Cyfle-D10-Rob Lloyd

2007-03-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

Week Twenty Four
19th March - 23rd March 2007

It's all over. Sob. Dimension 10 (the last ever, maybe) is at an end. It's painful, it's a day of sorrow, it's a day of trauma and devestation. On the plus side we're going bowling!

What an utterly brilliant six months it has been. I've learnt just an incredible amount and had the pleasure of working with some truly brilliant and unique individuals. So a big, big, big thank you to them for making the time here such a pleasure. I've made some great and (hopefully) long lasting friends. I'll remember you always guys n gals. Well at least until next week.

Also a HUGE mega massive big ass shout out to SuperG known otherwise as Gareth Davies. You're enthusiasm and belief in us has been truly inspiring and you're a propper legend.

Bring back Dimension 10! It's too good to die so young!

2007-03-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

Week Twenty Three
12th March - 16th March 2007

This has been a week of extreme typing. Got a hell of a lot of documentation to work through and it's not dissapearing fast!

Had a couple of interesting visitors this week. Had a days CSS trainging from Jake Rays on which, while really informative and a great workshop, came a little bit to lste for the majority of people. Most of us had gone past the level at which Jake was teaching, although I did pick up a few pointers structure wise.

Next week is the grad show so we're all (particularly Nic) beavering away toward making that as classy an event as we can.

See you there! (eh, maybe)

2007-03-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

Week Twenty Two
5th March - 9th March 2007

Well we've had some debriefs back from the work experience had a nice catch up with each other. Seemed like everybody had a good time during their placements. Nice to be back in D10 though. We're currently all looking forward (eugh) to writing up our documentation and sorting the Grad show.

2007-03-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

Week Twenty One
25th February - 2nd March 2007

Well work experience at the Beeb is over and what an enjoyable couple of weeks it was. It really suprised me just how relaxed the working environment is in their New Media department. I had expected a chaotic mass of stressed out people, but it all seemed very chilled out. In fairness it may have just been a quiet period.

Well the Belonging site (or at least a couple of pages of it) were delivered to Osian the lead developer and he was pleased with my efforts. It was really satisfactory to produce a piece of commercial work to a standard that was acceptable for the likes of the BBC.

I've learnt a heck of a lot this week about CSS and HTML. My structuring has improved greatly and it was reallu interesting working in that kind of environment. The restraints on creativity in the BBC are quite heavy because of the accesbiloity standards they must adhere to, and it was interesting to see how they got around these problemss.

We were also given a tour of the Motion Graphics department which was awesome. They have a huge badass Flame Workstation,the newest in the country, and it's an awesome bit of kit. Very exciting for a Filmand TV geek to see. Editing rocks.

So that's that for the Beeb. The next two weeks will be spent writing up a huge and nasty amount of documentation. So I guess I should make a start, right after this beer.....

2007-02-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

Week Twenty
19th February - 23rd February 2007

This week I've been living it up at the Beeb on my work placement. Things started a little quiet for the first two days whilst the guys n gals decided what it is exactly that Nic and I should be allowed to get our hands on. Eventually we were given some, shock suprise and horror, Belonging work to do! This was actually a cool job to have as the show is due a brand spankin new series soon so it's great to be working on something that's relevant and important to the Beeb. Nic's been given a html quiz to code and design whilst I've been given the CSS of the site to sort out. This is a great learning experiecne for me and it's good to get to gribs with BBC standards and there iin house technolgies such as WIPS and there system of server side includes.

So far I've got some structure up and running, just a case now of implementing the lovely drop shadow magic that I've been landed with!

2007-02-16T01:57:00.000-08:00

Week Nineteen
12th February - 16th February 2007

It's that time again, Deadline week!

As it happens, it all turned out rosey. Orball (as its now known) as a fantastic piece of work and one we can all be proud to have been a part of. Kudos to Nic and Carol for making it look sexy as hell. Have a play!!!

It's been a pleasure working in this group, as it has been working with Nic on the two man brief. It was all a little last minute when it came to Kristi, but we delivered a good piece on time. Check it out!

