Week 11 - 29/03/11

We are getting close to the deadline now and with only one week left to complete our project, I feel that we will finish it to a high standard. After having some problems with Flash and not being able to make some of the buttons to work, we figured out what was going wrong and were able to copy this code over to the rest of the venues. Videos montages have been created for Motion, Thekla and Basement 45, and videos have been made for The Croft and The Royal Academy. These have all been embedded in Flash and all display a recent event that happened in March from all varieties of tastes.

I created the video for a night that happened in Basement 45, but the focus of the review is for the  promoter of the night Crazy Legs. This promotion team put on nights and book DJs which play and produce forward thinking underground bass music, which is genres such as Future Garage, 2-Step, Intelligent Dubstep and Future Bass. The sound hasn't really got a concrete name yet and can be called many things but its growing fast in popularity and some big nights and names are already coming out of it. I want this website to be ahead of the game and show people off the map sort of club nights, pushing this style of night is exactly what the website is about.

Now that we have created the bubbles which display information when you roll over certain places, we really have kept the information to a minimum and are relying solely on visual aspects to allow the user there own opinion.

Instead of a text based experience aimed at finding and connecting bits of information the goals of the immersed user will include the visual and sensory pleasures of spatial exploration.

  Lister et al (2003)

Week 10 - 22/03/11

Today I learnt how to create pop ups and embedding video in Flash. I realised that we don't need to do much work in Dreamweaver for the site, most can be done in Flash and then we just put it into Dreamweaver to turn it into a website. Now on our home page, when you scroll over the Polaroids which are active a 'think' bubble pops up which displays all the relative information needed. Then when you click on the picture, the pictures will stop bouncing, the map will darken and either a video, photo montage or pictures & information will appear about that specific spot the user clicked on.

 I have completed this for Motion, and most of the bubbles have been added. Once all the videos are finished we can piece it all together and it should start to look pretty good. We are not running into many troubles at the moment and the project should definitely be finished soon.

Week 9 - 15/03/11

This week I've been creating all the visual content for the 'Shake, Wrap and Roll' sandwich cafe and for the night Run at Motion. For 'Shake, Wrap and Roll' I have got copies of the menu to display on the site and also brought a wrap which I took photos of to show the viewer the sort of wraps the place makes. For Motion, I went to Run on the 12th of March and took lots of pictures and combining these with some pictures I found, I have created a photo montage of the night, similar to the one created for Thekla. I also composed my own music for the video, the first song is my own production and then follows onto Hypno by Kutz.

Here is a rough edit of the video:

Week 8 - 08/03/11

This week we have been taking on board what our teachers have been saying and are giving our project a slight twist while still focusing on the same idea. Now the website is going to be based on 'what you have missed' last week from nights out to art exhibitions and top picks of the week from sandwich cafes to bars. The reason behind this is to give the website a different edge from your average tour guide or review site and while relying on visual aspects the viewer can see what they missed out on, if it was there sort of thing and so they can make sure the don't miss it again!

     Furthermore, to keep with this idea of the past, the whole presentation of the site has to include this, from the look to the name. So the maps colours have been changed to an almost ghostly shade to make it feel back in time, the photos will also be made more transparent to fit with this theme. We are also going to include in the collage of pictures some photos of Bristol from the past to play on this idea further.

      A name still needs to be thought up for the site and we really need to get moving on getting the site into production. Though the home page is nearly finished and we almost have all the content we need so next week we can start constructing our site.

Week 6 - 22/02/11

This week we did our presentation in class.  While preparing our presentation it helped us to kick start our project and actually get the design created, some photo montages and videos started and information gathered to start forming our website.

During our presentation I felt an unfair statement was made about how our entire project could be done on google maps. While a similar sort of thing can be done, I feel that this is not true. Users can upload there own content such as videos but when I clicked on the club Thekla one video had been uploaded from 2007 and the rest was reviews and heavily text based. We want our project to rely on visual content to give the user a feel for the place and regular uploads of the most recent nights, not one from four years ago. Furthermore we want to show the users 'off the map' places of interest that wouldn't normally appear in tourist guides or maps, such as little restaurants, sandwich bars, shops and little clubs. When researching for our project we chose places we wanted to put on our site such as Basement 45, Shake Wrap And Roll, The Bank and Lakota among others. None of these places mentioned even appear on google maps (unless you went on street view), let alone been reviewed or have any sort of visual content added to them.

Finally another quote I found interesting and relates to our project this week comes from Jay David Bulter and Richard Grusin who say 'the desire for immediacy is apparent in claims that digital images are more exciting, lively and realistic than mere text on a computer screen'.

Week 5 - 15/02/2011

This week we started work on both our project, proposal and our presentation which will be conducted next week.

For our project, I started creating the home page by collecting lots of images we will use for the collage and, cropped them all in Photoshop and turned them all into Polaroids to give it a better look. We also decided to place a map behind the pictures to show exactly what areas have lots going on. So far the home page looks like this, It's still under construction and many more photos need to be added to it.

Once completed, we can start to animate certain venues and places of interest and start turning them into links and create the pop up boxes which will contain all the visual information.

One quote I found this week which I felt really links to our Project comes from 'Immediacy, Hypermediacy & Remediation' by Jay David Butler & Richard Grusin.

Howard Rheingold 'Claims that at the heart if Virtual Reality is an experience - the experience of being in a virtual world or remote location'.

This is what we are trying to capture with our site, by creating this virtual expierence of Bristol, we hope that the users can really get the feel for the nights or events we review and see personally if it would be their cup of tea.

Week 3 - 01/02/11

This week, we carried on collecting our ideas for the project together as we still seem a little vague on what we want the project to actually consist of. During this process we came up with a number of ideas for the website, keeping the initial idea of basing it on Bristol but changing both the content and design of our project. We thought that...

• For the home page, instead of creating a cartoon drawing that we could animate, we thought we could instead create a collage using hundreds of pictures to both construct the areas and venues we want to use in our project but also link these areas together with streets and roads, to create a mini map of Bristol.
• The areas and venues we want to focus on will be turned into links and carry you to another page. Here it will go in depth about the history of the place, the cultural significance it has to Bristol and the types of music/art it showcases. We will do this by displaying text, pictures, music and videos to inform the viewer not only what its like to go there but also what it feels like to be there.
• Each page needs to represent its side of Bristol in every way so for each page the font could be different depending on the place itself, for example information about stokes croft could be constructed out of graffiti. 
• The music for the site I will compose myself. I want to create short 30 second loops for each area of Bristol we are representing and relate to that. Each could play either when you scroll over that area on the home page or on the links from it.

These are just a few ideas on how we are moving our project forward, now that we have some stronger ground work, we can start putting these ideas into action, to see what its going to look like and what other ideas this causes us to think about.