My Podcast Evaluation.

For the Digital Cultures brief we had to create a visual essay considering on how Leeds can be an 'Ubiquitous City'. There were many choices to choose from, I wanted to do it on futuristic cars and all sorts but I chose to do a podcast on 'The Octopus Card' which is used by the citizens of Hong Kong. I chose this because I had the oppotunity to use it when I went there and I'm quite familiar with this revolutionary technology.
This card already existed in 1997 and I was wondering why can't it be launched in more countries. It was able to make payments in transit fees more quicker therefore queues and traffic congestion might improve. Today you can even use it to pay for food in restaurants and supermarkets. I found it really fun to use in Hong Kong and it was more convenient. I wanted to compare some events in Leeds such as going on the bus with the life in Hong Kong as they use the card. I had a friend to film me getting on the bus and using the vending machine. We also tried to film in zara but got kicked out by the security guard and people delibrately got in the way of our filming when I've only got one chance to film it. Filming the vending machine was a little hard and we had to do it twice because the first packet of crisps got stuck in. I went on youtube.com and downloaded the methods of using the card to get drinks and transit as the comparison to my filmed videos. I love the speed of the card transfering wirelessly the sums of money when purchasing something. It takes about 0.03 seconds which is so much faster than credit cards. The downside of these is that it doesn't store any information of the card holder therefore when it's lost, someone else can find it and use whats left on the card.
For the podcast, I used Final Cut Pro to assemble all my research into one video. I still can't use it that well and I always had to render everything. I decide not to use a voice over and used subtitles for my video. The background music is from a korean film soundtrack and I thought it matched my podcast very well. After creating the podcast, I was able to learn alot about the idea of making travelling and everyday life more simple and functioning comfortably. I realised there were other cards similar to the Octopus card such as the Oyster card in London and the Suica card in Japan.
The podcast lasts to 2 minutes so I wished I could of done more like try to film more videos to compare it to Hong Kong. It was very time consuming when I had to try and make the timing of the film clips match the pace of the music, but I thought it flowed quite well. Overall I was quite happy with what I have done and I hope the podcast was able to convey to the viewers the idea of how the Octopus card can be used in Leeds when we approach to the future.

Old and New Animations

We've been asked to look into animations of historical and recents animations. For the new animation I've chose the opening footage trailer of the upcoming game by Square Enix, 'Final Fantasy 13 Versus'. I'm very excited about this game and I can't wait until it releases next year. I guess I have to save up money to get a PlAYSTATION 3 first. I love the main character Prince Noctis with the navy black hair and the red eyes. The part where he blocks the bullets with his swords were so fascinating! It showed many scenes in slow motion and the detail on the characters and the background are stunning.

The older animation is a episode from the series 'The Clangers'. I chose this because I still remember it from childhood. By looking at this, it should be done by a technique called stop-motion animation where every movement is created frame by frame with photography. I think there's alot of effort been put into this because it can be very time consuming although sometimes the viewers aren't aware of their hard work.

I prefer CG animations because I love looking at different special effects and Square Enix did a really good job with it.

FINAL FANTASY 13 VERSUS:


THE CLANGERS:

Vector !

It took me so long to actually make the vector versions of these objects. The pen tool was fun to use and I would like to be more skilled at it.

Storyboard Pylones 0_0

I thought it would be fun to do a very short narrative. For some reason I really like the cup which is one of the objects from the kitchen collection because it makes me laugh. I'm trying to keep it simple so then it would be easier to animate in flash. I'm like a novice at Flash and I still find it difficult to operate. I probabily can only use 1% of Flash's potential.

PYLONES

For the animation principles and techniques brief, I will be doing an animation for the plyones.com website. I had a look in to it and I especially like the 'Kitchen Collection'. I'm interested in the characteristics and facial expressions on these objects. Because of this, I thought I could create a short narrative for the animation.

=This screenshot shows the website of the kitchen collection. The website itself is very vibrate and colouful, in my opinion Pylones is more for a female audience because of the cuteness of the objects and its own stylistic designs.