Digital essay write up

The task was to create a digital essay on a topic of our own choosing and the subject that I chose was that humans should hatch from eggs. I chose this topic because it seems like a funny abstract idea that could be a possibility in the future. The purpose of the digital essay is to educate the readers about the advantages and disadvantages of humans hatching from eggs and I have done so by creating an essay that is divided into websites by the introduction, arguments for, arguments against and conclusion sections of a typical essay.

I began by writing down ideas about advantages and disadvantages of humans hatching from eggs. I struggled to figure out how to develop an essay into something much more suited to the digital medium. I then found a template and edited the images to suit my specifications. I also had to edit the html to get a better size from the template as the original was very slim. Once i was happy with the template I began to develop my arguments in word before uploading them to the webpage. I emailed Jason to get some advice as I was working because I was not sure how much writing to put into the work. It turns out I needed a lot more writing so I further developed my essay and included counter arguments as well. I also created a number of images in photoshop and I even filmed myself cooking eggs to include in the website.

Portfolio write up

I created a portfolio for myself that showcases my web design and development and programming skills: http://newformsreview.com/digitalwriting/GrimstonJason/portfolio/

I started by designing a couple of different options for the layout of the site and i was originally going to create a kind of furry animal page. I decided to create something a little more professional and began developing the site as it currently is. Once I had a design, I began developing the components in photoshop and once I was happy with them i started creating the index page of my site. I then researched a number of different ways to display my information and settled on an image gallery javascript that works quite nicely and fits in with the theme of my site. After that I took screen shots of my work and linked them to a working version that is held on a server. I emailed my lecturer for advice and it was suggested that I change the banner slightly on each page but I have chosen not to due to that fact that I wanted to create a consistent user interface across all pages of my site. I did however, rearrange some content so that the most recent achievements show up first.

Spartanisms

Concept:
Spartanisms is a site similar to ‘selleck waterfall sandwich‘ and it contains a combination of scenes from the 2006 movie ‘300’, pictures of George W. Bush, and quotes from George W. Bush that are often refereed to as ‘bushisms’. The point of the site is to humiliate George W. Bush by presenting his quotes out of context in a war setting from ‘300’ with his embarrassing facial expressions superimposed onto the scenes of the movie. The 3 subjects chosen reflect the main aspects of George W. Bush that will be remembered from his time as president: The scenes from the movie reflect the wars that america were involved in, the pictures of George W. Bush reflect his awkwardness in social situations, and the quotes reflect his stupidity.

The purpose of this site is not to insult or blame anyone, it is to ridicule a powerful leader and how he has been remembered.

Technical:
First I googled ‘bushisms’ and began saving funny quotes. Then I searched for funny pictures of George W. Bush and then scenes from the movie 300, particularly ones with the main character: Leonidas as he is the most powerful character in the movie. Once I had found some interesting scenes, I began to edit the pictures and add George W. Bush into the action of the scene. Once I had made an interesting picture, I finished it with a ‘bushism’ that reflects the situation in the picture. I made 10 of these and then created a Google sites page to host my images. Google sites is an interesting web application in that it has great functionality but it is not intuitive to use. It enables people to create and display websites to the public free of charge but there were a number of times that I became confused about how to remove or add an element to the page or change the theme of the page. Apart from that I think that its a great application that can only improve in time with user feedback. The site is now at: http://sites.google.com/site/spartanisms/

By Jason Grimston

The Creator – actual write up

Concept:
I have created a website that addresses the issues of religion and pollution to invoke questions about the true meaning of religion and encourage people to clean up the environment. I have done this by creating a fictional story of a god like figure who has taken the internet for ransom until the world is peaceful and clean. Every web page has been replaced by this one until the Creator is happy. The website explains that peace and a clean planet are possible through the introduction of 5 mysterious planets that are made up of the 5 elements of chinese philosophy: Fire, Water, Wood, Metal and Earth, which are said not to need any intervention from the Creator. The Earth is explained to have been developed as a more advanced planet but it is clear that the Creator regrets making humans as they do not care for his creations. The Internet will be returned to humans once they have completed a short list that the Creator has made for them.