Well its work experience at the good ol' Beeb for the next two weeks, so I'll let you know how that goes! Been a real pleasure, albeit a stressful one, working on these briefs!

2007-02-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

Week Eighteen
5th February - 9th February 2007

It's all getting crazy round here. And not just our game, which as it happens, does keep getting crazier and crazier too. Check out a recent test here.

Things are advancing well but its still very buggy and time is flying by. I have to admit that Kristi has been placed a little lower in priorities, but we're still confident of pulling off both briefs. Call us crazy but...

Incidently, after two straight defeats including humilation to Scotland, I feel a deep sense of loss and am frankly despairing at the inability to provide any beautiful tries. It may only be Rugby, but it makes grown men cry....

Well back to it!

2007-02-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

Week Seventeen
29th January-2nd February 2007

We're well into the swing of things now with both briefs. We've come up with a majorly crazy concept for a game involving JellyMan bouncing of pads to make that light up. Check out this preview!

So so far so good. We've split ourselves into two major camps. Designers and Developers. Nic and Carol on design, myself, Gareth and Tom on code.

The Kristy brief is coming along too. We've decided to make a small but pretty Flash microsite to complement the launch of Kristi's album. It'll contain some very pretty graphics (stand up Nic) and some cool little effects and gadgets to play with. Thats the plan anyway....

2007-01-27T08:39:00.000-08:00

Week Sixteen
22nd January to 26th Janaury 2007

Good god I'm 25. That's a quarter of a century. I have two dodgy knees, a clicky hip, stiff shoulders, shin splints (at least I reckon they are!) and a sore neck. What'll I be like at fifty! I'll be a jibbering mess upon the floor. Rather like most friday nights...

Well the brief are going ok so far. We've come up with some concepts for Mygo, including, floaty sinky, lightflower, and a few other random names. All based on a wee blob called JellyMan. They did say blue sky.....

2007-01-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

Week Fifteen
15th January-19th January 2007

Busy week again! Well, actually thats a little porky, it needn't have been that busy had me and James done what we inteded to do in the first place and actually signed off the documentation last week. As it was, we didn't. To be fair we were a little wrapped up in discussing James' Contraction and Convergence project. It's a website he's invited us D10enners to help build with the aim of motivating students to join in the C and C campaign. More info can be found on google but its basically a way of cutting C02 emmisons by putting a cap on the worlds emmision levels and distributing it according to size, population, current levels etc. The cool thing being that less developed countries with high populations can trade there emmision levels for hard currency. Check it out!

We recieved our briefs this week. Myself and Nic paired up to set up some kind of website or flash application for an local pop artist named Kristi. You can find her on the promo-cymru website.

It's exciting to be working with such a talented designer as Nic and I'm sure there'll be lots of fun and giggle along the way.

The second brief is sweet as. We have to produce a game for Mygo, a Malaysian game company. It's totally blue sky so we have to get our thinking caps on and come up with something totally different that will appeal across nations, genders and ages. Simple then.....

I'm in a great group including Tom, Carol, Nic and Gareth. It's really going to test us but you've gotta love the challenge!

So the end of the week

2007-01-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

Week Fourteen
8th January-12th January 2007

Another Christmas over. Another Turkey well and truly butchered. No snow as usual...
Well it'd great to back in D10 we've got some wicked briefs on the horizon, including one from a Malyasian games company which should really test our brains!!

Relatively quiet week back going through the debriefs for the Belonging project and writing up the documentation. Still trying to shift mince pies from the fridge....

2006-12-22T15:08:00.000-08:00

Week Thirteen
18th December-21st December 2006

That was a frantic week. The game was finished at 5pm on the Thursday. Gareth kindly gave us the Friday off. So the Deadline arrived and I was pretty darn pleased with what we'd achieved. The fact that the thing works at all is quite amazing. The only bugs that came up was a little font problem when we embedded the fonts at the end. So overall I'm really pleased. It looks fantastic so kudos to James, and it works, so Kudos to me!

Here's a link to the final game...
'Belongin' Belonging?'

Well have a great Christmas and remember, methene is bad for the environment, so ditch the sprouts!!

