Making progress…

Ok well I’ve been working mainly on the conceptual/visual side of things rather than functionality and navigation. I have been making some of the individual pages and will work on linking them up with my doors concept later. I have been using javascript and in particular the JQuery library and the UI plugins to add interactivity and functionality to the site. The UI plugin allows me to easily integrate a certain amount of interactivity and I have been using it to allow the users to drag and interact with different elements of each page. I wanted to promote the sense that the user is actually becoming and embodying this person, one way I thought I could do this is by allowing the users to interact with different aspects of his life.

Each page has a different theme or addresses a certain aspect of this man’s life. I have been working on pages for his work desk, articles and little clues which details certain elements about the crash involving his wife and daughter, and a page that is specifically about his daughter. I would like to create at least another 3 pages and finish the pages I am currently working on. I want to try and integrate some animation somewhere but I am unsure of where at this present time.

here are some screen shots of the pages I have been working on:

image source: http://www.careeradviceaustralia.gov.au/youth/default.htm

i found this image while I was looking through some sites for another assignment. I have recently been thinking of a way to try and piece all the clues discovered throughout my site together so that there is some sense of resolution and completion in the end. I was thinking that perhaps gradually as the user discovers more about the person and his life, random puzzle pieces are revealed which eventually unmask a final image.

Colour scheme

This is the colour scheme I am currently working with on this site. I’m using predominantly dull, dark colours to help establish the somber tone of the site.

Site Design 1

Here are some screenshots on what I have so far for the design of my site. I wanted to keep the mood quite dark and I think I was able to achieve this so far. This was made in dreamweaver and all the links work so far. Im currently working on the main page (the one with all the doors). I may later on have some sort of animation down the bottom of the page but I want to keep the design very simple and spacious.

influential/inspiring sites

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/identity/site/

This site shares many similarities to the way I envisioned my site. Overall it has a very gloomy and sombre tone which is enhanced by its enabling interactivity through using flash, which also enable animations such as flickering text. As I mentioned in a previous post I really want to make the overall tone of the site quite eerie and mysterious and this is effectively carried out in this particular site.

www.hotel626.com

I really like the eeriness that the creators of this site were able to establish. The site is really interactive and is very effective in what it aims to do – scare people. It gave me a few insights as to how I could also convey the eeriness I wish to convey through my site. Both hotel 626 and the identity movie site made me realise also how much sound can attribute to your site. Sound both in the form of sound effect and music, both were greatly responsible for how effective they were at creating the tone and mood of the site and making the experience what it was.

http://www.energylab.tv/

http://www.thesecretlocation.com/

Both of these sites are great example of how video can be effectively used on the web. After viewing both of these sites I was inspired to incorporate at least a few video elements into my site. The secret location also showed me how the use of colour, in this case only one colour, can add another dimension. In the secret location the creator intelligently used black and white film with only one other residing colour (purple) to emphasise certain elements.

http://www.smetana.net/#

Not only is andreas smetana a talented and innovative photographer, but his online portfolio/website is also very innovative and interesting. What I particularly like about this site is the navigation technique, using, what I presume would be flash, and utilising the scroll functionality on the mouse to navigate through his elements on the screen.

http://www.creatorsofemotion.com/home-int.php

this site was one site which related to out theme of identity quite strongly. I takes video of the faces of many different people, divides each of their faces up and puts it with facial attributes of 4 other random people to create quite a unique and interesting image. This again is a very good example how video is used effectively on the web and its even better because it relates to out theme.

http://www.mnightshyamalan.com/

Lastly this site is the official site of the hollywood director M Night Shyamalan. It is no surprise that his website it rather sombre and mysterious as he is predominantly a horror/thriller film director. The concept of the doors used to open up different pages stemmed from this site. As you wait for the page to load there is a little flash animation of a door opening leading onto the next page. Again this site is very interactive and very eerie which is very much the same direction I am trying to go with my site. This site has almost a game-like feel to it which is not quite my intention for my own site but overall I am able to get a good idea of how I could go about creating a similar tone and mood.

Preliminary site map

This is basically how i envisioned my site to be laid out. There will be an initial splash page for the site which will set the tone for the site as well as ask the user to enter. Once the user presses the enter button displayed on the page, it will take them to a page which will introduce the site and what its about, and give the current context, that is that the main character has amnesia and you are invited to go on a journey with him to discover his past and uncover his identity. The main page will display an array of doors which lead to different parts of the site which will uncover clues to their past. Some examples of what the pages will look like are displayed below.

Concept Outline

after having a think about my last concept (creating an anonymous social networking site), although i like the concept I think it is not really feasible for the amount of time I have to produce it. If I had 6 months to do it I probably could but it would include a lot of back-end work which a) I’m not too familiar with b) is very boring and I dont really want to do too much of it. So reluctantly I decided to change my idea once again.

