PARIS'S DIARY
07/05/19
Learning Second Life
Today was the first day we all got together to learn how to use the Second Life program, I had only just downloaded it yesterday and haven't explored very much so I was keen to learn. It is interesting and nothing like I have ever played before, it has opened a new perspective on gaming.Ā
Coming in at 9am we had a short tutorial from Chris Millward (head of placement) then from 11am onwards we searched around the different worlds and destinations ourselves. Finding out you can have screens up as cinema's (using YouTube videos) and you can spend hours and hours in the 'freebie galaxy' to get high-quality items and extras for no money at all.
MAKING MY NAME SIGN
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After we started to get a hang of the controls in the game, Chris put down six small gallery spaces and told us to pick one. This was a place that we could test out the building and designing side of second life, I liked this idea because I have never used a program like this before. Before getting started on building big structures, Chris suggested we make a sign so we can put our name on it for the outside of your temp gallery spaces.
I went for the standard rectangle shape as I am not too advanced in the building side like I said earlier, I chose to do a bright tie-dye texture because I thought it would reflect my character.
EXPLORING SECOND LIFE DESTINATIONS
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Using the destinations tab I searched for places to go, I was drawn to 'What's Hot Now' section as it showed the places with the most people in. The first place Kris and I went to was Japan, it was my first look at the outrageous designs skills of people of SL. I was truly amazed by the detail and amount of things on there. With Kris we read the signposts and saw there was a freebies part at the mall, there I was able to buy avatars, artwork and furniture.
Filtering through the different places on Second Life I learned about things you can include:
-Shops
-Post Box (people can click it and get notifications for our events)
-Games
-Donation Boxes
-Suggestion Boxes
-Cinema Screen (playing youtube videos)
-Radio playing in the background of world
i think if not all but a good handful of these things can be used on our island for our exhibiton
GALLERY TITLE
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I wanted to see what would happen if I made a sculpture that was 5 times the size of me, So I had a look at the different kinds of shapes in the menu, I chose to do the ramp shape and played around with the 'twist' function to make it different to a regular ramp. I was looking through the textures and didn't find anything that could fit well. Next I tried the sphere shape and tried to twist it but it didn't look as interesting as I had hoped, so I decided to stretch it instead so it was more of an egg or rugby call shape, Looking through the texture I saw that there was one for a metal gate and putting that on the long sculpture fit well.
08/05/19
The Story
Today was a fun day, I focused on having a look at other artist's islands within Second Life. I wanted to see how crazy and big these artists go, also to see what kind of stuff we could use in our exhibition. I also made a photo frame with a photo of my cat inside just so I can see how easy or hard it will be to create that if I wanted to do photographs for my final exhibition.
MAKING A PHOTO FRAME
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I found this relatively easy, it helped me get comfortable with the controls of making objects thick, thin, short or long. and I learned that if you right click on an object then click edit, pressing shift on the keyboard and clicking and dragging the object in SL, you can copy that object exactly how it is. I decided to do one square and then one triangle shaped, I wanted to test what how the triangle would frame the image had, it was difficult because it did not get my cat in the middle of the circle but because this is just a test, it is okay, now I know for future.
MOYA GALLERY
I searched 'artists' in the destination section of the search bar and there were over 30 different museums created by artists so I started from the top and the first one was a museum by an artist called MOYA. I was blown away by the amount of work that was put into this huge island. After walking through it and showing Barry parts of it, we reckon that this artist had huge team sections of this island because there are around 7 or 8 huge sections to it, it must've taken them years and a lot of money. Of course, we are not going to be able to achieve something that extravagant in 5 weeks but we can take sections of his ideas (not actual artwork) to use in our own exhibition.
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9/05/19
Today I spent some time looking aroundĀ SL searching gallery spaces, I found one called New Carlton. The setup of this island was interesting, it had structures randomly planted across the island but it somehow looked organised; nothing was similar on this island it really showed all the skill this artist has. Every art piece was animated, whether it was a small bit of smoke or the whole thing would spin, it was exciting to look at as a viewer. Need to have a look at how IĀ could do that myself.
MADOI
I also found another artist/ gallery space called 'Fondazione Isabella e Walter (Madoi)' it was amazing, it looked just like real museums you'd see in Manchester or London, it has statements on the wall and had the elegance.
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10/05/19
I have been thinking about what I want to do about my personal exhibition... it has been hard to think as I feel the pressure that I should have an idea or at least a base idea to start from. I haven't ventured in video so maybe that is a route I can go for.
I have done a stop motion video for one of my Graphics Projects and I really enjoyed that, I am starting to think that is what I wanna do.
11/05/19
I had a very vivid dream what I was a cartoon skeleton, I was at school and then me and my skeleton friends went to the fancy dress shop to get an outfit for a party everyone was going to, there were wooden stands with the full body outfits on. It was an interesting dream because it was not in normal cartoon animation, let's say like a Disney film. it was more like an old Mario game, 8-bit.
There is a video game called Undertale and that is in the same kind of style I had in my dream, there is even a character who is a skeleton.
12/05/19
I am subscribed to this animator on YouTube, he does 8-bit animations covers for kpop songs, being a huge kpop fan myself I was drawn this. He has done a tutorial video showing how he makes the figures, background and what program he uses, I think this will be so helpful with remaking my dream. Similar to his videos I want to make a scene and then have a few things animated, like a gif. I am going to sketch out the drawings first on my iPad and then work from there for the story.
13/05/19
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Today IĀ have been working on my sketches, it is still early for my idea! as IĀ haven't even thought of character names yet but IĀ have dotted some story.
HOW TO:
Look on the left side of the screen and look down the row until you see a simple straight line, hold and click the icon until you see a grid icon. In this window you are given the chance to type in the width and height of your canvas and how many lines you want in your grid landscape and portrait.
When playing around with different amount of squares I found out that 105 squares on a 1500 x 1000 pixel canvas worked out well as they the grid was not too stretched and not too thin.
After you have lined up your grid to the corners go back to the row on the left side of the screen and look for the symbol that has two circles and an arrow (called Shape Builder Tool) click and hold this icon until you see a paint bucket, this is called Live Paint.
You can colour in every individual square on the grid using this, using the left and right arrows it allows you to scroll through colours, from primary colours to wild patterns (almost like 70s wallpaper patterns).
14/05/19
I have started to get a handle of Illustrator, This is the first time I have used this program. I am playing around with the look of my skeleton characters
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IĀ have designed 3 characters for one of my characters 'Arthuristis', IĀ decided to do a ghost outfit, a devil outfit and a fairy costume. This character is the funny one, he doesn't care about looking silly in front of his friends.
15/05/19
I started with the 2nd scene of my story, I don't know why IĀ started with this frame but IĀ thought this would be an easy frame to get myself comfortable and happy withe process on illustrator.
