Art and Technology
Blah.
I went to the gym again yesterday…
Then I ate half a pizza.
I’m going again today.
Hope it turns out better.
I’ve also gotta write a story tonight for my elective tomorrow. Not excited for that, as I’m super-exhausted today for some reason, despite getting enough sleep. Can’t find a song to cheer me up, and it seems that an extra large coffee wouldn’t help either.
Oh well. Not that I want to be away from Kim, but I really want the weekend to come. I’m in some kind of weird funk today.
Bit.Trip Beat is kind of cool. I haven’t gotten very far but I’m not very good. Could have been that I was slightly buzzed from our green-cider-cause-we-don’t-like-beer night for St. Patties. I’ve never liked chiptune style music, but it just seems to be freaking awesome in this game. More to come on this I guess?
Now… to work on print layouts. Whee!
Busy Week – Things I’m Working On…
So, this last week has been pretty busy. Last weekend my Valentines’ plans fizzled out because Kim’s grandma passed out and wound up in the hospital. Kim and I only saw eachother for a few hours, and we were both really tired, so we had a Valentine’s day nap. It was nice. Turns out her grandma had to get a pacemaker put in, and she went in for surgery Sunday night, but she was pretty much out the next day and up and about as usual. A little scary, but I’m glad she’s okay… and that through a magical medical miracle she’ll be okay for years to come!
Tuesday at work was really busy, a lot of people asked me for help with the suites. I got through it, although I didn’t get to work on a lot of work… instead, I wound up working on a vector trace for a bit because it was something I could easily leave and come back to. Kim took me out for dinner at our usual Thai place in the evening, and I enjoyed it very much. It was a nice break from going there with everyone else, and it was good to get out on our own.
Wednesday morning, Project Management was cancelled… and we almost didn’t go until we found out from Samina that our groups had showed up anyways. By the time we got there, our groups were gone… but we worked on some stuff for Aviva’s Print class later in the day. I played some e-mail tag with one of my group members, and then we ended up meeting in the first few minutes of Aviva’s class and delegated our workload. I fired off e-mails to everyone so that they’d all have it in writing, and they’re supposed to have all their parts to me tomorrow. Only one person has sent their part so far. We’re to meet Monday night after Combustion class at 7pm. Hopefully that turns out.
Aviva’s class had us working on fictional brochures for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Mine’s pretty simple so far, but Samina seems to like what I have. I’m not too far into it yet though.
In the evening, Kim and I got down to business on our first real Advanced ActionScripting project. We had to make a tutorial on how to make a document class. I made mine in a .pdf file. I’ll tack it onto the end of this post. I found it to be a good project because I had to go through both actually doing it, and documenting how it’s done as well as how all the different parts of the code work. It was only supposed to be 1-2 pages, but I managed to flesh mine out to 6 plus title page when I added in images and made it easy to use. Overall, an enjoyable assignment I think!
Thursday morning, we had to do a debate in Art and Technology on whether or not the internet isolates people. Our side (Kim, myself, two others) was that it does in fact not isolate people. Our side won by vote of the rest of the class… and not only did we have some good arguments, but the other side seemed very wishy-washy. Their argument was basically “the internet does connect people, and allows you to talk to people all over the world, but it isolates us because there isn’t human contact and stuff”. Two of their group members were prepared, and the other two had no idea they were going that day because they hadn’t checked their Seneca WebMail in a week. How can you go a week without checking it? Silliness.
We spent much of Thursday afternoon finishing up our tutorials, and then we headed off to Flash. We just covered different ways to load different things, and a lot of people shoved off from the class early to “Ninja Pub 12″, a gathering of Digital Media Arts students that happens periodically, and enables networking among the students, as well as the ability to meet other people working in the industry. After Tim was done his talk, we headed there, but it was very loud and everyone was already pretty drunk at that point, and we’d had a long day, so we only stayed about 10 minutes before we headed home.
Friday we went to Motion Graphics and Jasmine was showing us how to put together crazy visualizations in AfterEffects. That looked neat, but I’m still not sure I like AfterEffects as a program all that much. Video has never been my cup of tea, AfterEffects is a little heavy on my poor computer, and I’m just not that into its’ interface. I prefers me Flash.
Anyways, I’m off to celebrate a friend’s birthday soon… I promised myself I’d keep this short because I’ve gotta grab a shower and call another friend to arrange a ride so… that’s all, folks. Toodles.
How to Make a Document Class Using ActionScript 3 and Flash
P.S. – Jet Set Radio’s soundtrack has got me through the week. Kudos to the crazies who scratched and mixed that.
Rants.
