It's amazing how time can pass by without anyone noticing

Ok, so it's like the 31:th of October today, ages since I updated this. Anyhow, so what's up? We have done a lot since my last post, we got all our 50 ideas complete, managed to get a top 5 and choose one, not one of those 5 tho. We changed our mind after a conversation with our project leader who liked one of our "very risky darling" ideas so we decieded to go for that. TerraByte, that's our project.

So what's up with this crazy idea? We are gonna add a layer to Google Earth, and create a new way to browse the internet. We are selling spaces on Google Earth, in diferent layers, like first layer is "Buy a nation, second is buy a city and third is buy a quarter", roughly. And where your spot is, you will be able to do a lot of things, like hosting your own website, split it up and sell to others to earn cash and stuff like that.

So we are now sitting in our own "island" with tables working on our business plan, our concept book and our presentation, 100% speed all the time.. no wonder we are all very tired and sleepy...

The front page of our concept book

Another week have passed

Concept and development, that's the name of our new project, started this monday so I've been kinda slow to upgrade my blog, sorry about that. Anyways, first week have been all about ideas, how to get them, use them and develope them. So our first asignment was to get up with 50 ideas in 4 days, from those 50 should we sellect 5 and make a deeper dive, and upload both lists on our server.

To be honest, it felt realy far away to have 50 ideas in 4 days, but after two days and lots of cofee, we had our ideas, almost all of them. Friday morning when we started to sum it all up, we had 60 ideas, wich means we could remove 10 less good ones. That realy felt great, it raises the quality of our work.

The hard part was to pick 5 favorites. We simply let everyone pick 5 personal favorites and then we checked to see what each member had chosen and the groups top 5 was our list.

We all had to kill some of our darlings, but I think the final list is realy good and couldnt have been of higher quality thinking of the circumstances.

Time to go home, take a 2 days long rest and be back in shape monday morning.

Exhibition... check!

Last day today, the exhibition yesterday went great. Got a lot of possitive feedback and a couple of suggestions that we should pitch this idea for H&M, we might do that. So today we worked with a video about or project.. we should promote it on youtube and try to reach as many as possible.

Everyone was realy tired today, so we went home early, trying to get back in shape til monday. All deadlines passed, so we can go to sleep with a reliefed heart :)

This is our video, contact me if you got any questions about it!

we're almost there

We have one more day to go before deadline, that feels great, we are 95% done, and just have the frame building and a lot of testing left to do so we get everything to work properly til tomorrow. We will make it, no doubt about that. To be honest, I didn't think we would make it last week, we stil had a lot to do, but we pulled trough, we focused and organised for all we were worth.

We bought tree and fabric today, to make our display. Our frame will be 2.5 x 2.0 meters and and keeps almost the same proportions as our stage does now.

We didn't manage to link together two diferent ourfits tho, so we can't show that in our prototype. We got it half way, we managed to load the second outfit, but as soon as you moved, it fliped back to our first outfit.

Nicolas don't feel so good, he did visit the doctor today, and is going back there tomorrow, I sure hope he'll be fine, he got the illustration work to do, not a huge loss if he don't manage to complete it, it's more important that he feels good, but still, would be great if he had the strength to finish it.

Off for now, will be back tomorrow and tell you how it went with our deadline, and Thursady it's showtime :)

The day after

My head hurts, strange huh? Was a great night yesterday, no doubt about that. And they already posted two videos about this event at Resumé's website. Check it out! I was able to chat with alot of people form our business and presentate myself, that felt great. The school was promoted and it felt like the feedback of the evening was realy good.

We had a progress check meeting today, was realy useful, got a lot of things sorted out, only a few more days to go, full throttle now, nothing else counts. We'll finish this with our standards high in the sky, our chests lifted high and with a coold healty breeze of air flowing trough our lounges.

the D day

Alright, it's finaly thursday the forth of october and just a few hours left til Resumébar opens it doors and the evening is on! We still have alot ot do, so this is the last thing I'm gonna do before I shut down my computer and get my ass into work.

We had a group meeting today aswell, decided a couple of things that would make our project easier and take it forward. For example we will no longer use a mask to hide everything but your face in the webcam, we will simply "cut a hole" in our stage and let the person using it place his head where the hole is. We will also add some sounds for our "touch zones" so when you raise your right arm, it will go BOOM. Hm, not realy but you get the idea of it.

Gotta get some work done now, I'll tell you all about the evening tomorrow.

Should it realy look like that?

Once you solve a problem, you can be sure that it will generate atleast 2 new ones. But it moves in the right direction. We got the sencors working as they should, (atleast for now, who knows what tomorrow will bring). So what's up next? We gotta get some propper movie clips for our animations, what we got now is very very alpha, the only purpose with the animation we have now is so we can have a visual of what's happening.

We also gotta work with the masking alot.. we can mask one color, but since we can't expect the users to wear one color only clothes we gotta do something about that.

Tomorrow is also Resumébar, wich means less work with the project and more time prepearing everything so we are fit for fight when all guests arrive.

I'm off kinda early today, since my dear mother is in town so I'm going to meet up with her. She got some stuff with her that I need so a boy gotta do what a boy gotta do.

Before I leave for the day I've spent my day working with our animation, or more true is that I've mixtured with it. I did also spend some time looking for some errors in our flash, but Lars solved it before I'd even sat myself into the code, (was the first time I read it).

So what else have I done in the project. I've made all graphic work so far. That is pretty much the stage and the "touch links", made in photoshop. That took about 2 days to get an acceptable stage ready with all depth illusions and proportions needed to give a pretty real look.

The stage itself is made in layers with patterns and some low opacity color overlay, took alot of google work to find a good picture of a stage so I could see what it realy looked like and try to get that style on my own stage. The curtains are from a photosite, enlarged, and some color changing and an additional shadow to make the depth come true even more.

The stage background is also made with patterns, opacity and sice changing, together with some perspective changing and some warping. So it's actually two pictures, fliped horizontaly, and then merged together. I first tried with a darker background, but that didn't work, it looked to dark and to "scarry" and not what we were after, we wanted something lighter and more fun.

Anyways, I'm glad that my stage was liked by the whole group, so now we got our background and our "touch links" made. you can see the result down here.