Handin

Handed my dissertation in today. We got there over an hour before the office opened which gave the staff there a bit of a smile. It was all a bit of an anti-climax really considering all of the work I’ve put into it. Still that’s another deadline gone – just the project left.

Who Begat Who: The link between hacking and Open Source


It’s a wrap

We’ve now finished our short film and we’re pretty pleased with the end result. So pleased that we’re even thinking of doing more! Having 2D characters within a 3D environment was quite a challenge in the end but I think we managed to pull it off. All of the animation, lighting and effects were done within Unreal Tournament as was our intention from the very beginning. The only things that weren’t were the images which were made using Photoshop and sticking the individual scenes and soundtrack together was done using Premier.

You can see the end result by clicking on the link below and if you fancy having a play with our set, you can download that as well.

Watch “Once Upon A Time” 8.9MB

Download set

Download critique


Slight change of plan

After the excitement of Camden, we’ve decided to make a slight change and make hood and her boyfriend indie kids. We’re still having red so that hood stands out but we’ve had a thought on the sound track and have a couple of tunes in mind whose lyrics would fit in really well with the film. For example, the Gossip’s “Standing in the way of control” has a nice ambiguity about it coz you don’t know if it’s about the boyfriend controlling the girl or if she is controlling him by knowing that he will freak out by her turning up late. So anyway, as the tunes are of an indie nature, it would make sense if the people were the same. Hopefully it won’t take us too much time to sort them out.


The way in

So we’ve just finished the entrance to Libertine, the club where hood meets her wolf. The neon sign looks pretty good even if I do say so myself. But the thing I’m really pleased with is getting the red light to spill out onto the pavement.

Entrance to Libertine, our club


Testing

I’ve now finished the basic platform for phone2fone and have moved into testing phase. The browser that comes with Sony Ericsson phones seems to be behaving itself. The layout of each of the pages, the accesskeys and the way the pages render are all as I was expecting. Even the Openwave browser that some phones (Samsung for example) have seems to be working but the Nokia browser is acting a bit strange. The accesskeys don’t work which is a bit of a pain but not the end of the world. The main problem I’ve got with it is it seems to insist on selecting the first radio button on loading a page. Whilst this might not appear to be a big problem, it does make searching all files available for swapping difficult coz the file type “MP3” is always selected. I was gonna add some browser checks but as you can’t specify “unchecked” with radio buttons that seems a pointless exercise so I’m gonna add something about it in the help section for that page. I’ve also noticed that with the numbering system within individual pages, the “back to the main menu” option is never 0 and I can’t see a reason why – yet another Nokia quirk.

So, back to the testing. I’ve got the basic file swapping to work and the rejecting of requests although I might change it to put in a reason. I have noticed that the signal strength needs to be up to maximum for the uploading of large videos to work. I appreciate that to get to the server, the file has to go over radio waves and thru’ the phone network before getting to the phone2fone server but that doesn’t stop me from being ever so slightly vexed about it 🙂

I’m hoping to get this first lot of testing finished in the next couple of days before finishing off the game and then starting on the recycle version which is gonna be similar to freecycle. After that, it’s the admin area and the main “normal” website to do. Sleep is so over rated.


Once upon a time…

No, I’m not gonna tell you a story, that’s gonna be the title to our film. Coz it’s loosely based on a fairy tale we thought it would be appropriate.


In da club

Today has all been about making the club where little red riding hood meets her bloke. As it’s underground, gone for an industrial look as you’ll see below. There’s an entrance off to the right, the bar in the forground and the DJ booth and dance floor in the background. I’ve been playing about with lighting, trying to get the right shadows and also to try and make the people dancing not too prominent. Coz all the action with hood and the boyfriend is likely to happen near the bar, we don’t want the dancers to distract the viewers. I think there’s still a bit of work to be done with that plus the people I’ve used are only temporary. Also, I need to put in the stairs from the ground floor entrance otherwise the first step in will be quite a big one 🙂

View from behind the bar of the club


A small town

Been busy working on the set of our film and the street has now turned into a small town. We’ve added more streets complete with pavements and lights and it’s starting to look pretty good as you “fly” around it. I’m now working on the club and Jamie is sorting out the characters. As usual with us, we don’t have a name for our film. I don’t think our usual style of adding the word “thing” will work this time.

Our small town in UT2004


Street scene update

We’ve now got the street scene finished. We’ve sorted out the night sky, added street lights, played about with the lighting to make it look like night and have added another street at the end to give the impression of a ‘T’ junction. Unfortunately when we export the scene, it’s not coming out as a standard size. So far we’ve not been able to find the relevant setting to fix this. It’s not the end of the world but resizing it in Final Cut doesn’t make it look quite so good. On the plus side though, we’ve found a setting that lets us export it in letterbox-widescreen mode which is nice.

Screen dump of our street scene

Widescreen version of our street scene


New domain

Late last week was an open day and I volunteered to give a short demo of phone2fone. We met a couple of days before to run thru stuff and it was at that meeting that I was told that I needed a logo and 100-150 words summary about it. I was gonna do the whole identity thing over Easter but managed to quickly knock up a logo for it.

So that got me thinking about identity sooner than I had intended. I’ve now gone and got a domain for it, made a couple of small changes to the original logo to web2 it up a bit and built a website for it. Well, when I say built, I mean there’s a holding page for it with the blurb that I compiled for the open day. Even though it needed doing, it has distracted me from the last remaining bits of development…especially as moving it over to the new domain has meant that it’s broke!! What do they say about fixing stuff that ain’t broken??

Anyway, you can see the holding page at www.phone2fone.co.uk.