For my final project for Bob Appleton, I decided to re-create the game that was handed into Brian Lesser for flash 4. The original game I made featured a Bee as the main character, or “avatar”. In the new version for my final Appleton Assignment, I have decided to stick with my OJ theme and make the character a nice carton of Orange Juice.

I think the game turned out really cute, considering the fact that I have limited flash skills and the idea of creating an interactive environment scared the living shit out of me.

You can play it here.
It’s hosted on a third party site, so it’s fairly slow to load, but that’s what it’s going to have to be like until I can get my FTP software working. (Or until I remember to fix it while I’m at Ryerson. Durr)

For this project Pierre wanted us to create a “Visual Metaphor” out of objects that we combine. One of the examples that we looked at was Picasso’s bull’s head, made out of a bicycle seat and handlebars. As a reference I looked at the surrealist movement. Our only requirement was that we have a minimum of two elements that when assembled become a metaphor.

I originally wanted to take a bunch of objects and then turn them into a spinal cord, but for some reason this idea didn’t stick with me for too long. I wanted to do something a little less obvious, and not so “scene”. One night I was lying awake in my bed looking up at my ceiling fan, and it was casting a really interesting shadow. It looked like a tutu. So that was my jumping off point. I vectored a ceiling fan in photoshop and then added different objects to create the head arms and legs of the “dancer”.

The skirt and hips are the fan, the head is made out of the shape of a table lamp, the arms are deer antlers, which Pierre thought was really funny for some reason. “What made you think to use antlers??” He said. I didn’t want to break his illusion of my creativity, so I didn’t tell him how popular the whole antler thing is right now. I told him it just “popped into my head”. Oh Pierre. The legs are daisies, which is the part that I think I like the best. They’re just so floppy and cute. Not like a dancer at all, but for some reason it still looks really graceful and fitting. The images below are all shrinky for some reason. They don’t look good.

But still, I really like how this turned out.

Okay, so we’ve started with the hearts. They are very tedious and we’re not quite sure weather or not they are going to work. We’re following the instructions as best we can, but they’re not super clear. Oh well, if this guy can do it, we can do it… right?

Brianne and Jess went to Creatron and grabbed all of the stuff that we need. About a million LED’s and a few soldering iron mishaps later, we have a few of the hearts started, and one is completed. The completed one is only “complete” in the sense that the heart has been formed. It hasn’t been hooked up to the arduino yet or anything. It still looks pretty good though.

The hearts are in different stages right now, so I thought it would be a good idea to take some pictures of them all together, to compare them side by side.

For bad web design, I have chosen Dollarama.

Do I really need to say anything about this? My first gipe happened as soon as the page started to load “what? I can’t skip this flash?” Imagine my surprise when the whole website WAS the flash. What? No store listing? No phone numbers? I realize that “everything is a dollar” and they don’t need to list prices or anything, but I was trying to find the Dollarama closest to me and unfortunately their website offers no way to do that… or much of anything. There are so many of these stores popping up all over the place, you’d think they’d have an ACTUAL website!

For good web design, I have chosen Facebook.

I know it might not seem like a good choice for “good web design” but something that I think is more important than anything on the web is user friendly interfaces. I think that facebook comes second only to google when it comes to user friendly-ness. The controls are simple, buttons lead to where they are supposed to and the user interface of your own personal profile is almost 100% customizable. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the different sections into the place where you want it to go. If it’s not supposed to go there, it snapps back to it’s original position. If you don’t load it up with all kinds of ridiculous third party add-on’s, it’s simplicity at it’s best… which is important on a social networking site with so many users.

So, I’ve worked 60 hours in 4 days.
I has monies now.

I’m doing this project kind of early because I’m not going to be in class the week that it’s due. I’ll be working at the Toronto Art Expo because I’m desperate for cash. I know school is important, but I can’t go to school if I’m homeless, so work it is!

For my interactivity without computers I was thinking about doing a lot of different things, and I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do. I developed 3 different games based off of the classic cootie-catcher, but I didn’t really want to go with any of them. What I did like about those projects was that they were so simple. I LOVE working with paper. Nothing is more simple and clean and crisp than paper. It’s something that I really focus on in my own personal work, and now that I was trying to think of something really simple to do for this project, it’s where I immediately turned.

In the end, I ended up going with paper dolls. The interactive part of the project isn’t just playing with the dolls, it’s making the decisions on how you are going to create the doll. What kind of body shape will it have? What kind of hair? Will it have hair, or will the hair be an accessory that can be changed? What will it’s clothes look like? After asking yourself all of these questions, you get to actively make them happen.

You can view the full assignment here.

Okay, so Jess and Brianne have also been searching around for stuff that we can do to the helmets that we are actually capable of. We found a really amazing tutorial on instructables that we think would be really cute and also really impressive. It’s an arduino charliplexed heart, which sounds very intimidating.

If we can get around this guys kind of messy instructions, I think we’ll be okay for this. We were thinking that we could do this on the one helmet instead of the rainbow LED’s on the side. Originally we were thinking that we could get a rainbow set up going, and maybe use the arduino to program it to work like a waveform based on the music around you so that you could wear it out to the club and be amazing. We quickly realized that this is not even in the grasp of our imaginary superhuman selves, so we gave it up for something we think is simpler.

I really hope that all of this helmet stuff goes according to plan, because it could be so fun once it’s done. Also, once I’ve got the experience of making something like this under my belt, I will most definitely be attempting to make a very authentic Daft Punk Helmet for my Halloween costume this year. I figure I’ll (maybe) have the time to spend on it in the summer. Imagine how sweet it would be if I made up two of the costumes and we could go out dancing on Halloween? We could be almost as amazing as these girls.

Here’s a look at the video for the heart we think we might replace the rainbow with.

I just found this video on Youtube of a really amazing home made Daft Punk Helmet. This makes me really really jealous and angry because I know I’m not capable of anything even close to this. Boo.

So, it’s finally reading week. I’m probably going to be spending this time working on my processing painting for David. Whenever it’s done I’ll make sure that I post pictures, because so far it looks really good I think. Basically what I’m doing is I’ve made a sketch in processing, (when I say “made” I mean took somebody elses really amazing processing sketch and modified it to do what I wanted it to do) and then took a screen cap of it. Then I projected it onto a giant canvas and I’m painting the output from the sketch. I think it’s pretty, and I needed art for my walls so. I know this was last semester, but I really loved processing. It was a really great class and I had a lot of fun in it. Also a giant plus is that the textbook was ACTUALLY helpful in figuring out how to do stuff; this is very uncommon. (I hate textbooks)

So yes, other than that I think during reading week I’ll be working on my project for Norm White. I’m thinking that we’re going to try and make some kind of Daft Punk inspired helmets.

These guys are the best. So, I know this is probably way out of my league but we’re going to try and make something that kind of resembles these helmets. I don’t know anything about vacuum forming or anything like that, so they will probably be made out of old motorcycle or baseball helmets. Also I know they won’t be pretty, I’m thinking that they will probably just look like some kind of wire-y blink-y mess on a helmet. (Which, you have to admit, is still pretty cool).

I’ll post some more updates about this Daft Punk venture when we’re further along with it.