So I may stray away from (read: will most likely not cover) Digital Media topics in this post. Well, I will cover some stuff that really REALLY annoyed me yesterday, incidentally involving a combination of my own stupidity and Macs (they still suck, but not just due to my own stupidity), as well as a presentation I did today and then becoming a little pissed off at the other group that covered the same topic. So here goes. It’s gonna be long.
Before I start… Sharp Cheddar Kraft Dinner is delicious.
So… yesterday started out fairly normal, other than Kim and I woke up late. Things started looking up though, when we got an e-mail from our Production Management teacher that he’d be late for class too. We ended up getting to class a bit later than the teacher, but he’d not yet started. This turned out to be the day we’d not been anticipating, as it was the day he was splitting us up into groups that were not of our choosing. Now, I know it’s “what the industry is like” and all that jazz, but, from my experience in college, Kim and I work extremely well together, and when Samina is added to the mix, we can plough through projects like nothing and our individual strengths come into play very well when combined. Now, in addition to this… a lot of people in our classes seem to not really care as much about their marks, deadlines, and quality of work as we do. So we were extremely upset about getting split into these groups. I think I lucked out in my group, as I got mixed with a couple of people I know… but the same didn’t really apply to Kim and Samina. I know it’s not a terribly huge project that we have to work on or anything, but the teacher is going to be doing the same thing for the final, which is not only a pitch like this project, it is the actual completed project as well. I just wish he’d let us pick our group. Although it may be an attempt at simulating a real work environment, it is not the same. In a real work environment, people are being paid to care about what they’re doing, and if you end up picking up the slack of someone not pulling their weight… well… there will be ramifications for that person. Not so much in this situation. I’d rather work with a team of my choosing.
Next, we had to head off to Aviva’s Intro to Print class and finish up our business cards. I was pretty tired, grumpy, and hungry by this point, and the fact that I had to get some work done didn’t help. I ended up having some technical issues (Illustrator not having the fonts I needed on the Macs in the classroom) when I needed to submit the assignment and making an extremely small modification to my project required me to fire up my laptop which I’d just shut down not a minute before. On a side note, the Macs in the classrooms are terrible. They’re supposedly top of the line, but they can’t seem to properly load a webpage half the time, whether it’s in Firefox or Safari. That’s annoying. Also I will take the time now to mention that I HATE THE STUPID HIDDEN GARBAGE FILES THAT MACS CREATE ON MY USB KEY WHEN I INSERT IT INTO THE MACHINE OR OPEN ANY FILES IN A FOLDER ON IT. I also hate when clueless Mac users think that Windows is at fault for creating the invisible files when they put their drive into a REAL computer. Anyways, I got all of that sorted out after a couple of annoying screw-ups. Being tired and hungry didn’t help. Also the stress of having to do a midterm didn’t help either.
Before the midterm, I decided to grab something to eat. I went to the cafeteria with Kim. I picked out a caesar salad and a coffee, as I figured that’d be good before a test. I grabbed some fries to take back to Samina as she’d mentioned a desire for greasy food, and Kim got a bagel. We’ve never, EVER been stopped for taking food into the computing commons. They do have signs up but nobody ever follows them (classrooms also apply to this). We walked into the commons with the food, and this random woman not wearing any kind of uniform or whatever stopped us and told us to not bring food, and said it’s not allowed anywhere in the commons, although the signs up say not past that certain point. Kim held onto the food outside the commons, and I went in to grab my stuff for the test which was over with Samina at the far end. I’d say the commons was at 75% of its’ capacity, and of that 75%, 60% had food. Just from my walkthrough. I was absolutely pissed off. Instead of stopping responsible students from bringing in a little salad, why couldn’t this woman be going after the people already there goofing off with their friends and who were a little more at risk for spilling shit on their keyboards? After Kim snuck the food meant for her and Samina into the commons in my backpack, I headed off for my midterm. It turned out that the Seneca Test Centre also does not allow food, even if the testee (? (lol, testes!)) promised not to slop their caesar dressing on the test papers. I headed off to an empty classroom to finish up my salad. I was pretty peeved at this point, and wanted to listen to some music to calm myself while I ate, but I’d left my headphones with Kim in my backpack. As I ate the salad, I became more frustrated at the fact that the croutons were soggy and mushy.
The midterm went surprisingly well as compared to the rest of the day. The questions weren’t terribly difficult, and I finished in about 50 minutes. Heading back to the commons, I found that Samina had left ten minutes or so prior, and Kim hard at work on our presentation (which we did today!). I joined her, and we got an hour or so of straight work done on it, which was good, because it was kind of last minute. After a while, one of the commons employees asked us to move across the commons for no reason. We decided to head home instead of relocating pointlessly. It was pouring rain and we got soaked. Kim moreso than me. When we got home, we continued our work on the project. Kim was using the wrong shade of black on the slides, and I was accidentally saving over slides I’d already finished. FFFFFFFFFFFFF comes to mind. Anyways, the presentation got finished, and that was the end of frustration for the day.
