Week 3 - 4

This past few weeks i have been focusing a lot on the manipulation of the photos that i have took. for example in one of my scenes due to my story being quite exploration based you are searching for items and note and i have had to dramatically change one of the rooms.

so this image shows the final look of the scene but if i look back to the first image that was originally taken you can see what has been changed,




so as you can see this original image isn't very mysterious at all, so the first thing i did was changed the brightness and contrast to match and create a mysterious building. I then selected around the windows and erased the inside removing the cars and buildings in the background, I then got a image when i had trees in the background and cropped the trees out of that image and placed it behind this image to show the trees through only the window.

Now as you can imagine the sun that is shining through the window and onto the left wall doesn't look natural from a forest/woods area however i thought that the little fragments of light in the top left suited this area well and so i right clicked on the spot healing brush tool in the toll bar down the left hand side of Photoshop and then selected the patch tool and with this i drew around the large light exposure I didn't want and then dragged the area upwards so it repeated the fragmented light area into my selected area as you can see by looking back at the first image. i have done this with all my areas and here are a few more examples.

BEFORE                                          AFTER

Pre-production

This week we are starting pre-production and i have decided to change my graphic style to actual photographs rather than the steam punk style, I plan on darkening these images to create a more mysterious atmosphere.

 

Week 2

As a class we used the same images to learn the basics of Photoshop and how to manipulate the image to suit the wants and needs of our story, firstly we placed both images into the same document by producing two layers and importing them into the seperate layers. We then cut out the sky from the house image and placed the dark sky in the background, we did this by using the magic wand tool to select the bright sky from the original picture. (The tool is placed in the left hand side bar as shown below)

After that we then removed some of the fencing in front of the door by using the clone stamp tool. this is just to neaten some of the houses features which were not wanted.

 Then finally we added some text over the image using the text tool.

We then exported the file Image as a JPEG and imported it into the flash libiary.

We then went back to Photosop and created our button which would trigger the start of the interactive story, in total we created 3 different buttons, these would be for the 3 different states that the button will be in, first state is just the button then the second state is when the player hovers over the button with the cursor and the final state is once the player has clicked the button.

 

firstly we needed to create a new symbol, and then we used the Up, Over, Down and End to allow the button to change according to the state (clicked or not). We then created an area box for the action so that we had the freedom to chose the specific area of the button that the player is able to interact with. therefor we could have the whole button avalible to click or just the start letters etc.

Developing Ideas

Story

I have the basic story for my interactive graphics project. the story is based upon a rumour that in WW2 the nazi's were running experiments to create "super soldiers". Their theory was to mix attack dog genes with human genes, this then goes wrong and the subjects become strong and aggressive towards everyone, even family members. The house is going to contain a underground area which is where these tests took place, the player is going to learn the back story of the house through notes, pictures, and hopefully puzzle solving if i am able to use the software to the level. I gained this idea from personal research of WW2 and the technologies that were being tested as this interests me, but there is also a film that is a lot different but still with the same styled rumours called The Outpost.



(i have decided to possibly narrow this down as the time we have and due to the story not being the main focus of this assignment, this will also make it easier to work on the relativity of the interactiveness)

Sound
i understand that sound is a huge part of creating a immersive story. Firstly ambient sounds. i understand that this is to try and create the atmosphere and show the characters surroundings through just the sound.due to the nature of a "mystery house" im going to try and create ambient sounds like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOgD0OgFEzA this is a video showing the ambient sound used in the video game Amnesia: The Dark Decent, this is a horror game which was developed by indie game producers Frictional Games.

Spot sounds - for spot sounds i was thinking of creating a different sound for each object/item that you can interact with, for example hovering over a door with the mouse will give a different sound to hovering over a piece of glass etc.. i was also planning on creating two sounds for each interaction and having them play at different phases of interaction, for example, if the player hovers over a door, a sound such as the turning of a door handle will play, then they will trigger the second phase of the sounds once they select the door, so the door opening and closing sound would then play. I have decided to do somthing like this so that it adds to the immersion of the game as it is as though your mouse/cursor is the players and grabbing objects and then deciding weather to investigate further.





Graphics


In my interactive media i am wanting a steam-punk style of graphics within my interactive media piece. like this concept art from a new video game called Dishonored.

I feel like the steam punk styled graphics will help create a mysteious and haunted feel