Boris’ Blog

I didn’t notice that it got pushed down so far on the page, so heres a link to the post

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=453

Action Seq 1

In a world where cars fall from the sky. A group of unlikely heroes will save the world from immanent destruction. Special forces: “I love blowing things up”. Medic: “Here’s a medpack for you! Don’t you love flowers?” Sniper “Hahaha, die noob” Support: “Need ammo? Eat Hot Lead!” Assault “Shoot first! Ask questions later!”

Action Seq 2

Nothing matters. In the end you die. It doesn’t matter how f**ked up life is, or how funny it is to blow up a bunch of people, because in the end, its all over.

Action sequences for SYNOPSIS 1

Show Special forces blowing things up

Introduce Medic. Show an example of how eccentric he is. “Flowers”

Close up on medic dancing

Show Support, throwing ammunition, cut to machine gun firing.

Sniper needs to be destroying a “nubcaek”.

Show close up of nubcaek getting shot up

Assault kit shooting m203 grenade at unsuspecting victim

Assault moves up to the victim and says along the lines of “That was a civilian? Didn’t look like  a civilian to me!”

Synopsis 2

I’m not going out there! (Show battle tanks and explosions outside)

Talk about past war experiences

Cut to a room with MEC characters talking

Cut back to outside

Show flashback of destruction

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Treatment

Treatment

Life is futile. Life has little point and you die in the end. Battlefield men kill to the point where life is war, and war is hell. But that’s life.

Setting: Strike at Karkand Song: I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire by Ink Spots

Start off with a Special Forces (SF) USMC blowing up a friendly Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) and then blowing up a M1 Abrams tank. SF goes to say “I’m gonna blow things up”. He blows up his Radar and his UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) trailer, crippling the USMC base. Special Forces then says witty remark about getting back at society.

In the very vehicle that he destroyed, out of hate for the world, SF gets in a new Tank and begins to destroy the world. SF destroys enemy tank. More wonton destruction. SF has compassion for the dead MEC (Middle Eastern Coalition) soldier. He reflects gently at the corpse: “It’s a cruel, cruel world!”, signifying that it is just better off being dead anyway.

Bouncy, playful, and eccentric and all knowing medic, throws medic packs at the enemy team and his own. His compassion is hollow, because in his heart he knows “He’s gonna die anyway!”. The medic goes a little mad, after he is shot, and mumbles about giving away more med packs, and loving flowers. The same medic tries to go revive a soldier on the MEC that has died. It is a medic’s duty to help the wounded. But it’s too late. He was trying to resuscitate a dead man anyway.

“Battlefield 2: The Movie” The movie that which is life.

An atom bomb goes off, and the smoke cloud is the ashes of our civilization. The USMC force, has been devastated, along with the MEC force. Meanwhile, not too far away, is more of the same behavior.

Setting: Sharqi Peninsula Song: “Blinded by the light” by Manfred Man

Countdown to destruction.

The MEC Support walks with a thermal fade to meet a MEC Assault sitting in a smoky room, and complains “It’s smoky in here.” The MEC Assault laughs at the MEC support. The MEC Support asks the Assault if he knows what’s going on outside. The MEC Assault knows, and that is why he is inside, in his safe room, safe for the moment, in the middle of a battlefield.

Cut to Battle scene literally outside of the safe house, from an aerial surveillance camera perspective. Tank shots and the sounds screaming men, fill the scene. The main emphasis of the video is vocalized: “Life is war… War is hell… But that’s life.”

Support MEC reflects upon today’s happenings. He recounts the story of his day. The story of his life: In a non chalant tone, he states “Today I killed three men. One of which was my own flesh and blood”. Three USMC soldiers are shown by an exploding barrel, and two are killed, one becomes a casualty. A MEC soldier is shooting at the Support soldier, attempting to commit fratricide for unsaid reasons. But the support soldier sorrowfully has to dispatch his former comrade, for it is survival of the fittest.

