DTC Showcase

So I went to the showcase and there were really cool things that people made. I really enjoyed seeing all the animations that people had been working on all semester. One of my favorites is the “On the Wrong Tracks”. The animation was really smooth and the camera work was really witty. Plus the ending was funny with allowing the audience to assume what would happen afterwards without visually showing it. I also really liked the stop motion animation winner. It was playful and punny with the use of characters and creativeness of the sticky notes as the dance floor. I know when watching some of the animations, I wanted to start looking into animating water since my goal this year was to work with skeletons, it’s time to push the animation further. It was also really cool that Maria and I won “Best 3D Animation” because both of us really worked hard on the project and the result was what we were looking for. Thank you Maria for everything and making animation better for the both of us!

 

These things that we’re learning about in DTC 338 about key framing, camera work, and animating and story telling draw back to the ideas of how we as an audience experience a piece. We have to design something in mind for the audience to understand without writing directions like we did with the board game. We’re using rhetorics of understanding the conscious choices we make. In my DTC 355 class we are always talking about analyzing the choices we make in designing something for someone else. For posters, we need to know the audience, the subject, the information and visuals that we want to show. For websites we need to know how our audience is interacting with our websites and how links connect with each other and making sure all the information is on the site. For our gameboard, we had to make sure that the instructions laid out everything we needed to know in order to play the game.

 

Final Blog Entry

Best DTC Project I saw at the DTC Showcase

Custom

In class we were talking about games that reflect our thoughts on current circumstances and how we view things. Video games give us the ability to empathize and take on the roles of a different person and see what we can do. I remember that in our group posts we talked about the connections of how the real world connects to the digital world in terms of differences and similarities. Video games are very keen on respawns and being able to do over a situation. In the real world you don’t get that. You get one chance. ZombieU is one of the few games that I know where you are set with a random character, play through with them, and then if they die, then the player is sent to another random character losing all equipment and experience. There seems to be a theme of the zombie apocolypse as a fear in society that raises the concern: “What do we do if it happens?” Most games set the player in a POST zombie world, where we couldn’t stop the virus and the player must survive the environment. There is no stopping the virus. It’s just surviving or getting away. In the end of games like Resident Evil, the player usually uncovers the truth behind how it started or getting away from the location of problems. But there is always something that is still there. It’s never truely gone. So does that reflect on society today? If this happens, are we doomed?

This video shows the ridiculousness of respawning.

 

Comments:
Megan: http://meganpetersonwsu.blogspot.com/

Lauren: https://laurelanddtc375.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/post-8-2/comment-page-1/#comment-21

Another Blog

Write a blog entry. If you choose the stock option, here’s your prompt: choose one of the concepts from the first five chapters from Bogost (art, empathy, reverence, music, pranks) that you find interesting. Use quotations from that chapter and specific examples from your knowledge and experience to discuss, explore, and make an interesting and non-obvious argument about that term in contexts separate from video games in a way that extends, contradicts, or goes beyond what Bogost is saying. (“Art is important” or “We need empathy” are examples of obvious arguments.)

Ian Bogost says, “One of the unique properties of videogames is their ability to put us in someone else’s shoes” (18). In games like Darfur is Dying, it allows the player to play through the struggles of a real darfur and help extend new the creative minds of the community to solve real issues by creating a model with restrictions and rules. Bogost makes note that we consume empathy in videogames , “[through] shoes [that] are imagining what it would be like to see over the kitchen counter. (18).

Empathy is present not just in video games, but in many other things that we interact with. When we read books, sometimes depending on the point of view that the author chooses, they can create different levels of empathy toward a character.

(GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT –> DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SEASON 4 EPISODE 2)

Movies or TV shows use dialogue and gestures to recreate and act out a scenario. A good example is with Game of Thrones. This is a good example of the “over the kitchen counter” empathy. When King Joffrey goes off and makes his stupid “Battle of the Kings”, with almost no dialogue, you can tell there is tension in the air and how almost everyone at the wedding was insulted. He should’ve called it, “How to Ruin a Wedding in less than 5 minutes”. Then he gets poisoned and starts dying. You can feel and empathize with the fear, anger, and terror as he starts choking (but not feeling that bad). Even though Cersei has never been one of the most favorable characters to say the least, when her son is dying, her characters switches from diabolical nosy underhanded power hungry “former queen” to a mother about to lose her son. The audience can still empathize with her actions as a desperate mother trying to save a dying son.

On the flip side, we can experience empathy not just “over the kitchen counter, but in the kitchen itself”. For example, based on the difference in level of empathy can be seen by someone outside of the kitchen (literally) and someone in the kitchen doing the work. Seeing and doing the action is two different ways of consuming empathy on different levels.

When we are hired for jobs or working on projects, we can empathize with the people that actually do these tasks as a living and understand what they must go through to accomplish something. For example, I am in an animation class. My dream job is to be an animator and there are so many steps to create an animation than I would’ve thought. One must create models, texture them, key frame the models, make skeletons when necessary, understand where vertex points are, paint weight the model, figure out the length of the time slider, render out the scene with the right settings, make sure lighting is provided in the scene along with ray-traced shadows, import into premiere, consider sound, consider transitions, and make sure that you check the final result to make sure that models aren’t breaking and other problems. There are a lot of things to consider when animating and imagining how movies such as Monsters University, Toy Story, The Incredibles, Frozen, or other movies that create models and animate figures are done in a timely manner. It makes sense why there are so many people on a team working on just one part of animating.

 

Comments of the Week:

1. http://victoriaorozcovalley.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post-8.html?showComment=1397499327107#c4580885540686466301

2. http://iclimbrocks1989.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/blog-8-dtc-375-stock-dark-souls-2/comment-page-1/#comment-53