Tag Archives: 534

Even though it is at the end of the semester, I am posting an overview of additional reading materials that were part of the discussions throughout the class. The readings are grouped loosely according to the parts of the class:

Narrative and Interactive Media:
Seymour Chatman: Story and Discourse, Cornell University, 1978
W.J.T. Mitchell: On Narrative, University of Chicago Press, 1980
Rudolph Arnheim: Film as Art, University of California Press, 1957
Ian Bogost: Unit Operations, MIT Press, 2006
Borries, Walz, Böttger: Space Time Play, Boston, 2007
Aristotle and Malcolm Heath: Poetics, 1997
Carlo Ginzburg: Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 1989
Chris Hales: Interactive Film and New Narrative Interfaces, 2002
Marsha Kinder: Hotspots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever, 2002
Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality, 2003
Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions, 1999
Lev Manovich: Language of New Media, Cambridge, 2001
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, 2005

Cinematography and Montage Theory:
James Monaco: How to Read a Film, Oxford University Press, 2000
Kris Malkiewicz: Cinematography, Simon & Schuster, 1992
Bruce Block: The Visual Story, Burlington, 2001
Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form, New Yorl/London, 1977
Sergei Eisenstein: Towards a Theory of Montage, London, 1991

Storyboarding:
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics, New York, 1993
Wendy Tumminello: Exploring Storyboarding, Florence, 2005

Space:
Dariusz Jacob Boron: A History of Digital Gamespace, Boston, 2007
Henry Jenkins: Game Design as a Narrative Architecture, Boston, 2007
Ronald Levaco: Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1974
Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City, Cambridge 1960
W.H. Matthews: Mazes and Labyrinths, New York, 1970
Erwin Panofsky: Perspective as Symbolic Form, New York, 1997
Robert Venturi: Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, 1972

Interface and Visual Design:
Ben Schneiderman: Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, Boston, 2009
Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, 2001
Jacques Bertin: Semiology of Graphics, New York, 2011
Kimberly Elam: Geometry of Design, Princeton, 2001
Philip Kortum: HCI Beyond the GUI, Burlington, 2008
Peter Morville: Ambient Findability, Sebastopol, 2005

Here are the shaders I mentioned in our previous class.

Display texture on both sides of mesh:
The first shader “bothSidesShader” will be displaying the texture that you are assigning to it on both sides of the mesh you attach it to. When you open the shader file you will see a line that reads “Cull Off”, which is where all the magic happens. You can tweak the rest of the shader to your needs.
Download the shader-file here: bothSidesShader.shader

Alpha mask for video:
This shader gives you two slots for textures: The first one is for the movie-texture and the second one is for the alpha channel. The shader allows you to use any image file with an alpha channel to mask the movie-texture. The image that the alpha channel is assigned to, will be ignored.

In my tests this shader also supports fading in and out of the texture without any problems with a script containing code along the lines like:
renderer.material.color.a = renderer.material.color.a – Time.deltaTime;

Download the shader file here: MovieTextureShader.shader

Moving on to the last assignment – which you can download here:
CTIN_534_4_assignment

And here is finally the third assignment for you to download: CTIN_534_3_assignment

You can download the second assignment here: CTIN_534_2_assignment

After you are done with the first camera exercises you can move right on to the first class project. Please download the description of it here: CTIN_534_1_assignment

As a little warm-up exercise before we launch into the first class project please complete the following assignment until our class meeting on Tuesday, September 6, 2011.

Download the assignment here: CTIN_534_non_narrative

Here are all the readings for the class. Please prepare them for the day they are listed on the syllabus.

Reading for Week 3, Sept 7, 2010:

Sergei Eisenstein: A Dialectic Approach to Film Form; in: Eisenstein, S., Film Form, 1977

Film_Form

Reading for Week 5, Sept 21, 2010:

Italo Calvino, Cybernetics and Ghosts; in: Calvino, I., The Uses of Literature, 1986

Cybernetics_and_Ghosts

Reading for Week 8, Oct 12, 2010:

Espen Arseth, Allegories of Space; in Cybertext Yearbook 2000

Allegories_of_Space

Reading for Week 11, Nov 2, 2010:

Umberto Eco, The Open Work; chapter 1

Open_Work

Reading for Week 12, Nov 9, 2010:

Frances Dyson: Embodying Technology; in: Sounding New Media, 2009
Embodying_Technology

Reading for Week 14, Nov 24, 2010:

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the Environment; in: Lynch, K., The Image of the City, 1960

Image_of_the_City

Welcome to CTIN 534 – Experiments in Interactivity. On our class blog you will find all posts regarding our class, the assignments, example code etc. You can also use it to share your insights, post versions of assignments, and post references to interesting things you have seen that might be of interest for the whole class.

Here is the syllabus for Download: USC_CTIN534_syllabus_2011

Here is the fourth and last assignment for this semester – download it and have fun:
CTIN_534_4_assignment