2006-12-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

Week Twelve
11th December-15th December 2006

Half way through the Flash brief now and things are going pretty well. Had a good meeting with the BBC and nailed down an idea involving a quiz in a kind of Monoply environment. The coding is quite complex because of the strcture of the quiz and how the user interacts with the game. It's coming along though with a bit of help from Neil and the design is looking good on James side. We decided almost immediately to split the coding and design duties straight down the middle and it's working really well....

Here's some tasters of the design..

2006-12-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

Week Eleven
4th December-8th December 2006

We were given our Flash briefs on Tuesday. I've been partnered up with James which is a great oppurtunity to learn a bit of time management skills since James is pretty anal about planning and the like. I think we should make a decent team.

The brief we were given is from the BBC and revolves around their BBC Wales drama series Belonging. Can't say I've ever seen it but it conjures up echoes of Eastenders in the Valleys. The application should look to educate the new viewers and well as entertain them and regular viewers.
Quite a challening brief so lots to get my teeth into....

2006-12-04T03:08:00.000-08:00

Week Ten
27thNovember-1st December 2006

Flash training begin this week. Neil Jenkins came down to the training and was excellent. Looking forward to the project, providing I don't have go anyway near he design. For the sake of all things nicely designed, do NOT LET ME NEAR THE DESIGN.

Anway...

Learned loads of cool tricks this week and Flash is fun to work with. The potential for making funky movies is great. I imagine there'll be some very nice work produced in this Brief.

Can't believe how fast things are flying. Saw the coca-cola xmas ad the other day. A sure sign that Christmas is a comin'. Top tip of the day, avoid town on a Saturday. At all costs. Also thinking of starting a campaign to ban slow, meandering people from shopping. Grrr...

2006-11-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

Week Nine
20th-25th November 2006

This week has been quite quiet and a nice comedown from the stresses of the previous week. We've been writing Self Evaluations, Group Evaluations and had some training in Sound Design which was good fun. Making bleeps and drum loops into something recognisable is a fun challenge, although better done with the headphones on to avoid enraged D10 neighbours...

We also cut up and remixed some text from Moby Dick a la William Burroughs. What I came up with was a little disturbed, frankly, but involved the rears of hyppos. It will stay safely hidden away on my hard drive...

2006-11-18T01:08:00.000-08:00

Week Eight
12th-17th November 2006

Deadline week. Ouch. Well here's the finished (almost) site in all its glory.
Come to Cardiff Bay

It was a late night effort on the Friday to get the content into the site ready for the meeting with sequence at 9am Friday, but it was worth the effort. Phil from sequence seemed quite impressed with mine and Shamim's efforts especially considering the time frame we had. There were a few elements that I would have liked to have implemented, such as a language selector and a Bay Directory, however we simply ran out of time to attempt these. I've learned a lot from this Brief particularly about time management and working within a team structure. Also the fact that we were learning as we worked within a strict time limit was reflective of a real-world environment.

Also due in on Friday was the dreaded Mock-up. Thankfully I was able to get to grips with Illustrator to the extent that I could draw some (shoddy) characters and maps. I quite like the concept of the game, and the central character, Billy Blaze, is a legend harking back to the early 90's gaming. You can't beat a bit of retro. I've uploaded the powerpoint file in case anyone wants to take a peek.
Lunchhour Mockup

So next week is a bit more chilled out, with some debriefing and sound design easing us out of the stress of this week. Marvelous.

2006-11-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

Week Seven
6th-10th November 2006

So we're in the second week of the dreamweaver project. So far things are moving forward at a pace. Admittedly not a particularly fast one but who's quibbling...

I'm spending this week attempting to write the CSS for the website. We had a meeting with Phil Murphy of Sequence on Tuesday which was reassuring in that he was happy we were going in the right direction. His comment about our deisgn abilities was particularly amusing 'they could do with a designers touch' being understatement of the day.

So next friday is the big deadline, with both the Mock Up and the Brief due in the same day. I've decided to concentrate solely on the Brief during the day and the mock-up at night. Meaning late nights ahead. But at least I get to draw inspiration from various selections of wines. Put it this way, it can't make my drawings any worse...

