Hypercompendia

Just found that Mark Marino at Writer Response Theory got to play with the moviemaking facilities at xtranormal a couple days before me. Here’s his video as well as his thoughts on the program.

Steve Ersinghaus has been working on a poem in Tinderbox and has added stretchtext features using jQuery within the boxes. Read about the process he’s been willing to share.

I could get hooked on this.

I’ve been looking to get back into animation and the folks at Xtranormal have a real fun and easy way to dabble a bit. Here’s my first attempt:

If you can’t get it to work here, try going here to the site.

It’s a real easy, simple yet fun way to introduce yourself to animation before getting involved in Alice or Panda or Flash.

Nice to see that the new media program at the local Tunxis CC is going forward with a hyperdrama class being offered online in Spring of ’10. It will be run by the well known writer and producer Charles Deemer.

One of my favorite pieces from the work of Steve Ersinghaus, the haunting, interactive Stoning Field has been chosen as a featured selection by The Oregon Literary Review. (Follow the Hypermedia link to Film and Video Arts to Editors' Picks.)

In playing around with some of the games lately, it’s come to me that it’s something I’d really love to try my hand at creating. The likelihood of making it a career is less than nil, but the self satisfaction in the learning of the mechanics of animation may be enough to make it worthwhile.

This piece is obviously dated by the outfit the girl is wearing, and though I hadn’t written down the year, by the signature of “Susann” I can tell that it was done during the 1965 identity crisis where I changed the spelling of my name, though I wanted to change to my middle name of Marie and found it too much of a hassle.

Once upon a time, more than writing, I loved art. Maybe I can find some time to revive that love.

Well I played this game, Heileen, for a few minutes, and the characters are usually static against a static background that regularly is changed after a bit of dialogue. Here’s a screenshot of my venture:

The story goes on through conversation and eventually a choice comes up as in the two boxes at the bottom of the screen (forgive my Dashboard, couldn’t get the image otherwise). Again, it’s a click one or the other choice to follow a new direction in the game.

Now the blurb on the site for this game (there are a few others) states:

Another game to check out and play with is Heileen. I downloaded the demo and will report briefly on it once I’ve had a chance to play, but my initial thoughts just from the screenshots (image) recalls my days of paper dolls when the character had one pose alone and just changed clothes (with paper tabs!) and could be placed against different backgrounds; gives me the feeling of cartooning:

Got into Storytron a couple years ago and was reminded of it again. There’s a story by Chris Crawford to play with and I find the format very different than what was up back then. I’ll have to play with it some more before I review or comment, perhaps re-sign up and re-download the SWAT program to try my hand at writing into it. But here’s an image of the reading mode, interactivity by clicking rather than typing in directions as in IF text adventures.