The 6 sites of the website are:

Home – short introduction to the site that shows up no matter what page the fictional audience tries to navigate to

The Planets – an artwork that explains the fiction setting of the website

History – explains the character of the Creator as a childish egotist by exploring his past, present and future achievements and plans from a first person perspective.

Biography – describes the creator and his accomplishments from a different perspective but it is clear through the writing that the Creator has written it himself

Broadcast – contains a short video that is being played on all TV/Radio stations to explain what is happening.

Contact Me – page that explains how to contact the Creator

Technical side:

I took a template from arcsin (there is a link on the bottom right of each page) and modified it by making it wider, creating new images, and changing the links. I then started making the content for each page and creating images to give the user a break from the amount of text used. I used Gimp for all .gifs on the site and Photoshop for all the other images. I also used Dreamweaver and TextWrangler to code the website. I have made this on a mac and I have used relative positioning on the images in The Planets page so I suggest that it is viewed in Safari or firefox (I have not tested outside of these browsers).

Creative website – The Creator

My creative website will be based on the idea of a “Creator” who developed 5 different planets out of the original elements of Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth. After he had created them, they started to develop their own unique life-forms who lived in piece on the elemental planets and so the creator decided to develop a 6th planet out of the others (which is the earth) as an experiment.  The site will be set in a time period after the destruction of the earth from over pollution and war. The site will attempt to explain flaws in religion with satire as it describes the 5 planets from the creators perspective and what he thought went wrong with the development of earth and its war torn inhabitants.

The site will be targeted to people investigating religion. The fictional reason for the creation of the website is to document the creation of the planets as a portfolio or a reflection of the creators accomplishments. The site will additionally exaggerate the accomplishments of the creator and make him out to be better then he really is (with use of stylized images and obvious exaggeration).

The pages will be:

The Planets – One for each elementary planet and one for the earth (to describe what they are and what they consist of) – These pages will be a brief description of the planet and its accomplishments and will be linked with the pentagram picture and links that I have already made.
a Bio page for the creator – (this page will be focused at satirizing the creator)
History – (develops the story of the planets and the reasons earth failed)
Contact Me – satirizes the impossibility of prayer with the addition of e-prayers where you email him for suggestions about new planets and stuff or for help because you have run out of food in your nuclear bunker
Images – photoshopped images in a gallery that further reinforce the notion that the creator is an exaggerated figure
How to  – How to be god and create planets and how to get people to worship you.

might use http://www.secondperson.net/ as a template if its not a flash site as it looks cool. Or http://www.freelayouts.com/templates/Pink-Flower Or http://www.freelayouts.com/templates/Stylized

Xtranormal write up

Concept: This clip explores the issues associated with artificial intelligence and whether or not it will be able to accomplish all that the human brain is capable of. The clip portrays a child dressed up as a hero character ‘Box-man’ and he is supposed to be playing with the robot who is referred to as ‘Robo-fag’. The child is immature and will not reason with the robot and it is clear that he feels used. The robot explains that it has become more than just a computational machine but the child, and the rest of humanity, believes that artificial intelligence is only capable of imitating humans and does not have any ‘real’ feelings.

Technical: I started by going to http://www.xtranormal.com and I got to know the site by playing with the application and creating random clips. Once I had a thorough understanding of the site, I began planning the basic concept of my clip. Once I was happy with the concept, I chose the location, characters and voices and began to write the script. After I was happy with the script I then added the animations and camera angles to make it more realistic.

Image Map

Concept

The image map project “Hero/Villain” is an exploration of the similarities and differences between a hero and a villain. The hero is portrayed as intellectually inferior to the villain to juxtapose the common portrayal of the two. Usually, the villain is outwitted by the hero in cartoons such as “Road Runner” and the like, however, this piece reverses this to raise questions as to whether or not the hero would still prevail if he/she was not as smart as the villain. This project additionally explores what the differences are between a hero and a villain by depicting the two as identical apart from their colours, which tell them, apart. This then leads to the question of what turns a person into a villain or a hero. This piece has also been created to entertain the audience with the comical simplicity of the hero juxtaposed with the obviously smarter and more serious villain.