2006-11-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

Week Six
29th October-4th November 2006

First things first, lets get the Maya brief out the way! Here's my flaming ball of rock in all its glory. Pump up the volume!

So on to the Dreamweaver Brief!

I've been paired up with Shamim and asked to produce a website for a company called Sequence. The site is basically a Tourism guide for the Cardiff Bay area. It needs to attract new visitors but also be useful to people already familiar with the bay.

Here's an outline of the brief...

'Come to Cardiff Bay'

-A fictional site designed to encourage people from Cardiff and elsewhere to come visit the Bay and its features.

-Design a site map, addressing visitors both familiar and unfamiliar with the Bay and addresses the type of tasks they want to achieve, e.g. find out what to do, where to go, where to stay etc.

-Create a design which is both clear and fresh and reflects some landmarks of the Bay.

It must :-

-be accessible to AA standards and have potential to be multi-lingual

-use modern XHTML and CSS techniques

-be conscious of search engine requirements

-be compatible across all major browsers

-be WC3 compatible

-be optimized for quick browser response time

-be scaleable for future content.

So there's the brief! More soon on how its going!

2006-10-30T01:37:00.000-08:00

Week Five
22nd-27th October 2006

It's quite scary how quickly you (or at least I) forget stuff! It's only been a month since I stopped playing with html and CSS in my old job and yet I seemed to have forgotten the most basic stuff! The week has been spent learning Dreamweaver with Steve which I've never used before but is very simple to pick up. I think by the end of the week I'd got to grips with it all again and I'm looking forward to the brief!

Had a great D10 night out on Friday....(Note to self, lay off the Strongbow in future!)

2006-10-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Week Four
16th-20th October 2006

Wow, the course has been going a month already! Time flies when your having fun!
This week was definately the most enjoyable so far as we spent the week learning Maya under the excellent tutorlidge (and patience) of Matt.

We were given the brief to produce a Ident for a fictional music channel. I've had great fun learning Maya and animating the project despite the experience sometimes being hair removingly frustating. The project is due on the 3rd Novemeber so keep an eye out for updates!

The premise of my project involves a firey comet rocketing trhough space..... At least, thats the theory! We'll see how it turns out....

2006-10-16T02:31:00.000-07:00

Week Three
9th-13th October 2006

This week was spent writing and producing our Digital Stories. I decided to tell the story of a Glacier Hike I did in New Zealand in June 2005.

The result is below. I'm pretty pleased with it though I still think it could do with some tweaking and some de-cheesifying. But I'll leave it alone, if only because we've got too much work to have the time to tinker!

The workshop with Catherine Lindstrum was extremely helpful. She helped me see that my story needed to be more personal and needed more detail in order to keep the audiences attention. I struggled to rewrite the script for most of the day but stumble across a wee bit of inspiration and ended up writing the main bulk in around five minutes. The day made me realise that writing a script requires you to be far more open and honest with your story than I imagined.

2006-10-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

Week Two
2nd-6th October 2006

Well this week was one to remember, despite it being somewhat of a blur being in Thailand and all. So many stories, none suitable for this Blog! There are some tales that are best left untold....

(One thing I will say is pack plenty of imodium, Thai food is a little fiery!)

2006-09-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

Week One
25th-29th September 2006

First days are always a bit of an unknown quantity and I often find they can veer indiscriminately between excitement and that nasty feeling in your gut, as if you've just seen your parents walk out of Ann Summers. However, Monday was remarkably weighted toward the excitement department. I honestly didn't know quite what to expect from the course and the informal but informative discussions about Cyfle in general and the nature of the course were extremely enlightening and stimulating.

The course director was very pleased with the caliber of the trainees and it seems like there's a great mix of different talents and that everybody has something important to offer. I personally am looking forward to creating multimedia content such as video, sound and the like. Having come from a film background I feel that my skills can be used too good effect in this area.

Being from North Wales I was introduced by Iona to the group and she asked that they be nice to me. This was a nice touch and helped to disguise the fact that I am in fact friendless and homeless. However my traveling has set me in good stead for being in this situation, and with luck It’ll be neither before I leave for Thailand!

