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Today:

Grades and Feedback are up - - happy holidays, and best wishes! I'll see many of you next semester!

Going forward . . . Where are you, developmentally, with narrative design? At which level would you place your production? :

1.  The Kids Show (typical cartoony simplifications; jokes, or one-trick ponies, black'n'white/world of opposites moral landscape) > > > >
2.  The Genres (Star Trek Original Series, Robots, Zombies; Romances, Action genres; Sitcoms) > > > >
3.  The Mature Statement (well-crafted drama/comedy or genre-expansion, but not quite transcendent; magical realism) > > > > 
4.  Sophistication and Ambiguities (Shakespeare; Melville; Oscar Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Wolf, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Don Delilio, David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oats; Fritz Lang, Bunuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, Altman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, early Scorsese, Lynch, Kronenberg, and a handful of others- - I know, it's my own biases and it's a bit severe, but ultimately, you must make your own list!) 

Also, a free event (if you get an RSVP) by ArtistsWanted.org, tonight in Miami. Go there and check out the VJing (I'm guessing there will be some). 

Orlan: On Thursday, December 2, she will give a public lecture at 5 p.m. in the Senate Chambers of the Student Union on the Boca Raton campus. She will then be at the opening reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Gallery. The lecture, reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.

The final for this class is Tuesday (Dec 7) from 1:15 PM - 3:45PM. This is when you'll give your final presentation of your completed interactive narrative.  And ALL your work needs to be saved to thumbdrive, drive, or Mac-readable disc.

Brass Trio

Page Turner with Sound

 Previously

Non-random version of Calendar Thingy here. More on XML here, and if you're really bored, try the 3-D Flash interface! (This is as deep into Flash as we'll get). The only differences of the 3D template is that the XML loads IMAGES and TEXT. The image files are entered as ATTRIBUTES of the individual tags for each node. You really only have to deal with the XML, and maybe change a few logo-y graphics. If you want to use this for your final project, you'll need to host it yourself, on your own site (this wiki doesn't support folders in URLs, so the files would get pretty hairy and messy). 

Can you start RE-PURPOSING the 'Calendar Thingy' for your page-turner content? Yes, you can! Start getting used to POPULATING A TEMPLATE with your own material - - All you really need to do is (probably) re-size the images you're using, and you can expand both images and text ( you have 16 panels to work with ). And, no, it's not a real 'calendar' is it?.

Housekeeping: CREATE YOUR WIKI PAGE, LINK IT TO 'YOUR PAGES', and UPLOAD YOUR PROJECT SO FAR (html page, background image, and .swf file) - - and make sure they EACH have YOUR INTIALS in THE FILE NAMES, otherwise you might overwrite somebody else's files. If you need help  with the process, review this tutorial.

And now, we move on to PROPERTIES, VARIABLES, and more interesting FUNCTIONS, like MAKING ACTIONSCRIPT MOVE THINGS AROUND! Here are the tutorials—first and second— and here are some sample files to start investigating: 'The Purple Ball', a simple, conceptual one where you just move a graphic around,  and "The Calendar Thingy", a more complicated site that uses the same principle, but also uses XML to load images and text (link downloads a zip file of a folder called 'dynamic media')..

Some examples of this code in action: the wunderkammer ("cabinet of wonders", yet another upper class European entertainment from the 17th century that somehow becomes one of the GREAT UNIFYING FORMS for new media in this century). But, websites can be cabinets of wonder, too, and be sure to check out the fantastic D-FUSE site for an example of (essentially) the same structure used to organize a site. (Also, here's how I present my little do-it-yourself iPod opera using the same structure.)

Latest : 9_21_10_JB.fla  watery background image and final look. 

Don't say I didn't warn you! 10,000 stories by Idiot Books. This is a GREAT UNIFYING FORM, the Exquisite Corpse.

Help us create the mosaic for Ultra Mega Nano Meta!

Today's Flash file (adding text blocks and image masks):9_14_10.fla

Previously: 9_9_10.fla

Performance: October 26 (Tuesday) from approx. 4pm to 6pm, in the main floor art gallery space ("2nd Avenue Studio"). Dress: Jeans, Sneakers, Sunglasses, Black Plastic Garbage Bag (Provided). Details to follow! (p.s. September 18 event has been cancelled) 

GREAT UNIFYING NARRATIVES: Death, the macabre, allegories, etc. Totentanz, illustrated by Hans Holbein the Younger (download here), The anatomical work of Andreas Vesalius (De corporis humani fabrica), and a contemporary play based on him and his pal Servetus (also one on Galileo, so a pretty famous gang of heretics or almost-heretics).

GREAT UNIFYING NARRATIVES: The Faustian bargain - -  'selling one's soul to the Devil for untold wealth, fame, etc.'. Do a MadLibs to replace 'sou', 'Devil', 'wealth, fame, etc.', to personalize and update. MadLibs is the beginning of metaphor-mapping. One classic from the 20th century (1918): Stravinsky's l' histoire du soldat.

Where we were: symbol_1.fla

A tool for helping you organize story ideas, links, and visuals: MindMeister

Equipment and lab hours for Fall 2010 here.

Flash Page-Turner Template for you to deconstruct: (CS3)  site_root_4713.zip

Abridged version of the film Sticky Notes™ on archive.org (iPod version available on request!). 

Welcome to New Media Narrative!

New Media Narrative (MMC 4713) 4 credits

This course explores traditional and alternative storytelling using new media tools and paradigms.  The class encourages experimentation, while developing critical, technical, and design skills.  Taking inspiration from film, video, animation, comics, art, and literature, the class creates collaged, multiperspective, modular, and multiparticipant narratives.

While "narrative" usually describes a sequence of events usually rendered in the form of a story, and expressed in terms of conventional means (short stories, novels, theatre and movies but oral traditions of storytelling, song lyrics, epic poems, myth), this course will examine an array of new media forms (blogs, interactive media, gaming, etc.), as well as forms that expand the notion of narrative form (experimental film, improvisational media, data visualization).  In addition to conventions of dramatic structure, we will examine character, setting, and event constructions that impact narrative (psychological and physiological conditions/processes, altered states, brain chemistry, pharmaceuticals, dreams; cybereality, sci-fi physics, etc.), and explore how new media technologies can enhance the vocabulary of narrative.

*Radiohead's House of Cards - a music video created by data visualization. What's 'narrative' about it? What's 'new media' about it?

Really great, diaristic series, with very sparse, but essential production: Baby Cakes by Brad Neely. (episode 2,  episode 3 , and episode 4)

And, one more classic, the Sex Slave Decalog (1998) by Naoke Mitsuse.

A graphic showing various approaches to character, setting, and action in new media terms.