The scene cuts back to the safe house, where both men are trapped and know they will die when they go outside. Exiting out of the house will result in certain death. But they are masters of their own pathetic fate, and go to roof and detonate explosives. They take their fate in their own hands. With the explosion, their bodies reach astonishing heights. Only in death, do they attain higher ground. But they end up dead on dirt in the end.

Transmissions is cut, a Vodnik explodes. An empty pier is all that remains.

Transmission is recut, onto a sunset view of a Vodnik Truck. Lion King Sunrise Song plays. It is the dawn of a new day. But the survival instinct takes over, and the Vodnik immediately begins to attack a nearby soldier, and toys with his life. The soldier withstands a direct hit from the Vodnik, but is miraculously saved. But for what avail? His fleeing gets him nowhere, as the Vodnik catches up in the end, and crushes his futile life. The world turns upside down for a moment, and the Vodnik driver sneers at the worthlessness of the fallen soldier’s insignificant existence. He philosophizes: “Your life is worthless!” And continues on his path of destruction “Our Existence means nothing”. Cut to black.

Then a camera pan from bottom of a tall building pans to the top, where many MEC soldiers are perched and are ready to jump. The two USMC soldiers down below, are crushed by the weight and force of these bodies. In midair, the MEC are heard, questioning the reason for this massive suicide. “What do we fight for?” and in desperation “What is our purpose?”. The massive suicide ends, and fades to blackness, where the last sad line of the movie reemphasizes the whole movie. “There is no purpose”.

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Please write a concise but specific final piece of writing that revisits your video manifesto and connects it to your final video project or in light of the video work you have done for the class this semester.  This document should be between the equivalent of .5 and 1 page.

Upon revisiting my video manifesto, I can now see just how much expectations I have had about video, and can see just how far along the medium has come along for myself. I made the points that video should be teaching people, teaching people new and exciting ideas about life, the universe and everything. I also made the point that video is a great medium of communication that is much better than still picture media. The final point I made was that with today’s attention spans, a videographer must work to get his or her message across to the people in a short and concise way.

I have a new respect for the video making process: Editing, scripting, angles, found footage, rendering quality, sound issues, audio syncing, and bad acting. These are only some of the obstacles that one will encounter in the process, and it takes tremendous patience, time, and effort to make a quality video. I have come a long way in editing, shot choice, and story creation since my first video, and now as I more frequently do more subsequent revisions, the quality of video can reflect the amount of time put into it. Some of my best works took me the least time to edit, but that is also because it was among the shortest pieces. As the videos got longer, the editing took longer and more content needed to be reviewed. However, using skills acquired from previous editing, and watching my classmates video’s, I was able to get more ideas on how to make the longer videos better.

Sometimes, while trying to convey a specific message, it was extremely difficult to do so with the footage one had, and sometimes loss of a solid foundation occurred, and video quality would deteriorate. Sometimes, the sheer fatigue of hours of editing, and trying to get past all of the technical issues, including audio sync, improper video rendering, and codec issues causing the video to become entirely pink, took away from the quality of a video. A similar analogy is the way that a Super Hero video game rarely used to turn out well: Most of the resources were spent on licensing the character, and that took a lot of money of the programming and storyline and game play development elements of the game. But if not for previous meditation and peer review, it would be difficult to tell what was really being improved.

“Video has every advantage over still picture media” and using video to convey a message is using a powerful tool that can turn out well like “To Vomit and to Run” or “Lost in the woods”. But if you aren’t careful, and your goal for the video changes, 12+ hours of work can look quite unbalanced. The right amount of extra tinkering can make all the difference.

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LINKS

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FINAL VIDEO–NOTE IF DOWNLOAD DOES NOT START, RIGHT CLICK AND CLICK SAVE TARGET AS

First Cut

Rough Draft

VIDEO MANIFESTO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX_eHuY7RU8&feature=channel

TERRY JACKS: SEASONS IN THE SUN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfm-17pu6SQ&NR=1

Boris Sadkhin

Reflection On Final Project

INFO 390

The final project for the class was a culmination of much of the work done throughout the whole class. The weekly readings and the theory discussions were preparation for the final theory presentation in our project. The project brought out elements from the sequential art project, and incorporated some of the themes from the video project. Both of these mediums were present on the website, and were used to convey the message we saw in the theory.