The two weeks I had booked in Thailand before I knew about the course were concerning me slightly as I think it could be very easy to fall irretrievably behind. Luckily I am able to change the flights and cut short my trip by a week. So I'll be back for the Digital Storytelling, which is a relief as I'm looking forward to that.

Tuesday morning was spent discussing various definitions of Interactive Media. I especially liked the idea of electrifying the thoughts and action centres of peoples minds." We looked at the various uses of Multimedia such as Education, Corporate, Entertainment etc and also at the various ways in which Multimedia is constructed.

In the afternoon we went on to evaluate four websites and analyse them using the following questions:

1. How easy is it to use?
2. What audience is it made for?
3. Is it a commercial/educational/entertainment product?
4. Is it obvious how to use it, even before you click?
5. Can you tell how it was made?
6. What clues are there?
7. Does it contain mostly image/text/sound?
8. Are you satisfied with the way it works?

1. Billy Harvey Music
I found the layout a little haphazard and often confusing and this is a shame as it detracted from an otherwise very impressive site. A huge amount of content and some excellent animation work such as a Billy's lip synching of songs. A great site for fans and well constructed, just let down by the untidy layout.

2. The Badluck'o'Meter
This is great example of the use of Interactive Media in advertisement. The site initially comes across as a flash quiz on the various dangers and hazards that you find in your house. It uses nice 3dMax and Illustrator graphics and is very user friendly and user interactive. It is an excellent piece of Edutainment which makes it an excellent advert for the Insurance agency that have commissioned it.

3. Own You're Own C
Although initially extremely visually appealing and with lots of promise of things to experiment with, I found that after ten minutes of playing around I still had absolutely no idea of what I was supposed to be doing and what the purpose of the site was. It is baffling in the extreme and smacks of the site designers being given too much creative license. A very frustrating site as it seemed to hold a lot of potential. One to explore sure, but you don't feel like doing it for long.

4. Fly Me to the Moon
Again this is a site that promises much but fails to deliver. The initial launch sequence is nicely designed and gives the user the impression that this is an advertisement that they can have some fun with. Unfortunately, the launch sequence is where the fun ends. The user is only given control over movement of the ship, whilst the 'afterburner' effect when clicking the mouse button is laughable in its utter lack of effect. A very disappointing effort that does not reflect well upon its commissioners.

Wednesday was spent learning the basics of Usability and the concept of Heuristics as Developed by Donald Norman and Jacob Nielsen.

These are two insanely clever dudes who's ideas will be discussed in the presentations by Aled and Lyndsey

Again we were given five examples to look at and here's what I thought of each.

1. Special Ten DVD
Special Ten is a DVD magazine that deals with music, video and general entertainment. If is realised monthly and this was issue 8. Interestingly each issue is designed and developed by an entirely different team. This issue was extremely well designed with lots of modern, sharp graphics and good use of audio. Extremely well put together and a delight to use.

2. Eye Toy for Playstation 2
This was the obviously the most enjoyable item to use and me and Tom had loads of fun playing with it. In fact with played with it for far too long, but it's an addictive little monster! Brilliantly designed and very intuitive. Great fun!

3. Go for Gold
What an absolutely awful experience. It was literally painful. Playing this so called 'educational game' would surely scar a child for life. Completely useless menus, comfusing layout, no educational value, terrrible games and appaling graphics. A shocker of the highest order. Avoid at all costs.

4. EuroTalk Learn Italian
Another shocker. This program is meant to teach you italian but it's such a frustrating experience that I can't imagine that anyone would bother. The fact that it wouldn't even install on most peoples PC's probably didnt help. Badly designed and developed.

5. Being John Malkovich DVD
We were running a bit short of time thanks to the Eye Toy addiction so didnt spend to much time with this one. Seemed a nicely presented piece that fitted in with the film. However it seemed to have been adapted from the original vision to incorporate some rather bizarre icons that were garish in comparision to the rest of the DVD menu. Frankly they stood out like Vince Vaughn in a dwarf convention. A shame because the rest of the DVD was well made and nicely designed.

On Friday I flew off to Thailand for the week....