Doox's Invitation

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October 30, 2004

Week 2 Film "They Live"

I remember this film has totally different impression between the start of it and the end of it.At first it seemed like a realistic story of a traveler who is trying to find a job. But suddenly the sun glasses, the special function to recognize who's not people. Actually I liked the idea of the glasses function to tell what's behind of various kinds of media like books, billboards, TV and so on by ummerizing that into simple texts like "Obey", "Sleep" etc. But why suddenly wrestlers? why is that fighting scene is ridiculously long? That made me think about what's the background of this film's birth. Thinking about that it's echo from the film "Merchants of Cool". The trend of that time, wrestling was so popular and maybe the "man" of the production company wanted to insert the scene that long to attract people to watch the film and make money. It's kind of depressing to think about what's behind the media like this almost always money. And also the last part of scene was 2 buddies trying to escape from the building and it feels like from famous arcade games of that time which I don't know what the tiles are. Media affected by other media, media affecting people and also people affecting media... This is really powerful interactivity which flows around the world and makes me think about what's other side of this. If this media has bad influence(it is also not an easy thing to tell what's bad influence and what's not and why), what kind of power related to regulate this and specifically what's the organization in a country to deal with this problem.

Posted by doox at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

Week 1 "Merchants of Cool"

It makes me think about how media affects young kids to feel what's cool thing and what's not. Media like TV uses every possible tools to make audience to watch the program. It's money related bussiness. They use what appears to be COOL to make favorable feeling for something they try to sell to make money. If a kid don't know this tendancy of what's cool and what's not, then the kid may be sort of isolated, from kind of culture they share with other kids out of this kind of public media. This Coolness among young kids usually doesn't come out of thoughtful choice, but they tend to accept without criticism what media creates as popular things of the current time. Bussiness people want to make their brand as the symbol of that Coolness of current time and try to link something popular at the time with their brand, and now "Brand" itself is on the table of judgement to be classified as a coolness or not. Now, the choice of buying a product is not necessarily because of the quality of the basic function of itself but rather because of how "Cool" the brand is. Young kids try to immitate the image of "Coolness" from TV commercial, magazine, and also a classmate who does the same thing. Now, the media trying to know much more of this kids as big costumers reflects them on the screen and watches them imitating what the media itself affected to them. Now, the media is affected by what they did. This kind of interactivity makes me worry about what's behind all this happening. Thinking about it, I cannot erase the thought that it's always money behind that. This reminds me the importance of regulation system for public media and what's the government's role in this and how hard to control this kind of social interactivity which has many sides involved.

Posted by doox at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2004

the very first Course Overview Questions from Syllabus

* What is Interactivity?
action and reaction. active way of appreciating a media.
envolvement, not only accepting but also affecting,
controllability

* Why is Interactivity worth studying?
I believe interactivity makes people more engaged in appreciating
a media. Audience become more envolved and active when they have
control to express themselves in a media. It's far more powerful
tool than non-interactive media.

* What are classifications of interactivity?
Interactivity between what objects? people vs people? people vs media? media vs media?
How much freedom or controllability? how much audience can manipulate the content of the media?
How fast the reaction is? Is it immediate like playing game? Is it after 5 days like international mail?

* Interactivity and new media - what's the difference?

old media also has a certain degree of interactivity like selecting TV channels.
But when it comes to new media, the degree of interactivity need to be
a lot more improved in making audience participate the media and have control
of manipulating them.

Posted by doox at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

My 3rd film "88 Teardrops"

Finally, I finished the last individual film project. This time I casted myself as a main actor. OMG, what an emptiness it was~! Moving the camera, and acting(and ,for sure,there's nobody reacting) and going back to the camera and so on... Now... it's group project~! there will be no more loneliness, yeah~~~

3rd indivisual film "88 Teardrops"
by Doo-yul Park(aka Doox)

INTENT:

* to make a film which sound and music are taking greater part than my 1st and 2nd.
- that's the reason I choose a pianist's story. Also raindrop sound and piano sound are somewhat similar in their transparency, and the teardrop ,which means the painful process of reaching high artistic level, also reminded me of raindrop. Those combination of "raindrop + teardrop + pianosound" gave me inspiration of visual and sound/music design in the film.

* to create visually interesting scenes & and improve the light which I missed in 2nd film.
- taking shots from the raining campus, I found really visually strong scenes and those were mostly scenes with flowers. So I decided to use flowers as a meaningful symbol in the film.
- when I saw a yellow flower which looks like a hand, I got an idea of dissolving it exactly where the pianist's hand is. That was the start and I came up with more ideas of dissloving
things like dissolving between dry scenes and wet scenes,piano keyboard and the road, and things like that.
- piano keyboard itself has visually interesting figure and it was just great to look at in a certain angle of camera. I wore black overshirt to make an impression of unity with
the black piano, and I also chose white overshirt for 2nd one.