As soon as we read the title “From Cyber drama to game-story”, our group was interested in the article. We research it online, and after reading it, we still were interested, and picked the article. But we weren’t sure exactly where to start, so then we basically assigned the readings to ourselves, like the readings that are due every week, and assigned discussion questions. The next class session, we came together and shared our ideas with each other. We now came to a bit of a standstill. We weren’t sure exactly what we needed to accomplish, or how to accomplish it. We discussed the possible mediums that we could use, and somehow came upon creating a website. I immediately volunteered my web space and bandwidth, and offered to get a CMS up and running. But we still weren’t sure what we had to do. We spoke with you, and you suggested looking at a shockwave based website for inspiration. The shockwave based website was a very creepy and interactive piece, and it gave us at least some idea of how to be interactive. We decided that we would split up the work based on the very different points we brought up in our discussion questions, and then put them all on the website to show different aspects of the Janet Murray article.

After class, I went home and spent a few hours tinkering with my web server. I was having problems with the virtual host not being correctly assigned, and then eventually had to wait three hours before the change was updated over the complete internet. I created an SQL database with my webhosting provider, and then uploaded an installation of the Content Management System (CMS) called e107. I then edited some configuration files to link the database to the e107 installation, and then setup user privileges and accounts for my group members. I then proceeded to try to install some plug-ins, including a tooltip JavaScript script, and Coppermine image gallery. I had originally envisioned creating pop up tooltips for certain terms, specifically for definitions, but I was having difficulties integrating it, because I did not know how to modify the php required for making custom e107 pages. So the workaround was to create multiple sub pages and manually linking the pages back to referring page- time consuming, but it worked. The Image gallery was intended to be my replacement for giving my group mates FTP access, and an easy way to allow them to upload images and store them on my web server. However, no one ended up actually using it, and ended up using Image shack while I used FTP.

Back in class, we had met up again, and I showed my group mates the website I put up, and an early version of my “every day is an algorithm “ sequential presentation. I gave them the credentials to a custom admin account I created for them, and showed them the basic layout on the website: where to go to create custom pages, how to upload to coppermine, etc. Paul seemed comfortable using it, but I needed to make sure that they both could demonstrate that they could create pages. Paul created a page and linked it to the mains splash page I created, but Nichol was having a bit of trouble. I explained to her how to edit basic HTML, including how to insert images and how to use the <img src=”img.*”> and how to use the insert/embed media/images button on the wysiwyg (What you see is what you get) editor. Once I had shown her and seen that she could reproduce uploading and linking images and pages, I felt comfortable with letting my group mates loose, and away we went, creating web pages and images and linking them.

I had originally had difficulty expanding all of my points from the few paragraphs that I had, but I kept re-reading the Janet Murray article, and the rebuttals, and decided to start with the rebuttals. After reading the rebuttals, I understood Janet Murrays article more, and what it was trying to accomplish vs the complaints of the ripostes, and understood why all of the authors held their own valid points. Janet Murray was establishing the video game story to lean more towards the traditional narrative, while the other authors argued that it wasn’t doing the genre justice, to consider games and game stories merely narratives. From this I understood the multilayered facet of the game story, being a culmination and a combination of the player’s actions, the plot, the programming, the interaction, the essentially endless combinations of slight variations in game play, and the fact that a video game can exist without an actual plot. I attempted to show some of these facets through mini blurbs, interactive flash game examples, and multiple pages of reflection, extrapolations, and defining of variables.

I started my section of the website with a definition of variables, and an interactive “Every day is a story” anecdote with internet cats being the main actors. On page 9, I gave the user a choice for a bit of interaction, and randomness, to show how a path can change, and an attempt to make the anecdote more effective than if it was a completely linear path. At the end of the story, the user is given a chance to “adventure again” and then a blurb about the multi-layered aspect of games, and two examples of games. The first game was TETRIS, in which there is no real story, and the second, was asteroids, which also had no story, but I had fabricated one, which almost gave it a real plot. The fabricated story was at the bottom of the flash game and read “You, the starship commander, must command your highly advanced space craft to save the universe from the oncoming slaughter of evil rocks and alien craft,
You, are the universe’s last remaining hope. Good Luck, and Light Speed.”

