Story Creation: Transmedial Story
Audio Log 1 – Arrival: Audio Log 2 – Terminal: Audio Log 3 – The Mall Audio Log 4 – Caught After Dark Process: While I had some trouble coming up with settings for my story initially, I chose to set it in the world of the Alien movie franchise. Specifically, in the spin-off videogame Alien: Isolation. My goal was to try and bring that feeling of wonder and horror from the game into my story. It’s something that is essential to the Alien movies and videogames, as it keeps the viewer/player interested and involved with the story. The more intense the horror and struggles are, the more intense the final triumphs feel. It is emotionally rewarding in a way. Relatable story I knew I had to find some way to really get the player to relate to the story I was going to tell. Just some text logs weren’t going to be enough, most people skip reading those things or only read up on them after they’ve completed the game. I wanted to really bring my story to life and engage the player with it, both when found on location in the game as when […]
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The Making Of Mortimer: Clocks And Arduinos
In this second part of The Making Of Mortimer, I’ll be talking about the mechanics and programming that went into making the physical manifestation of our chatbot actually tick. As I mentioned in the entry on Mortimer’s personality, we got an early start on our chatbot. We narrowed down the object we wanted to a clock in the second week of the semester, and by September 9th, we already had an actual clock to work on. We also had to work on ideas for the rooms during week 2, which is why I made a 3D representation of the Kitchen space as a rough estimate to get a feeling for what our room could be like. We were hoping one of the spaces would be a kitchen because the ideas we had for the dialogue involved our bot helping the user learn how to cook. We showed the model to the class after our presentation and it helped us narrow down the list of ideas to a Bathroom, a Living room and a Kitchen, as we’d hoped. Going in without any knowledge of the internals of the clock, our initial plan was to integrate a screen behind the glass panel near […]
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The Making Of Mortimer: Personality and Dialogue
In this part I’ll be talking about the making of Mortimer. Mortimer is the name we gave to our main project, the clock chatbot. I initially brought the group together to brainstorm about what we wanted our chatbot to be like in the second week, before we were even asked to do so by the teachers. We rather quickly came to the idea of making our chatbot a sort of parental figure, which would assist people in getting their lives in order. The concept was that the more you’d use it, the more it would teach you, the less you’d need it. The shape our object would take was going to be either a mirror or a clock. We ended up going with the latter as it’d better fit in a kitchen. When we were given were given a personality to work with in the random draw, we got the ‘Ruler’ archetype. This would fit in nicely with what we had planned already by that point. We’d just adjust it so it’d be a bit more oppressive, so that it’d seem like it’d be trying to stay in control of everything. The personality the other group that was going to […]
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Intercultural Communications: TEDx Talks Paper
You can read my paper here. You can find our presentation here. In week 4 we had to watch 3 TEDx Talks for Intercultural Communications on Youtube about communication, culture, behavior and how these 3 things affect each other. Our assignment was to watch these videos and write a paper about them and about how we related to them. We also had to make a presentation on it as a group. These videos got me thinking more and more the more I watched them and discussed them with my fellow students. I noticed that a lot of them were mostly either summarizing the videos or just giving their opinions on the overarching topics in their papers. I thought that both those ways were coming up a little short of really talking about the subject matter of the videos, so I tried to be a bit more analytical in my approach. Taking the main points mentioned in each video and then arguing my own view on each allowed me to get a deeper understanding of the topics at hand. This effort was also appreciated by Jessika, with whom I had a brief but interesting ethical/political discussion during her feedback on the […]
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Orientation Presentation on AI
You can find our presentation here. Early on, as part of our research/orientation phase, we had to look into AI and do a quick presentation on the subject. I volunteered to do it along with Nash and we took charge of making the presentation as well. The group did some quick research into AI as we veered off into a bit of an ethical debate/brainstorm. During this debate we kept a list of things we thought we should bring up and then we organised it into a presentation. During the presentation, Nash went a little bit off-script, so I helped him get back on track. The feedback on the presentation was pretty positive and we knew enough about our subject to answer the questions in the short discussion that followed.