However, I have come up with a concept which I am happy with, which is much simpler to substantiate. This concept is actually roughly based on  a short story I wrote in year 12 for my 4 unit English class.

In year 12 for my 4 unit English class, I had to write a short story about any topic of my choosing. Essentially the story is about a man who wakes up after a car crash at the bottom of muddy hill and realises that he has completely lost his memory. He has become an amnesiac. I don’t intend to follow the storyline at all really just the amnesiac element. In year 10 I had a friend who was a boxer who suddenly collapsed during one of his training sessions. He woke up the next day with amnesia and was unable to recognise anyone apart from his younger sister. He had no idea who he was, where he was, what had happened, all he knew was what people were explaining to him. When he came back to school a few weeks later he had no idea who we were. It was a really strange sensation trying to reintroduce yourself to someone who you had been close friends with for a few years. This is the initial inspiration for my idea.

Anyway, as I said, my general concept for this website will be based on the theme of “the amnesiac”. It will follow the story of a fictional character who has been affected with amnesia and cannot remember anything of his past life. So essentially the website is dedicated to rebuilding this characters identity, which I know from experience with my high school friend, is a very interesting and difficult experience. The user of the website will learn about this character as they themselves do. On each page will be displayed flashbacks, photos and other clues as to who this person was. In my last post are some photos of example pages displaying clues to the character’s past.

The overall tone of the site will be quite gloomy as I wanted to project the eerie, mysterious side to amnesia and rediscovery. I will use scattered animated images and text which will be moving around the page, making it more dynamic and furthering the general eeriness. I also aim to incorporate elements of film/video, although I’m not entirely sure how at the moment.

The user will navigate through the site via one main page which displays a series of doors. Each door will lead to a completely different place which will unveil something about the identity of that person. And so the user follows this person from a first person perspective and learns who this fictional person is as they themselves do. The only real piece of information that the user starts of with is their physical appearance which could be shown through a reflection on the first page.

Each new place will be a significant part of this person’s life. For example, after going through one door, you may be taken to a deserted bedroom with a few portraits of the protagonist and what appears to be their friends and family. Each new place has a few major indicators or clues as to the identity of this person.

Also I intend to use flash extensively throughout the site to animate text and images as well as navigation elements. I have used flash before and am fairly confident with it although I haven’t done much web-related work with flash. My aim is to allow users to zoom into certain parts of the page such as articles and photos which will be mainly flash dependent. I have also used After Effect a little and would use it for the small video clips i intend to use.

Example pages

week 5 tut

I didn’t save my before shot, don’t worry you’re not missing anything.

Personas (identity online site/tool review)

http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

This morning I was browsing around trying to find a site identity related that I could use for this write up. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like going for the generic type sites and reviewing them, I like to find unique little abstract sites. It just so happens that I stumbled across a very very interesing, well its actually more of a tool than a website, nevertheless it is very much identity related and it is very interesting. This online tool is called “Personas” developed by Aaron Zinman which was part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit which was displayed at the MIT Museum in the USA.

“In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”

Personas  “uses sophistacated natural language processsing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

So essentially this tool takes a your first and lastname, quickly scans through all the information it can find about you on the Internet and presents you with a coloured bar which is labeled with the areas or categories eg Sport, religion, fashion which it found the most information about you from. By doing this Personas is effectively able to characterise you from what the information on the internet.

As Personas scans through the data on the Internet pertaining to the name you provided, and it displays this information as it is scanning and categorising it. For me it picked up that I was a student at Sydney University studying Design Computing, next a sentence relating to my days of playing AFL for Western Suburbs appeared. You can actually observe how this program is thinking and how it is converting these strings of text into these coloured boxes and effectively categorising the data and creating your online profile as seen by the Internet.

For example if I type in Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead) this is what happens:

This is essentially allowing us to observe the brain working, displaying the computer’s “uncanny insights” into our individual indentity.

The main major downfall with personas is that it cannot differentiate between people who have the same name, so for people with fairly generic names such as John Smith, their online identity is a culmination of the identity of all the John Smiths in the world. However, this does give an accurate representation to how the Internet sees us. The internet doesn’t know that John Smith from Canada and John Smith from Sydney are two different people, it only knows that they have the same name and treats them as the same person because of that.

Zinman states that Personas is “meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing out digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now”.

I personally really love this work and Zinman is a genius for creating it. For unique names like mine it works quite well, and I found that the results were quite accurate. This concept of discovering your online identity, as seen by the Internet, is really unique, profound and interesting. Maybe in the future it will be able to differentiate the identity of people with the same name.