A Small Bit of Progress

Spent the majority of my weekend working on drawings for this project, will post photos soon of the two walls I've nearly finished... Taking awhile because I'm working with charcoal on 2'x3' paper.
Yes 2x3 foot paper. One of the big huge yellow pads of doom. (Ganked from Tom since all my old pads are at home. thankyouuuu~~~) I tend toward a lot of ridiculously minute details in my drawings (and all my work, really.. *typing this while waiting for a working copy of video project to export..definitely going to take like >15min*), so I decided to go about this the smart way and draw things large enough to fit all the detail I want, that way I won't be squinting at the page trying to fix details in each millimeter of space.
Of course, now I'm going to lose a lot of detail when I shrink things down.. but at least it's there, it'll look so much better.

I'm in the lab working on video for awhile now, mainly because I nearly made my fingertips bleed from rubbing charcoal into paper for like six hours at a stretch for the past two days. Wheeeeeeee.

In any case, I think I've decided to do most of the objects for putting on shelves and things seperately, and sticking them into place through Photoshop, mainly because I haven't decided exactly what objects are going to go into it, nor how many, and putting small things in like that will be easy enough. I've sketched out a lot of things, but need to be sure I don't add in like too many vases or too many books or whatever, and if I added in all the little things now and then decided to change them, it would involve re-drawing parts of larger objects and things, and it'd just be a bitch. But all the main furniture and features are there, I just need to go in and do some detail work, add in a small shelf I forgot on the first wall, and put the floor in on the second wall.

And I think I'm going to try to just take digital pictures of the drawings, then fling those into Photoshop to work with that way, because trying to scan in a 2'x3' charcoal drawing would be far more trouble than slightly better quality images would be worth - and y'all know I'm ridiculous when it comes to image quality. But will probably warm the tone of the drawings a little, and possibly grunge them up a little and add some more lighting in Photoshop, just little atmosphere things.. which'll be interesting, cos I've never really done that with full-out drawings before.

...

...a post here, a post on my blog for video, and my damn video is STILL only half exported. damnit. -_-;;

Schedule

Who *isn't* woefully behind it? sigh. Cranking out drawings today. No really.

re: in-class discussion

chris tucker torture

Reply to Questions/Comments

Is the identity of the architecture reliant on the people, or can it speak for itself using aesthetics?
I think I'm going to work with a combination. Not every object in the room will be mentioned in stories, and not every story will mention one of the objects. I'm going to really work at getting detail into the drawings of the room, bits of dirt and dust and stain on furniture or the floor, all the random marks and things that get knocked into things over time, dents near the bottom of the warddrove, paint chipped off the wall, bite-marks on a child's chair, etc. So each object shows its history to some extent, while the stories flesh out those histories and add to them.

How many stories are in reserve, to be used and rotated through, and keep from being too repetitious?
Not enough yet, will be working on that while working through everything else. But so far, there are seventeen (less than a page to go on the eighteenth one). I'm also planning on adding more stories to the project over time, maybe every few months or something, stir a few new stories into the mix - history doesn't have a stopping point.

Why avoid it looking like a flash site, would it look too "new"?
It would look too cheesy. *g* At least for what I'm doing. Flashy and shiny and glowing doesn't work well for depicting something old and as organic as what I want to do in this - it would be a very different sort of room were it all done in vector-based, flash-like graphics, far too cartoonish. Though I'm not shooting for photo-realistic (I know better than that), I want it to be a believable, relatable space. I want there to be a strong sense of time clinging to everything in the room, the sort of dingy bits of damage that occur to objects when they've been used for many years.

How long a period of time is it covering, and would the same object really be in the room all that time?
Currently, the stories cover a range of about a hundred and fifty years. (Though I don't include any specific dates, there are clues in the surroundings, speech patterns, clothing, activities, etc. - pop over here and skim a story if you want a better idea.) The persistance of the objects.. admitedly, I'm taking a little liberty with. However, it's not all the same set of furniture through all the stories, things move around, there are some things mentioned in one story that aren't mentioned in another. Some things are moved to other rooms in some time periods, and later moved back, some things are added or taken away. It's not that one person furnished the room and no-one ever changed it, it's more like one out of every half-dozen tenants leaves something behind, whether it's a little table or a vase or a warddrobe too large to take with them.

Will the stories interact?
Already do. :) Though never in an obvious way (like someone referencing something that happened in another story), there are repetitions of actions, emotions, ideas, objects, and possibly characters. In one story, a little girl is poking around the furniture in the room, and finds a small, embroidered handkerchief tucked away in a drawer. In another story, another little girl lovingly spreads out a small, embroidered handkerchief across her pillow when she makes her bed, saying a short prayer for her father. The connections are never plainly spelled out - I'd rather let the reader create them, while reading a story, have them suddenly go hey! I wonder if that's the same handkerchief as in that other story..., things like that.

