Hypercompendia

Maybe it’s the Borgesian influence of Ficciones that I’m currently reading, but it seemed like a good idea to practice manipulation of Alice by creating my own people and have them walk through a maze.

There is a taller hedge maze available, but then I just know that with my lousy sense of direction, and even with the top angle view, I’d lose Joe and Ada and never find them again.

Back a couple of years ago in a New Media class, I presented my final paper in a time capsule format, offering the progress made to date with an eye to the future. 

In this morning’s news, I was most interested in work being done to establish a direct path from mind to inert object and see that Hitachi has been able to "think" a toy train to run.  At the time I did a bit of research, experiments were being done in the medical field and there had been some positive successes. 

While I don’t know how far this work has moved along in the years since I first read up on it, I would hope that it receives the same attention and funding that Hitachi is putting into its project.

Well I have a small working video produced in Alice just using some of the basic principles and keeping it real simple.  It’s not the same one I started with Socrates and Dr. Sheutzenheimer, since I’d developed some sense of story with that and didn’t want to mess it up.

Overall, the software is enjoyable to work with and one of the easier ones I’ve tried.  The graphics being as sophisticated as they are helps tremendously to keep the momentum up when drudging through the technical aspects of making the animation work.  I think that’s what hindered me on Scratch; it just wasn’t nice enough looking for the effort put into it.  When you see what’s available and what’s being done by folk in the animation field, even at amateur levels, you want to leap rather than crawl.

Besides, I’ve always been one for instant gratification.

While I’m dabbling in the Alice software and learning little by little how to maneuver within it, I seem to have lost all interest in anything other than the learning of the program. 

My Muse has left the building.

Ideas for using animation as well as any other form of graphics and audio come in sparks of oh, that’d be neat and just as quickly fizzle and blacken into useless bits of ash that blow away before they are collected in the urn of the mind.  I was afeared of this; the telling tale of the last few months reveals a lack of any output in even simple text. 

The silver lining though, I suppose, would be that if the creative spirit ever does come back to dwell within to brighten up the mind, the rest of me, the practicality, will be ready.

Going off in thirty different directions as if playing all the players of a game for lack of friends.  Looking to the board to see the paths, they often run in parallel flight separated but by a hedge too high as in a maze.

In working with Alice, it dawned on me that part of its fascination is the movement, the ability for motion, not just in characters but in viewpoint expressed by camera angle.  This reaches out a tentacle to other projects, such as The Paths or Recycling, both of which I’ve pretty much abandoned for the time.  Recycling is, I think, a decent bit of prose and while I was proud of adding, drawing, taking pictures for the graphics and overcoming my timidity to speak into a mic, the audio, it’s nothing I’m particularly proud of as a piece of work beyond the accomplishment; the learning of the way to make a static text come alive through software.

Now something’s just occurred to me: to learn Adobe Premiere by reworking Recycling may be a good idea, but if I want to really make the piece sing, I must admit I "settled" for rather static objects and images and merely played with Photoshop and Illustrator for effects (while learning that software too, of course).  The images I made up just match the words, but not the story.  Is Jesus Christ supposed to be there or be a metaphor?  Is Earth a place, or Mars?  The only one I think I came real close to, using imagery to match the meaning is the final tunnel turned birth canal and even that’s not quite right.  The poem is about a desire, a conflict and a release.  None of these images truly display that; Earth as Earth impedes, I’m thinking now, rather than follows the flow.

So even as I learn to work with motion, I see its value in other creative areas.  This is something extra Alice teaches.

Stacking snowmen, aligning soldiers, finding the center of gravity, learning angles, point of view, perception.

Just playing; getting used to subtleties of movement much as learning touchpad or a mouse.

Got through the first chapter and have actually learned by restraint.  Taking the time to learn a procedure does indeed take some time, but the discipline of needing to complete an exercise successfully does take out the frustration of not learning something properly.

Watching Shrek, I’m still amazed at the animation.  Just amazingly detailed and smooth.  One of the best illustrated characters is Lord Farquaad. 

The programming and software on something like this must be amazing. 

Another thing that I really love with this movie–which is really geared for adults rather than kids who may or may not catch some of its subtleties–is the humor, a bit dark at times, just love it.

Hmmm.  The princess just turned into her ogre form.  She’s saying how ugly she is and the donkey’s first reaction confirms it.  But in truth, she’s not.  Really, she’s a little on the chubby side, has a round lump of a nose, long thin funnels for ears, and is green, but basically, she’s kind of cut–certainly not ugly.

Getting back to the graphics, I’m absolutely awed–and inspired by the animation.

Besides the emphasis on storyboard, the Alice textbook gave out another suggestion that looking back (after having a scenario all set up) makes a lot of sense:  bring in all the objects at the beginning of the setup of the stage and move them into position.

I can’t find, in the whole world I created, the freakin’ bench.

Where it was plopped down I don’t know.  Obviously outside the garden walls that encompass the characters and action.  I flew around with the camera a bit but couldn’t find it close by. And to be honest, with my lousy sense of direction I was afraid I’d get lost and lose the whole scene if I didn’t keep a part of the garden in sight.  No, really; I’m that seriously spacially impaired.  Earlier I did find a tree and moved it inside the walls, but the tree was a lot bigger than a bench and it was fairly close by.

So the thing to do now is take the easy way out: delete the bench and add in a new one.  Though this may be a case of having put the garden, which is now the central point of my created world, not in the center of the world itself so that any added objects end up in the center point of the world, therefore outside of the garden, and I’ll just have to go search for them.

Wouldn’t you just know that any world I build would be off-kilter.

In New Media classes, we were given the assignment of producing a storyboard for a project.  In my own way and sense of writing as a flow that cannot be regulated or charted, I didn’t take it as a serious part of the whole.  Now I realize that the instructors, familiar with games, IF, programming, narrative structure, et al, placed it at a high value because in something like this, animation and graphics versus plain text, there is a series of events that make up a story, and where everybody is standing at the time plays a major part of that story.

Alice brings up the importance of storyboard:

Do the following steps in order: alien moves up; alien says "Slithy toves?"; robot’s head turns around; robot turns to look at alien

Do the following steps together:  robot moves toward the alien; robot legs walk (Learning to Program with Alice, p. 25)

Looking at the "map" of this textual storyboard (there’s an example of a visual as well) one can see immediately what program codes need to be put in place and in what sequence, bringing in the elements of space in distance and time.  With this simplest of narrative form, any inconsistencies or flaws will show up immediately and can be modified.  Much easier at this point than to set up the scene with complicated code just to find out it doesn’t work.  I’m thinking too that Storyspace might prove a valuable tool to use as this storyboard for work in Alice.  If I’m going to do a lot with Alice–and so far I’m really into it–than Storyspace may become a justifiable expense.

So I’ll be spending some time in the learning by instruction method and give the actual project a very brief break while I read, watch, experiment with the techniques outlined.  I’m sure it will make the whole project smoother and easier to progress more quickly.  With the Alice text and tutorials there are enough fun hands-on things to do for both my way of learning and adding the element of excitement and satisfaction.  Enough to keep even me from rebelling against authority to stumble through in my own stubborn way.  There’ll be time to let loose as soon as I learn a few basics, and perhaps a few tricks.