Cassandra Gibbs2831459

Digital Media Arts: PrototypeMajor Project Proposal

Overview

For my major project I am looking to create an interactive web piece in which the user will navigate themselves through a story called ‘Enter the Dojo’.

This is a story about how society are becoming tired of such a consumer orientated world, which is heavily influenced by force-feeding the public information. Many believe this information to be untrue and see it as a form of social conditioning from the governments. Due to this people are beginning to fight the system and try to better their lives by learning about ancient secrets that will teach them valuable skills to enhance their future experiences. Each skill makes up part of a diary and is hidden behind a symbol in a world called the ‘Dojo’.

‘Enter the Dojo’ is intended to be a transmedia story, which will be communicated to the audience through a variety of media platforms creating the illusion of an entire immersive world. It will use platforms such as graphic novels, short films, websites and you tube channels amongst others. The symbols of the ‘Dojo’ will be hidden within each of these platforms.

Here are a few examples of the style of artwork that will be

included in the interactive piece that I will be creating.

As you can see there will be a very urban look to the piece.

This is the sort of style that the graphic novels will be in within the project.

Method

I will be working on taking each of these platforms and combining them to create an interactive piece, which will give some continuity to each different element. I will concentrate on making sure that all the elements work well together and don’t seem mismatched in any way. I aim to create my project in HTML5 making use of CSS3 and JavaScript to create the animations. I want to do this so that I gain a better knowledge of the latest coding. I also feel that this would suit this project a lot more that creating the piece in something such as Flash. This is due to the fact that the idea of this transmedia story is to make it accessible to users on many different devices and Flash has some restrictions on which devices can show its content.

Storyboarding

Below is a rough storyboard to show how each element may link together:

Start

Graphic Novel

Short Film

Birds Eye Graphic Novel

Symbol Collection

Symbol Info

Symbol Info

Symbol Info

Symbol Info

This diagram aims to illustrate the way that the interactive piece may work. Although it is likely that this may change as the project moves forward.

It shows that after the user clicks from the start page they will go through a variety of different elements such as the graphic novels and the short film. However this will not necessarily be linear, the user will be able to go back to each page if they wish to.

Off of each of the pages will be sub-pages containing information on the symbols and character profiles.

The final screen will show the symbols that the user has clicked on, therefore highlighting the symbols that have not yet been found.

Prototyping

I have started to see how the screens could be coded to move around in a very basic manner. This will allow me to get a better knowledge of what issues I may come across and help me to think of more effec-tive ways if necessary. Below is an example of one of the tests.

This is an example of how it may be possible to code the project so that different screens can slide into place. It has a main window with various screens surrounding it. By clicking on the relevant buttons each screan would slide into place. It would also be possible to have different transitions such as fading in etc.

To play clip, please open the document in Acrobat

Findings

Although there are still things within this coding that need to be altered it has allowed me to see what the coding that I have chosen to use is capable of doing. It has also made me think about whether or not HTML5 would be the best option. Even though I think it would be suitable in the way that it will allow access on multiple devices, the interactivity of the project may benefit from it being built in Flash.