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.