Fill the Void

So the last couple of days has been somewhat frustrating and very stressful. We’re now doing our Experience Technology module that aims to give us an insight in what you can accomplish with technology, bringing digital media into the physical world.

Our group is in the middle of making a mind game out of an RFID kit. What we have to work with is an RFID-reader and some RFID tags that are suppose to communicate with an flash applictation.

The game will be a so called “Simon Says” game, that is based on the player getting a combination on the screen and is then to repeat it in the correct order. The game is called Fill the Void.

The application part has been buging us all week. That’s what happens when you put five designers together that rather argue about what the color our showcase should be, rather than dealing with the technical stuff.
No but seriously it feels like every thing is fall into place and that we’re gonna make the deadline with great results. I’m finally starting to get the hang of ActionScript and the game interface getting closer to finished day by day.

Presentation Technique

This morning started out with the whole class discussing our common goals and expectations on the upcoming years at Hyper Island. We had already made a draft of this during the team building a few weeks ago, so today we wrote down some more specific examples of what we wanted to achieve as a class.
Afterwards there were no specific assignment so some of us (including me) started a design team to work on the front-end of the class Industry Database for the Human Interaction module.
We came up with some nice propositions of which all of them probably will be used to give the user the opportunity of picking a theme of their taste.
We’ll have a talk with the programmer of the back-end this Friday and we’ll see what to come out of it.

After this I rushed to another project. Some Business Management students had asked us to help the out making a short motion video for one of their clients. This video is to describe the service of which the client offers. Together we came up with a style and storyboard of how to best illustrate this.
Tomorrow we’ll gather once more to make the storyboard even more detailed and hopefully start out with the animation itself.

Time is Rushing – Good Times Rollin

Even though I’ve embraced the blog phenomena I find it really hard finding time blogging. I put a lot of effort in my posts, making sure to keep it interesting for you as a reader and formulate in the best possible manner.
That’s on of the reasons I haven’t been posting on a daily basis, when ever I have a few minutes to spare on blogging that isn’t enough. I need at least 20-30 minutes thinking it all through.

With that said  here’s a summarize of what I’ve been up to the last couple of days.

Starting with friday when we held our presentation of our work on the Information Society module.
Everything with this presentation went according to plan. Me and Josefin did the talking and Jonas and Johanna answered questions afterwards.
We received  some very positive feedback, both from our fellow classmates and co-workers, but also form the people representing the industry. 
The quote:
“This is what a good presentation should be like” 
pretty much covers it.

This week has literally been a vivid one, I’m talking about the Motion Week module. This aims to give us some insight when it comes to animation. 
We’ve been having workshops in After Effects all week with two former Hyper Island students who now works as professional motion graphic designers. I had previous experience working with After Effects which gave me a jump start to learn more in depth skills.

We were given our first assignment monday afternoon and today we presented it for all the class. The task was to make a 30 sek animation constructed with cube shapes. We decided early on to make a compilation with 7.5 seconds each. This way all of us had the chance to explore the software in our own phase and the ability to chose our own ambition level.
All of made a great effort and I’m very happy with the result. My part in this project was to connect and make transitions between all of our individual compositions.
I made this with a camera flying through 3D space. Watch it below and please do comment.
 

Today we go a new assignment to make a 15 second video on our own. So far I’ve made a storyboard and some illustrations. I can also promise you that it will include a whale!

Finishing-Up!

Again I’m sorry for not updating on a daily basis. But does that really matter when there’s so much work that it makes the days seams like one single long day?

Our hard work is starting to payoff and you can expect a killer presentation tomorrow!

I’m also looking forward to hear all the other groups presentations. Everybody has put so much effort in this module so it will be great to see what they’ve come up with.

Yesterday we had two lectures Tony Högkvist (form the agency Perfect Fools) and Jonathan Briggs (one of the founders of Hyper Island). I’ll update this post tomorrow with more information about them, right now I’m really in the need of a good nights sleep

So good night for now!

New Week

New week and of course I forgot to write a post last Friday. To bad because it was a groundbreaking day that I’ll tell you about in short below:
What happened was that we finally have enough material/information to have come up with an overall topic for our presentation the upcoming Thursday. Bad news considering the information part is that I’ve got an answer from Fuseproject, telling me their press realise staff wont be back until Wednesday, which probably will be to late to include it in our presentation. I’m not to worried about it though, since we have enough sources to support our final outcome.

What we’ve been up to today is that we’ve been dividing the work between the four of us and started to structure the presentation (which bits and pieces we want to include etc.).

We’ve set the deadline for the structure by tomorrow morning and I’m depending on it to be finished in order to be able to start working on the graphics and animation, that I’ll be making using Flash.