The next section of the website contained a blurb about infinity versus finity. Along with an explanation , I added an infinitely interactive loop of art, and a book that ended. I also then created a “thoughts” page that reflected upon the previous notions brought up on the rest of the pages, and a further “Stories in games” section, with examples of different games that were really the same thing. On that page, I intended to show how easily the story of a game can be modified, based on simply editing the presentational text or the layout or color scheme, or weapons, or extra features on games that were all basically the same thing. I ended with a riposte by Brian Loyalle and described and reflected upon what he was saying in his paragraph, and that was the end of my part of the website.

Overall, with all the group members contributing, I feel that we did a good job of presenting a sizeable introduction to the topic of game story, but that the topic can certainly be presented across many more pages, and still have new subtopics being brought up.

http://final.handstandwarrior.com/e107

1) Stencil Activity

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=97

2) Sequential Art

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=214

3) Audio

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=321

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=336

4) Video

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/?p=399

http://blog.handstandwarrior.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/roughdraft.mpg

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Story Vs Narrative
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Unlike the Traditional Story, Games are based upon the player, influencing the courses of action.

One of the biggest problems about describing stories and games in the same context, is terminology.
It’s best to decide on, and agree on terminology, before analyzing arguments for or against anything!
Define Your Variables!

What is a STORY/NARRATIVE?
It is ANYTHING that is told / recounted
Usually, something in the form of linked events, a series of happenings, accounts.

A story is the plot.
A story is also more than the plot. A story is the characters, the dialog,
Narratives, ie, Books, Stories, Magazines are Linear

What is a game?
It is User-Interactive.
NON-Linear!
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What is the game-story?

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Superman, the Book is not equal to Superman, the Game.

A game may have a story, but that story is the progress you make.
A game may have a story, but that story may be the PLOT.
A game may have a story, but that story may be superficial.

Check this out.
Its the same game.
But its different.
Is it different games?

(Open in new windows)
Arkanoid
Javanoid
http://bulltricker.free.fr/USversion/javagames/play-brick-breaker-breakout-game-3/breakout-3-brick-breaker-arcade.htm ” target=”_blank”>Bricker Breaker

What if it was the EXACT same game, but only with different models, like vampire heads, and an introduction story that is slightly different?!?

Example:

Year 2021: Your Mission: to destroy all the aliens

Year 3021: Your Mission: to destroy all the robot vampires.

Everyday is a story. Every move you make is an algorithm.

Stories are stories.
TV Shows are stories.
Your daily routine is a story.

“In our discussion here, game-story means the story-rich new gaming formats that are proliferating in digital formats: the hero-driven video game, the atmospheric first person shooter, the genre-focused role-playing game, the character-focused simulation. All of these are certainly more storylike than, say, checkers. But, as Celia Pearce has pointed out, not more storylike than chess or Monopoly. Games are always stories, even abstract games such as checkers or Tetris, which are about winning and losing, casting the player as the opponent-battling or environment-battling hero.” Janet Murray

So are all games always stories?
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares!

Stories have just one branch.
Games have many branches? Don’t believe me? Try clicking on the kitty below and decide if its a game or a story for yourself. Do you interact with stories? Can you change the path of how the story goes, and still have it make sense?

“Sure! Just flip to random pages!, thats interactivity and story path change!”
That’s nonsense.

A day in the life of kitty:

Kitty sleeps!

(Click the image to proceed)

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Do you ever get stuck in a story? Do you ever read to a point, and something in the story prevents you from going on?

NO! <—(Click, opens in new window)

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Does a game tell a story? Or is the game the story itself?
Or is the game a narrative, with the sub story being the way you play it?
Or is the game not a narrative, and the actions that you choose are the story.

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Story Vs Narrative
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Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite
manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits
of representation and to achieve the real

1) What is the closest form of media to real life? Would it need to encompass every single sense? If a virtual reality experience covered every sense, what would really then distinguish it from real life? How could this affect one’s view of reality?