* to make the film say something but not all the way serious. I wanted to make it humorous sometime but also making audience think about the painful process of being an musician.

SYNOPSIS:
* a guy is playing piano, he thinks his technique is perfect and is sure to have favorable response from his teacher at the coming lesson. But the teacher thinks there's no feeling in his play and even hits him with the piano score. He is so dissapointed and frustrated that he even throws his keyboard to the floor. But in a second he feels sorry what he did for the keyboard. He sleeps besides the keyboard and is awaken to find that it's raining. He starts to play the keyboard improvizationally with his own simple melody. There's raining scenes of campus, and he keeps practicing. In the next morning, he seems to be more comfortable from yesterday's frustration after listening raindrops and playing the keyboard with his own melody. He goes to the lesson again and the teacher tells him not to be stiff and to be himself. The teacher says he has to play the piano with his own feeling like when he looks at a flower. He tries to play Rachmaninoff with his mind and plays it in a JAZZ style. He also plays chopsticks and suddenly the teacher joins to play with him, and they seem to be comfortable to each other again. At the concert, he played well and the teacher is proud of him. The two hug each other after finishing the performance with applause from audience.

CHALLENGES:
* making various angles for playing piano and make their sound & music synchronize seemlessly.
* make big impression of symbolic dissolve transition like flower and hand, keyboard and road, and dry scenes and wet scenes.
* acting(also practicing the piano piece"Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concert") by myself
* giving various kinds of height and angle to scene(I used my keyboard stand to make various height) without panning or zooming(because I had to act away from the camera)
* recording sounds like(a guy next room hitting the wall, keyboard falling down, etc.)

Posted by doox at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)

Clock Project

Clock was really interesting subject to think about to implement some interactivity. I learned a lot more about how to program FLASH more OOP-likely. Reflecting on those days I put lots of time to make 2D games with direct draw years ago, I'm just surprised how fun and simple FLASH is.

Intent:
* Making an interactive work(especially a GAME for me) with a practical clock and also the work has to be drive from a clock’s functions.
* A clock has this cicular outline and also moving 3 different hands and I found them interesting in a way of making game world exactly driven from that.
* Game world has circular coordinate system and second hand is the most dynamic hand(except millisecond hand). Actually playing game is sometimes just killing time, so it’s interesting to make a game with clock to kill time. 
* Second hand only moves 6 degrees in a second, so it’s not dynamic enough and also millisecond hand was too fast and distracting. So I chose to rotate the land counterclockwise. That gave me twice faster chance to shoot enemies in clockwise but twice slower chance to shoot in counterclockwise. That was interesting change of the game element.
* Different to most of the shooting game I wanted to make a game in which every single shot is so critical that you have to be very careful for every shot you make. In this game, actually if I lose the chance to hit black guy once when he is close to me and another black guy is chasing from opposite direction(which is often happening in the game), that’s critical to the player’s life. This limitation is not something which makes players bored or out of control but something that more challenges them.
* procedural land generation is for making things as less STATIC as possible and also to make different height of enemy. By that, it’s more challenging to shoot enemies because players actually have to decide when to press SPACEBAR with how far away the enemy is from the second hand’s angle and also what’s the distance between the center and enemy’s hitpoint height.
CHALLENGES:
* drawing procedural landscapes around the clock.
* generating dynamic instancies of MovieClips like Gems, Enemies.
* Circular Coordinate System:
- landscape has Enemies and Gems as its children but player is
Another separate MovieClip and I need to calculate the actual coordinate
Of player according to players movement by key press and also the rotation of the landscape itself.

Posted by doox at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

Adaptation Project Flash Screenshots

I wanted to make more detailed drawing for every scenes in the project, but I could afford to put some time for only a few scenes like openning scene like below.

[OPENING]

I just used sketch drawing to make rest of the flash. Actually I finished drawing 3 blocks of map with detail, but I couldn't afford to put more time and had to discard them.
[GAME INTERFACE]

If a player links a right piece of the poem to a right object in the world, simple visual shows up like below.
[LINK TO OBJECT]

This was my first FLASH experience. Fortunately my C++ experience helped a lot to understand FLASH. But I think in my 2nd FLASH, I think I did something really look like a real program.