The graphics will be taking the form of pictograph’s. The reason being that they take very little time to make, plus that they combined with motion get the message through in a very direct and pedagogic way. We want to avoid using text as much as possible.
I’m very excited about this identity for our presentation and would love to show you some samples of what I’ve done so far. But that is to remain a secret until after Thursday, so be patient.

Process Follow-up (28/8)

The main thing that happend today was that the was gathered with our Co-worker Malin Distner and discussed how the teamwork within our group had worked so far.
Questions such as: How decisions had been made? Was anyone more of a leader? What had we achieved? What could we do better? etc.
We realised that there where no leader in particular and decisionshad had been made through discussion and argumentation. This approach have worked out fine for us so far but we considered the possibility that the process might had been soother if we had chosen a leader and also entitled the other group members to make our roles in the group more clear.
We concluded the meeting by giving ourself and our co-workers feed-back. I found the feed back I received spot on, and I will think about what the others think I can do better. I also got feed-back on what I had done well, where the overall feelings was that I had been the one taking responsibility for the final result and that I had made sure to keep the group on the right track
Oh, I forgot to mention that we made a lot of calls to different agencies yesterday,  as well as today. Some of them asked us to mail the questions and hit us back with answers as soon as possible.
I’m very disappointed with most of the agencies we’ve tried to get in touch with. Since we haven’t gotten any replies at all. You would think that they at  least could tell us that they doesn’t want answer and why.
Yet we haven’t lost faith and are convinced we’ll come up with something great in the end!

The Day After Yesterday

Couldn’t write yesterday partly because my internet connection (correction: my neighbors W-LAN) wouldn’t work, but mainly because of private issues that I don’t feel belong here.  It got me thinking about starting another blog focusing on personal thoughts and ideas other than my work on Hyper Island
Any who…

Yesterday we had a really interesting lecture with Trend Analysis, Carina Sjödin. Listening to hear talking about her passion keeping updated on the world around us really motivated me on our current task.

A topic she brought up that really struck a cord with me was on the subject of signals. It was about what signals a message sends, rather than the content of the matter.
These signals can be then be interpret and related to other subjects beyond your imagination. For example I fond an article about a Polar Bear documentary and categorised it under Politics.
curious? read it below.

Article:
Bara hälften av alla isbjörnsungar överlever sina första levnadsår.
I filmen “Realm of the Great White Bear” får vi följa en isbjörn och hennes två ungar under en två år lång arktisk odyssé.
-Expreesen

Article Description:
Only half of all the polar bear cobs survives to reach mature age. In the movie “Realm of the Great White Bear” we get glimpse of a two year long observation of a polar bear and her two cubs.

In this article some examples of why the polar bear have a tough upbringing is mentioned, however the gravest danger isn’t.
The biggest threat is ironically ours as well. It concerns the melting ice, due to global warming. Throughout this article this issue is never mentioned. Most likely because it’s a story of it own and very hard to just mention without losing focus of the bears situation.
Nevertheless it’s scary how humans tend to avoid vital topics such as this one. One reason of the matter being that the ice is our only reserve of fresh water, but also that it will cause the water level to rise rapidly causing entire counties to flood.

The work continues…

Today our group have done a bit of in depth research and then bombarded agencies with interview requests. All of the agencies we’ve tried to get in touch with so far are in completely different timezones than Sweden, which means that when it’s daytime here it’s night overseas. Hopefully we’ve got some answers by tomorrow and can start making phone calls by dawn.

In favor of the research we now have a better idea of which direction we’re heading and what we want to include in our 15 minute presentation, due to be held on Thursday next week.
I got especially excited about a company called Fuseproject, and in particular one of their projects called “One Laptop Per Child” that is providing free laptops to children in development countries.

One Laptop Per Child

Who knows, if I’m really lucky I might be talking with the founder tomorrow.

Information Society

Today.. ore yesterday to be exact, we where introduced to our next module called Information Society.
This module aims to increase our interest and understanding for how the media industry is constantly changing and with it the methods of how things are done. We are also encouraged to explore which trends we can see today, as well as thinking about what the future might hold when it comes to new ways of communicating.

Lecture Paul Collins

Lecture Paul Collins, currently Interactive Creative Director at the agency of Åkerstam Holst, gave us some valuable information concerning the industry he know. Along with some really good examples of campaigns he underlined the importance of how idea, concept and analyzing your target group plays a huge part in why these campaigns become successful.

After having asked Paul some questions the process continued within our groups (consisting of four pupils in each group). We started by disguising the overall subject and then made a brief structure of how things should be done.

Tomorrow/today morning we’ll start of by gathering the entire class to make sure we have a common understanding considering the given task

-Sleep tight