Interactive Narrative Final Piece

This is my Final completed edited Flash.


The Treasure Land by ~salomeliu on deviantART


When we were in the first seminar, we were asked to come up with some stories for our flash.
I had three ideas at the time and all of them were targeted to children, because I think an Interactive Flash like this could be fun for children to play with.
Then I chose this story of treasure finding after listening to other people's ideas in class as I think this one could be more interesting because the player has to go around to find the treasure.
Once I have decided which story I would used, I did a flowchart to plan out my story.

And then I did something like a storyboard to remind myself of each step.
I actually drew out what each images would be like too.I decided to draw out my own images because I don't think I can find the images I want on the Internet.

I tend to keep my images simple as my target audience are children.
Once I have all my images, I edited them in Photoshop to add a “cartoon-like” feel, so it looks more interesting for children.


This is my first time using Flash, although I was confused at the beginning, it became much easier once I have understood how Flash works and I actually enjoyed it.

What was good:

• I think the plot was quite good. The player has to find the right path, so will be curious of what will happen next.
• It is simple and easy to play. I think children would like to play it.
  

What was not so good:

• If I have more time, I would make the images prettier. Maybe add more colours and make them more interesting for children.
• It is too simple that I think more instruction is probably needed.
  

One shot film Final piece

This is our final One Shot Film.


The quality of this video isn't very good as I have to get down the file size for uploading so there's a reserve link- http://vimeo.com/7764945

We had a meeting for gathering ideas together before filming it.
As we all liked the idea of the camera being the eyes of the audience and this idea worked quite well on our practice piece, we used this concept again but only in a different story.
Then we came up with this story of a guy trying to do his essay in his room but his flatmates keep coming in and try to get him out drinking.
We discussed our plot in detail and the order of things happening. I think we worked quite well as a group as we discussed the problems and tried to find solutions which we think might occurred when filming it.
Although we did quite a lot of takes on the shotting day and finding problems as we were shotting along, we were able to get the problems fixed.
Sometimes we just go along to film it and see how it worked out and what didn't worked well.
But we all were pleased about the final piece.

What was good:

• It's very realistic and situation like this does happen in real life. I think it makes the audience have a feeling of 'ah, I understand'.
• It's simple and easy to understand. Nothing fancy but real.
• I think the camera handling was good. It did look like how our eyes would see.
• Put aside the acting, I think the plot itself was good.
  

What was not good:

• The voice of the guy's thought wasn't as good as I thought it would be. We probably need some professions for help.
• The time passing issue was the biggest problem we discussed. It would have been better if we could change the time on the clock to show the time passing.

Through this project, I understand that a one minute short film is very hard to do as there's a time limit. And especially we are doing a one shot film, there's a lot of limitations and it is very important to keep the film simple and easy to understand.

Trial One shot film

The second project we need to do is a one shot short film.
We have to make a one shot film using a DV camera and a tripod.
The film needs to be only one shot and about a minute long.
We cannot move the tripod or the camera, we are only allow to turn the camera around on the tripod.



This is our groups first attempt on the one shot film - Vending Machine
(Edited by Dan Stewart)

We got the idea of the camera being our eyes from this video called "Guy Stuck in History Class" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7hzcLZ7uRc

We really like this idea so we used it and plugged in our own story.
I think this piece was really good. It went well.
It wasn't very hard to do once we have the story planned and we knew what to do.