FLASH is lots of fun. I'm surprised at the simpleness compared to C++.
I loved to spend more time to think about the design and drawings.

Posted by doox at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

Adaptation Project Sketch

Adaptation from a poem in the opera "Nickson in China"

I can keep still
I can say nothing for a while
while the sparks die high in the air,
the sun moves on.

Nothing I fear has ever harmed me,
why should you?
Marshall your forces, I'll lie low.
The drought has made me thin and strong.

When they took off their coats,
and hung them over branches,
and the pick scraped the eroded ground,
I shook with pure excitement.

I emagined a girl's night dream from this poem. She read a poem from a book before she got asleep. In her dream, she explores a strange world. People from there ask her to save them from years of winter
by collecting teared down pieces of the poem and linking them to a certain object which seems to be connected with the piecie of the poem. For each success of link, sun will go one step close to the village and if the girl solve all 6 pieces than people "took off their coats... and she shakes with pure excitement."

Posted by doox at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

DOOX3D ENGINE Specification

This is the 3D Game Engine I programmed when I was working in a Korean game design company for 2 years from 2002 to 2004. It was originally a 2D game engine. But I implemented every 3D part of this engine on top of that including 3D scene related main framwork, character animation(my own file format/avatar system/skin animation), collision detection, simple physics, 3ds MAX studio export plug-in for graphic assets, scene management, octree based culling, view frustum culling, Vertex/Pixel shaders and so on. Screen shots inside the documents are from a racing game I was working on with this engine.
I started programming my 3D engine from Direct3D v7.0 and the latest version is now Direct3D 9.0 based with HLSL support.
What I'm trying to achieve with this engine is designing a game which contains truely innovative elements in it. I don't think a good engine always makes a good game but I believe lots of great innovation can be driven by, but not only by, what an engine can supports technically.

(If you're reading this from the main page, then pictures look out of frame. To see the whole pictures, click "DOOX3D Engine" from the "CATEGORIES" right side of this webpage.)

Posted by doox at 03:47 PM | Comments (6)

Cover for my 1st film "PICKPOCKET"

I made this cover for "PICKPOCKET" DVD the other day. Making a category of "DOOX film", it's really fun to reflect those days I filmed this. Lots of thank-you for JESS & MIKE, again.
I'll give you guyz, DVDs with this cover. I didn't have printer and enough spare-time when I finished this. Now I've finished my 3rd film, there's still so many things going on... but making things like this is totally fun enough to enjoy my free time.

Good luck for all you guyz still filming your 3rd~!!!

Posted by doox at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

CTIN541a Category OPEN

Soon there will be images and flash movie files posted here~!

Posted by doox at 01:30 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

MUSIC Category

My music related work will be posted here soon~!

Posted by doox at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

Let's Draw Something~!

I made "ILLUST." Category to encourage myself to keep drawing things. And this is the first one.
I draw this at Glenn's place. It's now posted at his website.
http://www.paradiseworld.net/sotd/585

Posted by doox at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

CTCS505

My CTCS505 related topic will be shown here~!

Posted by doox at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2004

My 2nd Film "LOOK"

I finished my 2nd film last week and I made this DVD cover for actors featured in the film. They were really friendly and supportive. I enjoyed making this film too but I learned a lot more from this one. I used "www.nowcasting.com" to cast actors. There were over 200 actors submitted to this film and I choose 5 of female and 5 of male from them. 3 of female and 3 of male responded. At the open audition just 1 female and 1 male came. That was cool because the two were actually I liked best with their headshots and resume, and they just shined in my film. Most of all, I learned a lot from my laptop crash a day before my screening day. I managed to reach to the class and show my film but it was a real nightmare to recover lost data from that.
This is a comedy film about a couple. At her birthday the guy gives a TEDDY BEAR for her birthday present and actually there's a hidden camera inside the TEDDY BEAR and he tries to sneak a look at her through the TEDDY BEAR's point of view. The story starts from here and there are some more interesting reveals in it. I believe that watching movie itself is kind of sneaking a look at someone's story. In that point of view, it is interesting in this film that the guy is looking at her through the eyes of the TEDDY BEAR and we, the audience, are looking at the guy. This is kind of experimental for me in this point and the "first person view cinema" seminar I had at the ZML influenced me in thinking about the script for this film. I heard Justin is trying to make space for 1st year student's film. I hope to have a chance to show this to you.
Now... it's third film shooting week... it's so fast-paced... third film already? But it's always exciting to make a film.

To all 1st year guys, good luck for your films!!! Hope to see yours, too someday.

Posted by doox at 01:19 AM | Comments (2)