February 29, 2004
Assignment 3: Interface - Beyond the Button
The project description for assignment 3 has been posted in the Projects section
And an article that may be of interest from SwitchJournal
Slipping the Interface
Strategies of art making and Lynn Hershman
Jennifer Henderson
Interface - n. a surface that lies between two parts of matter or space and forms their common boundary.
Interface - "the controls or the contact surface of a program" [1]
Agency - 1. action, power, means; instrumentality. 2. the business of any person, firm, etc. empowered to act for another 3. the business office or district of such a person, firm, etc.
Identity - 1. the condition or fact of being the same in all qualities under consideration; sameness; oneness. 2. a) the condition or fact of being some specific person or thing; individuality. b) the condition of being the same as something or someone assumed, described, or claimed.
Role - 1. a part, or character, that an actor plays in a performance 2. a function or office assumed by someone: as in advisory role.
February 28, 2004
Reconstruction
The class site is undergoing some reconstruction work this weekend. The forum can be accessed directly here:
The next assignment will be posted here by Sunday.
February 25, 2004
Tonight's Lecture Notes Online
I've put tonight's lecture notes up here in .pdf format.
The Ambient Collage assignment is due today and should be uploaded to the dropbox by midnight tonight.
February 20, 2004
Project Upload Guidelines
Detailed guidelines on how to name, compress and upload your projects to the class dropbox is available here in PDF format. Please follow these guidelines carefully as projects that do not will not be able to be reviewed
February 19, 2004
Details
Here is the example source (both the movie and the castLib) for anyone who wants to look it over.
One detail I forgot to mention last night has to do with the video clips used in the example. These are Flash embedded video files and they have some very cool uses and don't require that Quicktime (or other extension or application like RealPlayer) be installed on the user's machine. For more details check out these articles,
Also here is a shareware .zip utility for Mac OS X for anyone who has had problems using Stuff it (or doesn't have it). MacZipIt
February 18, 2004
Class Tonight 02/18
Tonight's class will be a hands on "experiment" - what I was starting with last week when we ran out of time.
Here's the experiment: working in teams I am going to ask you to recreate the example at the link below in either Flash or Director, depending on which tool you wish to focus on. The example is pretty simple (and lame) but it should be a challenge to recreate it just by viewing it and using the source assets provided at the link below.
The teams will be made up of a person experienced in the authoring tool and one or more people who are new to it. The experienced person should determine how the example was constructed and guide their partner(s) in constructing it. The less experienced people should do the actual construction.
The goal here is to make sure everyone is comfortable working with the timeline/score, and using the various asset types. We will also discuss distribution options and publish this exercise as a standalone application and as web content for playback within a browser.
Guidelines
Stage size: 300 x 600 pixels
Frame Rate: 30 fps
Total Frames: 470 (score/main timeline)
(These guidelines apply to both Flash and Director)
The Example (2.5 mb - so don't try on a dialup connection!)
The Source (8.5 mb - no need to download this until class)
February 16, 2004
Macromedia Boston User Group
MMBUG is a good resource for learning about Macromedia specific products, along with other multimedia and web technologies through their monthly meetings. They also run a couple of very low traffic mailing lists for local job ads and event announcements.
The next MMBUG meeting is February 24th and will focus on ActionScript 2.0
iKatun: reimaginings
I haven't looked very deeply at this project yet but it has a wonderful information layering. Check out the link below.
Ambient Collage
am·bi·ent adj.
Surrounding; encircling: ambient sound; ambient air.
[Latin ambins, ambient- present participle of ambre, to surround : amb-, ambi-, around]
col·lage n.
An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.
A work, such as a literary piece, composed of both borrowed and original material.
The art of creating such compositions.
An assemblage of diverse elements: a collage of conflicting memories.
[French, from coller, to glue, from colle, glue, from Vulgar Latin *colla, from Greek kolla.]
February 15, 2004
Welcome
Ok - this is working. This front section uses a great open source blog solution called "Moveable Type" - which will make it easier to add news and other timely content here as well as a place to field comments. I've also added a bulletin board type forum in the Class Forum section. This is a change from past classes where we used a listserv group (mailing list) for support questions and discussions. The reason for the change is so that common questions can be responded to and available to the entire class.
It should be quite clear that I don't do web development... the site is quite ugly, I agree. But is a work in progress-so you should check back often to watch it evolve into a thing of beauty...