Today we got up, made it to school early, printed our paper, and had our presentation prepared. We were ready at the beginning of class except for the hightlighting of what we wanted to mention from the paper, so we went… 5th-ish I think? We were wired on coffee and I was a little jittery during my part, and Kim stumbled a bit, but overall I think it was an informative, enjoyable, and concise presentation. The class really enjoyed Crayon Physics, which, if you know me, I’ve been mentioning/showing it to just about everybody. It turns out the teacher even plays it on her iPod Touch/iPhone/whichever she has, I forget.
The other presentations were fairly alright. Most of them had fairly interesting topics and had information presented well. I had a problem with two of the projects though. First one, minor complaint. The topic was comparing the stories of movies and tv shows to those of video games. First problem, they said that Pokemon was a game based on a TV show. WRONG. DO YOUR RESEARCH. THE SHOW IS BASED ON THE GAME. Next problem. Someone said X-Men games were based off the movies, but technically X-Men is based off a comic book so the group shot that down… but THEN they said that Dragonball games are based off the TV show which is partially true, but DRAGONBALL WAS ORIGINALLY A COMIC AND THEY DIDN’T SHOOT THAT DOWN. GOD. I don’t even like Dragonball that much but it’s pretty mainstream and most people that know Dragonball OR EVEN A QUICK WIKIPEDIA VISIT would point you in the right direction. If you’re doing a presentation and want to be informative, at least research your topic, because if you’re not into it all that well, chances are you’re going to look like a tool in front of people that know.
Second presentation that pissed me off – the one that was the same topic as ours. Firstly, it seemed like the people making the presentation picked the topic because it was video games, and not because they were actually interested in and followed the topic on the side. They definitely came across as the “hardcore” gamer type of guys, and although it was nice to hear about it sort of from their point of view, the way they went about it seemed all wrong to me. FIRST OF ALL, a lot of the games they mentioned and references they cited came right out of MY TOPIC over at the Escapist Magazine boards. Here is a short list out of things in that topic they used:
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – they mentioned that they recently found out about this game and stated what the posters that mentioned it had learned from it.
FarCry2 – they mentioned about weapons smuggling and African politics, almost exactly in those words. They didn’t flesh out this part of their presentation much.
Daniel Lloyd’s Video, Video Games and Tangential Learning – was mentioned in the topic, and it was the first I’d ever heard of the video. These guys used it in their presentation, to bring the length up to about 25 minutes (limit was supposed to be 5-10, Kim and I went almost 15)
I know this isn’t a large list or anything, but it just bugs me that they found the forum, read the topic, didn’t bother to check the profile page of the user who created it, and it didn’t occur to them that the original poster who mentioned doing the presentation this week MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THEIR CLASS. I confronted them after class, and asked if they’d heard of The Escapist or its’ board and had seen my topic on there. When they both replied no, I said how it was a strange coincidence that they’d used the games mentioned in the topic without providing any additional information that wasn’t mentioned in the topic. I had caught them in their lie and they tried to weasel their way out of it. It just bugs me that I went to the trouble of asking an intellectual gaming community for suggestions, and they went ahead and used my efforts to prolong their project and make it look better.
The second thing that bothered me about their project was that they just made up some bogus facts about the Wii, a video game system they obviously know nothing about as they seem to love Grand Theft Auto so much. They said that the Wii was concieved as a toy for children. This is an incorrect “fact”. The Wii was concieved to appeal to a wider demographic, yes, but that does not mean only children. One of the very first games developed and released for the Wii was Red Steel, and is definitely not aimed at children. The presenters said that at first the only games out for it were kiddy games, and that the pack-in games that come with it were learning experiences. The only pack-in that has ever come with the Wii is Wii Sports, which I would hardly call educational. There were 21 launch titles for the Wii, which included such mature or more realistic titles as Call of Duty 3, Red Steel, GT Pro Circuit, Need for Speed: Carbon, and Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. The majority of these games were ports from other consoles or PC, but Red Steel was originally developed and only for Wii. There. Shot that one down too. People frustrate me.
Anyways, I’m done ranting, and my attentions are wanted elsewhere. That felt good.
Woot. An Update.
So I haven’t updated in a good two weeks or so. There’s a lot that’s happened… at least in terms of school.
