an interesting middle part. To some extent, reality follows the same structure, beginning- birth and ending- death yet we play games or involve our selves with similar media to escape reality and unlike games our lives aren't as dramatic or continuously interesting. Video-gaming is play, as Eugene Provenzo JR  argues in video games: a popular culture phenomenon, 'we can't stop 'playing' life when we get bored with it. This matter of having a beginning and endings is also found in fictional narratives in all media...'.


Here's some tidbits  of working progress and tests;

Week 4

Started thinking about the project in terms of theories and how what theories could be applied to our project that we have studied so far this year. I suggested to my group that the following are addressed within our project;

-Simulation
-Remediation
-Immediacy vs Hypermediacy ( I think that by our project being within the video form- it takes away the awareness  (the hypermediacy) where the user is far more immersed and therefore reflects far more on the 'blurring of reality and virtual reality' ) Also that video is structured as immersive media.

Worked on a brief outline of the proposal this week;

Our project explores video gaming conventions and iconography through remediation into the video form. By intentionally using the video form, we are reiterating theories of immediacy and simulation within an ever-growing technologically advancing society. The games we have chosen reflect iconic moments  within video gaming history that, through technological innovation, has resulted in a shift towards immersive game play.

Continued with filming this week, it went well. Took a few production shots;

Our take on Pong

Our 'real-life' Mario

Week 3.

Started filming this week which was quite enjoyable and fun and didn't feel like a task like other uni work. Not much to say on this front as only just started so as a group were getting a feel for what we wanted to do/achieve. Started reading books that focus on video games;

Video games : a popular culture phenomenon by Berger, Arthur Asa

Game on : the history and culture of videogames / edited by Lucien King by King, Lucien


Joystick nation : how videogames gobbled our money, won our hearts, and rewired our minds by Herz, J. C


The video game theory reader / edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron by Wolf, Mark J.P


Understanding digital games / edited by Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce by Rutter, Jason


What Mark Pesce states in Game On: the history and culture of video games reiterates what we are trying to achieve for our group project. With the advancement of technology, games in particular 'the boundaries between the real world and the imaginary realm of electronic play have already begun to blur'. 

Reading around the topic of video games, the term 'immersion' kept coming up, I really liked the description given in The Video Game Theory Reader; 'Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality'.

Found this video online, found it interesting as it is taking an existing game and gives it a unique spin- a remediated spin,yet it is still  recognizable as PONG despite not being from a birds eye view, this again is what we as a group are trying to achieve in being creative and thinking of ways to portray the games we've used other than being stereotypical and unimaginative. We wanted to take the conventions of individual games that make them both iconic and recognizable and place them within reality to reinforce Mark Pesce's idea of the real world and the imaginary realm beginning to blur (See above).

Whilst reading around the subject of video games, I learnt that due to technological advancement Pac-Man was the first character led game which then later influenced the making of Donkey Kong in 1981. Having characters within the games suggest that the game must need a narrative. The most common narrative used within gaming is kidnapping. Take for example, Mario, Princess Peach is kidnapped. The user does not question why she has been kidnapped just that she needs to be rescued- relating to Propp's character theory of a heroic character, a damsel in distress and enemies for examples. I quite liked the below link as it shows the users engaging with the video games and forming opinions on fictional characters, again that suggests video gaming is immersive.

http://games.uk.msn.com/gaming/photos/photos.aspx?cp-documentid=156037560.

At present, still working on a proposal so that it is both coherent and interesting. Resuming filming on Tuesday. Not feeling as confident as before, as it is quite frustrating when your creativity is limited because of resources and time available. Hopefully my view will change soon. 

Picture of my mushrooms I made for the Mario scene :)