You should keep the sketches warm and realistic, not too monotonous and monotone, to keep the viewer's interest. / I think you should scan in your drawings for the site.
I agree. ^_^ As mentioned, I'm not going to try for photo-realistic (sodefinitely drawing, photo montage really wouldn't fit this, and I've never done any modeling on the computer), I'm not that insane, but I put a lot of thought into my materials. I decided on charcoal both because of its ability to capture a lot of textures and types of surfaces, as well as its atmospheric qualities. It's very warm, very organic, and though it's only one color, I think the amount of texture I can manage with it will keep that from being too dull. And charcoal is very conducive to making things look old.

As for transitions and movement from one direction to another.. I considered setting up a three dimensional space, but I think it would be really hard to get that to mesh with the organicness I want. I think I can keep it two dimensional, and still have it be immersive. Moving one wall to the next.. I'm still debating whether to do a straight cut, or show a movement along one wall over to the other. I think once I get some drawings done, I'll do a test of each, and open it up to what everyone things when there's something to look at. :)

Are the stories going to be real stories about real people?
Inasmuch as a bit of my own point of view or experience is tucked into little corners of everything, yeah, but by and large, no, definitely fiction. I feel safer that way. ^^; At the same time, I'm always culling things from memories or things I've read or conversations I've overheard or whatever - there's a story about a neglected young girl locked into the room, with no human contact whatsoever, that's based off of things I read over on a psychology site about feral children. There's a story about a couple of young guys playing around on BBSs back in the '80s or so, that's an amalgram of things I remember and things I read from around textfiles.com (one of my fav sites to nose around).. So most things have some basis somewhere, but the stories and characters are fictional overall.

Will users be able to affect the website for other users, or just themselves?
Initially, I was planning to just have it be for themselves, but I've been putting a lot of thought into that randomization element lately, so I'm considering a few different things now. Probably just themselves though, I think that's enough variation to start with... that, and I've a hunch it'll be closer to my coding ability to pull off. ActionScript and I really aren't on the closest of terms...

Any other suggestions, questions, comments, story ideas, ANYTHING, hugely appreciated, all the comments so far have really got me thinking about some things, thanks. :)

Proposal & Responses

I'm sure everyone has the jist of my project by now, I won't rehash my proposal for the 463829th time, but if you want to check something (or you're not in my class), the presentation I put together for my proposal is here. (Apologies, but geocities is my only option at the moment for hosting html files, boomspeed's free accounts are too small for pictures, and was too lazy to change my image links.) I'm open to ideas on a lot of the technical things, as well as any other suggestions.

At the moment, I'm trying to sort out what I want to do with transitions, particularly moving from looking at one wall to another.. what I'm leaning toward is when you move your mouse over to the far edge of the screen, it'll switch the view to that of the adjacent wall - that way, there's no out-of-place looking button, but it's still easy to stumble on. But I don't know if I should do a straight cut to it, slightly fade it, or what.. (Re-playing Myst, I tried using the sliding-over transitions, and found that though I used to like them, I now find them annoying, and would rather have a straight cut to the new view, so leaning toward that.)

And any suggestions on sound would be hugely appreciated, I haven't worked with it much at all yet (though I started out a pre-music student here, so I know what I'm doing in terms of actual sound..just not the technology end).

edit: ahhhhhh dan you proved my paranoia right, knew I should've posted this before getting dinner.. ^^;

a later edit: and yes I know my warddrobe and bookshelf and little cabinet-thing are all a bit lopsided. That's why these are test-sketches. (Really need to learn to be sitting at right angles to my sketchbooks.. -_-; )

safari sucks like whoa

omFg I should not even have looked at this in Safari. It completely ignores my font selections, and made everything huge and arial and bulky and, y'know, totally wrong. I'll try to fix, but won't try long. Why is firefox not on the lab comps?

edit: Figured it out. Safari totally ignores styles, css, even when put into the body of things rather than the header. The only thing I could do would be to go in to eeeevery lil area and plug in an old-school "font face" tag and tell it Times or Times New Roman - Apples don't know Garamond by default. And I'm so not doing that, it's currently set up with styles to do Garamond and if it can't find it, then evilTNR, but without styles, I can only pick one font for always. And I'm not fecking doing that. So, basically, no-one in the world who gives a shit about what sites look like should use Safari alone. sigh. gj apple.

...

So I e-mailed Ferraro to see if I could drop by today to get my final production packet today, as, y'know, I could use all the sketches I did for it (the write-up I have copies of still of course). Because he never gives anything back to keep because he's weird.

good to hear you are furthering the work. The files for that class are at my
house in Bemus where I took them for grading. If I don't have them here Fri
at 1PM -- I will be up there this weekend and will have them Mon at 1PM.

*facepalm* thankyou. >_< wtf.