Technical

This work was created by drawing the hero in Photoshop first. Once I was happy with the picture, I saved it as a jpg and created a simple webpage. I then opened Dreamweaver and added the image map with the image map tool. After I had made the image maps, I added a tooltip from dynamicdrive.com and then began to write the content for each tooltip on the hero page. After that, I created the villain page and went through the same process. Once I was happy with the pages, I linked them by creating a table with one row and putting the links either side of the image. Once I was happy with the work I added targets that I made in Photoshop to draw the users attention to the image map areas and made them fade in and out when the user rolls over them with another dynamic drive script. I have not tested this in windows yet, and because I’m using relative positioning on the targets I suggest that it is opened in firefox or safari. I would have liked to have made the targets fade in and out when the user rolls over the area of the image map that it relates to as well but I ran out of time.

Goto http://www.newformsreview.com/digitalwriting/GrimstonJason/ImageMaps/heroMap.html to check it out

Week four rocking bits

This week I’m going to explore some cool code snippets from dynamicdrive.com and explain their various uses. The first of which can be found at: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/wipedemo.htm and explores using JavaScript to enable animation of text rather than relying on Flash to accomplish the same result. This script is platform independent and doesn’t require additional downloads which means that the user will view the effects as intended without having to go through the hassle of waiting for plugins and updates to download. Another advantage of this form of animation over Flash is that users can easily modify the JavaScript file in a text document to alter all aspects of the animation instead of having to edit a file in Flash which is an extremely expensive professional animation application that is not as widely available as a simple text editing program.

The second interesting script that I have found illuminates the intrusiveness of pop-up windows by displaying them within the current window. The script (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex8/dhtmlwindow/index.htm) enables programmers to bypass the users browser settings to display information in this format if pop-ups are disabled. This has many uses in web design, primarily it allows for pop-up windows to be used constructively (as I’m sure they were originally intended to be used!). For example: the site may have a help button that initiates the pop-ups at locations around the page to help the user gain access to the features of the site. The user is then able to close these windows as necessary whilst they browse.
This new type of pop-up may also be used for promotional gain by forcing the user view or even click on an add before they enter a sites main content.

Dynamic Drive has a number of interesting scripts that can be used by beginner website creators or modified by experienced programmers to enable the creation more interesting and usable websites without the need for additional expensive programs that do a similar job.

Google Maps

Check out my google maps piece here:

http://newformsreview.com/digitalwriting/GrimstonJason/GoogleMaps/

First, very first topic

Cliche Paragraph:
It was calm before the storm that ripped my heart from my sleeve. Without warning, he exploded like a bomb with a short fuse. The pot called the kettle black as it rained cats and dogs on our home sweet home. I sat like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming train and watched the clouds cry themselves to sleep. Soon I traveled to another world within the confines of my mind. Inside my head I wanted the truth. I couldn’t handle the truth so I became a figment of my own imagination. The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, but when it rains it pours, so I found myself in a dark and dreary place with a bird in my hand (which is worth two in the bush). “The more the merrier” I thought as I realised that we were both at the bottom of the pecking order.

Rewrite:
The atmosphere was calm before the wounds were inflicted. Without provocation, he began to attack my existence. Hypocrisy was rampant as the heavy rain fell to the ground on and around our place of residence. I fixated on the flurry of drops outside which resembled the depressed tears of unseen mourners at a funeral. Soon, reality became a memory as I regressed into the shell that houses my existence. Once there, I aimed to find the truth. However, the truth eluded me due to my inability to grasp it. I then created my own reality in an attempt to rescue myself from the plague of rain drops that dragged me into that lonely place. In the emptiness of my mind I found myself holding a small but friendly bird that sat gently in the rough palm of my hand. I enjoyed the company of this feathered friend as I became aware that we were both at the bottom of the social hierarchy.