Turtle Dash!

On Tuesday we were asked to create a new game to be played the the screen school. There were no limits, but had to be something practical and not to 'out there'.Coming up with the initial idea proved to be quite hard at the beginning because the objective was so broad. After researching online we found that most people nowadays prefer games they can play with other, and be interactive, so we came up with a game that did just that. ‘Cute baby Turtles’ was actually one our first ideas, and thought people are usually drawn into colourful, fun animals. I went and asked various people what kind of game they liked playing when they wanted to pass time, and the most popular was ‘challenge games’.

I think the fact our game can be played with a vast amount of people is a strong point because it gets people involved if they aren’t so confident within smaller groups.

The prezi that Hannah and I produced explains the game and has brief instructions of it.I think the fact that we both actually came up with the idea together incorporating what other people said they liked and wanted made it easier to work together. But having done our separate research it made the process quicker. 

Heres the prezi breifly explaning the idea of the game.

TURTLE DASH on Prezi

I created a mock up poster for our game in Photoshop

Lego, Seriously?

When I first heard that we were playing with Lego as part of a lesson I first thought 'WHAT!? Lego, seriously?'

At first you think, well this is going to be a waste of time, it has nothing to do with media. Although, as a matter of fact it does. It is used as tool to help you think more creatively.

“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation”

-Plato

The quote firstly seemed quite strange before I had actually experienced the LSP exercise, because I thought to myself ‘Surely that can’t work?'. However, what you don’t realise is just how much you can learn about yourself and other in one act of play and designing something out of the blue. We started with a task that required each individual to create a tower; and the only rules were that we had to use the green bases as a starting point and also to have a Lego person on the top.. A very brief objective, but it meant that we could creatively bring all these pieces and build a very complex or simple design .We then discussed these pieces in detail and you soon come to discover that what you create is actually a representation of yourself, regardless of what you are asked to do.

When I came to analysing my tower for example, what was evident is that I like perfection. It is safe to say that I most definitely am a perfectionist. And that the fact my little Lego man was hiding in a box, but was wearing a crown, shows that I like my own ideas when it comes to being in a team, and I can be quite stubborn when coming out of my comfort zone.

After that we were asked to then develop the original tower to something that represents the skills that we bring within team. I kept with the idea that I’m the ideas person within a team. The important rule when building is not to think about what you’re doing, and just keep adding things on. When it came to analysing it again, Its brilliant what you subconsciously do when building with these little Lego pieces. I had connected little wires to other Lego men, which in reflection could mean I like to help people in a team, like I keep the team together and connected.   

The fact that the end results gave us all a clear view of what we thought were the working of a perfect team, goes to show, that not everything has to be literal, you can find meaning within anything creative that you do. LSP is a great technique to prove this. In my opinion I think that Lego Serious Play could be an example of convergent and divergent thinking

Stop Frame animation

In Digital Media tools, we were asked to produce a short 1 minute animation using stop-frame.

Not one of my favourite things to do i must say!

My group and I found it quite hard to come up with ideas for this so the finished piece in my opinion isn't really a good example of what we could produce if we did put our minds to it.

Our idea was basically to film a 'flat party' and animate different things going on.

It started off well, but I think we all thought the idea was a bit too complex for just a small animation.

Film Language Grades

So today we got our Scene analysis grades back.

I personally didn't think i'd do that well with this piece, because since a-level i've never been very good at analysing extracts of films in terms of WHY they did something. I can easily point out the Cinematography or talk about the composition of shots, but when it comes down to explain why they have done it, I struggle a little bit.

I decided to do mine on the film 'Requiem for a Dream'. It is one of favourite films because there are so many unique editing techniques used in certain shots.

I chose this scene of the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuzNohk5cYw

So in the end i got a high 2:2. I wasn't surprised. But wish I'd done SO much better because I know i could have done.