It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation. We are
not claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather arguing that at this
extended historical moment, all curFent media function as remediators
and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well.

Television can and does refashion itself to resemble the World Wide Web © p. 189, and film
can and does incorporate and attempt to contain computer graphics
within its own linear form. © p. 153 No medium, it seems, can now
function independently and establish its own separate and purified
space of cultural meaning.

2) IN what ways do media mimic each other? Is the most superior media today the World Wide Web, a total encompassment of video, sound and still images?

3) How often do people not notice the form that media comes in. Many watch TV or see a picture in a magazine and judge the object as the object, rather than a representation of the object. Does the way something is presented ever get in the way how it is presented? Are there ways to present an idea that just make it seem artificial and create a disconnect between the audience and the message it is trying to portray?

Info 390

Film Project

Overall, the group seemed satisfied with the results of the project. We had started off unsure about really any elements about the project; the form and the content were up in the air. At first, we pictured a documentary type film involving talking to people about the underground tunnels between a few buildings on the east side of the Quad. We weren’t quite sure about the argument or who or what we were representing, so we took a class period to just walk around the tunnels for close to an hour. We simply scoped out the place, and snooped around. We entered through the Chemistry Annex and walked through the underground tunnels, along the pipes, to our destination: Roger Adams Lab.

During the walk, we were overwhelmed by the creepy ambience of the tunnels. Random clicks and pops, bangs, thuds, metal clanging, and hissing were pervasive throughout much of the walk. A nerdy looking girl and an angry looking professor were among the only souls we saw down there. The professor walked around with a sour look on his face, and was pushing a noisy metal cart, in a zombielike fashion, through the tunnels. Upon entering the basement/storage room of Roger Adams Lab, we found a huge amount of old computer supplies, boxes, radiators, and various other discarded equipments. The hallway was full of junk and locked doors. A milk carton from what seemed to be the 1970’s sat on a table, covered in dust so thick it was hairy.

After exploring these underground regions, we hoped that we would find people to interview and scrape together something from the things they said, if we didn’t think of a script or prompts. However, when we came back a few days later, armed this time with cameras and this time charged by the aura of the creepiness of the place, we took a different angle. Nobody was in the tunnels to interview and we needed footage. We wanted to capture the creepiness of the tunnels and I began to film various knobs and gauges that emitted a hissing sound at the beginning of the tunnels. I wasn’t sure what angle to pick, but I simply took the camera and started walking down the halls. I decided to throw in some footsteps in case we wanted to extract the sounds. I walked down the hallway and decided to sneak around the first corner. I continued to progress a sneaking angle up until the first room and the room to the stairs. I showed the group the footage, and they liked it, so I handed over the camera, and let my group members get some footage on their own. Soon, we had 10-30 minutes of raw footage across the cameras.

On the first day of editing, there seemed to be little consensus on how to start editing, so I took the video editing skills I learned for another class and showed them to my group. I told them the process of how I work: Watch the complete unedited footage, take notes of scenes I want to take down, and then storyboard and edit. We watched the raw footage and then I chopped out parts on my laptop. I showed them the “fade” transition, which from my experience is one of the best transitions there are. After I had worked something out we could all follow, we split up and the rest of the group edited outside of class. When we had come back to class again, we used the time to discuss the music choices, the background sounds, and our talking. We spent a lot of time editing out our voices from the video, as well as cutting out scenes that were too choppy or too irrelevant. Once I had heard the music selection “Grisly Reminder” by Midnight Syndicate, I instantly thought of the horror classic: Pyscho. We grabbed the audio from the shower scene of the movie and used it to end the movie.

Overall, after getting past the initial difficulties of group logistics, such as workload distribution and unequal skill levels regarding different stages of the film development progress, we were able to create a peace that was highly different from the styles of the rest of the class, and were able to combine all of the groups visions into a single piece that we all can claim ownership to. The initial angle of the underground tunnels changed, but the original concept of using them stayed as a very important part of the envisioning and inspiration for the final product.

LINK IS STILL PENDING BC OF UL