We’ve been doing some print layouts for our Intro to Print classes… for our Wednesday portion we did a 2-page spread in Illustrator. Super Paper Mario seemed like a good subject. It was well-recieved by the teacher when she critiqued it, and I’d say it was one of the better ones in the class. I will upload it with this post in .pdf format. We also did a one page layout in InDesign for our Monday class. I did it on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It would look pretty good, if it weren’t for the fact that the project specs called for an outline on an image and a drop shadow on another, so I don’t think I’ll post it. Ugh.
In Combustion class, we’ve been working on doing some lightsaber stuff… which is kind of fun, not terribly difficult, but lame as I’ve never really liked Star Wars. Also we’re not allowed to make purple lightsabers, as our teacher, Gavin, hates the colour. Lamesauce.
I went back to work for this semester on Tuesday, which will now be the day of the week that I work. It wasn’t terribly busy, and I played Konami Krazy Racers for GBA all morning, and then browsed the internet and played DS for most of the afternoon. The help requests were plentiful later in the day.
In Project Management we’ve been giving the new teacher an idea of where we are in terms of Flash skills by recreating a sample banner ad he made. I’d say mine was extremely close to what his was. We’re to bring in our best work to class this coming Wednesday. I’m trying to convince Kim that we should bring in the Racoon site we made last semester, because it’s awesome. I don’t know what other work I’d really want to show. Maybe my frame-by-frame animation from semester 2.
In my Art and Technology elective on Thursday mornings, I’m to participate in a debate three weeks from now about whether or not the internet isolates people or connects them. Kim and I are on the “connects them” argument side. I’ve thought of some arguments but so far I haven’t really written anything down. We also have a project due in two weeks’ time. It’s a research paper and presentation, and the topic we picked to do was “Computer Games that teach us something useful”. I’m particularly excited to show off Crayon Physics Deluxe and World of Goo to a class full of kids that probably think of video games as Halo and Grand Theft Auto. I’d like some more games to show off though… so I’ll have to come up with something. I can’t think of something right off the top of my head, but I’ll talk to my friends Nate, Ben and Cindy and I’m sure one of them will suggest something. My friend Mike might also know of something. I’d best get on it.
In ActionScripting class, our late Thursday night class (5:10 – 8:50 that often goes overtime is considered a late night class!) we’ve been learning AS3 from the ground up. I’m actually beginning to grasp AS3. Really. Because before, the thought of scripting HORRIFIED me and I’m pretty good at timeline animation and tweening so I sort of steered more toward that. I talked to our teacher, Tim Willison of Oddly Studios, and he said that there is room for animators in the industry and he’d show us a way to create a workflow between an animator and scripter that works well for him. That kind of relieved me. I hope I keep picking up ActionScript, because it’d be great if I could actually be good at it. Good career asset I figure.
And finally, our AfterEffects class on Friday has had us dabbling in simple AfterEffects projects, beginning with Slideshows and applying one filter or so to things and making a short animation. AfterEffects seems exciting. As Kim says, if Photoshop, Combustion and Flash had a baby, it’d be AfterEffects. I guess with the marriage of raster graphics, video compositing and keyframed timeline animation in the same program, it makes sense. I don’t know if it’s my cup of tea though, and I also doubt my computer’s ability to run it properly after I messed around in it for a while. I made a 10 second long animation, and it could only render like 4-5 seconds of it before erasing what it had already rendered. I had to actually output the render to a file to see what it looked like. I think my problem was that my image was too big. I’ll try it with a smaller image later. Also what frustrated me about AfterEffects was the fact that I can’t seem to figure out how to save to legacy formats… i.e. saving for CS3 out of CS4. Basically, anything I make in class I cannot look at on my laptop unless I install CS4. Which I don’t want to do because I don’t want to risk losing my only working install of CS3. Also I don’t like CS4… yet? So ha.
In terms of the rest of my life, things are going quite well. I’ve been into Pokemon LeafGreen which I bought used from EB for like $12. It’s pretty cheap for re-living my childhood with pretty graphics. I turned 21 on the 18th, so happy belated birthday to me, I guess. I got Eats, Shoots and Leaves from Kim, which I’ve wanted for a long time. I also got a book about famous left-handed people from Sonja. I love being left-handed. We get special status. 
My mom also got me a cookbook for college students (which I won’t be for much longer…(!)) and a left-handed planner that’s bound on the right side instead of the left so that… you don’t have to deal with annoying binding when you’re trying to write something. People thought I was crazy when I started a sketchbook from the back. I guess one could say that my birthday was left-hand themed. Well, just two gifts, but… yeah. Ben got me Pineapple Express, which I’ve already seen twice now… but I suppose if I’m bored I can see it again and watch the extras or something. I can’t wait until my flashcard for DS (Ben’s (late) Christmas gift (they were sold out)) arrives in the mail though. That should be awesome.
Anyways, if I remember anything else to write about, I’ll certainly post it.
Calendar
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