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Protagonist Prototyping
You can find my prototype document here. When it came to actually prototyping our protagonists, we were told one of us had to pick the clock we had already bought for our final project. After some discussion within the group, I was the one who picked that part up. It turned out, a week or so later, that we weren’t meant to pick our group objects after all. I was already stuck with prototyping this, however, and had no time to adjust course at that point. We were sent out to go to thrift stores to look for some objects we could use for our projects. I figured it might be worth looking for other potential clocks. Me, Nash and Rikky went to Het Goed in Eindhoven to see if they had anything we could use but the trip was a bust since they had nothing any of us were looking for. I visited another 3 thrift stores over the next week but most of them didn’t have anything I could use either, or at least nothing better than what I had. My initial prototype was a 2D representation of the clock we started out with to rapidly test out […]
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Protagonist Creation
You can find the character sheet here. For Story Creation as well as the process leading up to our DDW expo, we had to come up with a few different objects with a certain personality and emotion given to us at random by Woody. The personality our group was given was that of the Ruler, which suited our initial concept for a chatbot; something that’d help users get their life in order by ordering them around. The emotion I was given was ‘confused’. Confusion can come from a lot of things, but I tried to make it an integral part of the identity of my protagonist. I did this by making it confused about its very identity itself, by making it an oven that was programmed to be a dishwasher. It would then often forget it was an oven and try to wash your food or cook your dirty dishes. This allowed me to give it some behavior consistent with its given emotional state throughout both its internal issues and conflicts. The goal of these protagonists was to then prototype them and eventually pick one of them to be in the room alongside one of our main objects. You can […]
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Intercultural Communications: DMIS Paper
You can find my paper here. During the second week we were introduced to the DMIS Model as a way to describe a spectrum of acceptance towards other cultures differing from one’s own as a few specific ‘stages’. Our assignment was to write a paper on this DMIS Model. We were to answer a few set questions as well as describing our own position in the model. Discussing the model with a few classmates I realized there were more people who identified themselves to be on the left side of the model, more ‘ethnocentric’ or ‘mono-cultural’ as it were, than I initially expected in this minor. However, after talking with them it turns out most of their issues with other cultures aren’t necessarily present on a personal basis. They seem to mostly be grounded in fears and insecurities regarding the unknown as well as concerns about the increased stream of migrants. In that sense, despite seeing myself mostly in the last stage, ‘Integration’, I do also see the more ethnocentric side in me when it comes to recent issues like the migrant crisis. I have yet to get feedback on this paper from the teacher, I will update this when […]
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Improv Class
One of the first classes we had was an improv class. The point of the class was to get us to think more freely about characters and personalities, and to help us find a more dynamic and organic approach to creating them. We were given exercises where we had to keep saying the same word or phrase in a circle, which was meant to make us think about all the ways the intonation and delivery of the words that someone could use. It also reminded me that the way the words are delivered is almost as important as the words themselves. There were a lot of other exercises, from a form of charades to acting out some improv situations given to us without letting us discuss it beforehand to coming up with a full-on improv stage act where we had to come up with a basic storyline. The one that stuck with me most, however, was the vocal exercise, as it seemed like the most vital bit to nail in a chatbot that would only be interacted with through voice.
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Myself as an object
This was one of the first assignments of the year. We had to find an object that shares characteristics with us and bring the object to life. Before we even got started with this class, I took some personality tests and looked at some I had done a while ago. Based on these archetypes and personality analyses, and taking my own experiences into account, I started off sketching some doodles. I quickly came to either a suitcase or a book as an object to represent me. The book represents how I’m a bit of an autodidact and know a lot of things about a lot of things, whereas suitcase represents everything I’ve seen in life and everything I’ve been through. I chose to go with the suitcase. It’s not so much all bad “baggage”, more so that I carry a lot of stuff around and keep a lot of things in my head. I can find myself reminiscing about the past and I don’t always like opening up about it. Aside from all this deeper stuff, a suitcase is also an object I’m quite familiar with as I’ve seen a lot of the world during my youth. Having spent almost 4 years […]
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