Ryjak's Animation Blog

Not really, but here's my final site
click here

I’d like to come back to my writings on the new program I purchased (and with which I did my final project in soundscapes) “The Movies” the game. It provides me with an interactive experience in writing, creating and producing my own films. Part of this whole process of movie making, is deciding the angles of the camera one is going to use in filming the movie.
Filming from low angles allows the character to appear large, and dramatic, giving the impression that one is below the person being filmed. It adds an impressive trick of the camera to induce forced scale upon the subject from the viewers perspective. In The Movies, I have limited control over the angle of the camera in most scenes, but those limited movements allow me to change a hero into a has been, a villain into a child.
If you really want to see what I’ve accomplished with this program take a look at one of the movies I’ve submitted to the Planet The Movies website. While your there why not take a look at some other people’s work as well? Mine’s the one called “Evil Geniuses”.
On the other side of things, Theater doesn’t use the use of camera angles, as it is set with a single stage with the audience looking from multiple angles. The set must be as multiangular as possible, and use various tricks of lighting, color, and motion to grab the audiences attention and move around the hierarchy of importance.

Websites and forums in particular provide vital information to the designers of games. I for two years was a resident every single day on the White Wolf Games website’s user forums. I participated in many prescheduled events where the developers would garner information from their core audience by running us through supplements for their role playing game series which were still in development. It was my job, as a dealer/player of these games, to glean as much information as I could about upcoming releases from the developers, and relay them to my customer and gaming base. It was an effective marketing strategy, and because of it, I was able to increase the sales of their product in my department at the gaming store.Of course, there’s always a downside when we’re talking about my experiences isn’t there? They canceled the line of products I was most enthusiastic about just a couple months before I left that job, and the services they provided for the old line went down dramatically, while they ran betas and play testing sessions for the new product line, but I suppose the old must make way for the new in all things don’t they? I continue to support that company despite its change of direction.
Other companies also benefit greatly from input from their customers. Betas are an important part of many companies. Microsoft runs many betas all the time, from their games to office and productivity software, they are constantly getting feedback from their key audiences. Even in their OS software, there is a feedback response everytime a program crashes. Needless to say, I see this message a lot, especially when I visit broken websites.

Making money online is harder than it seems. People are always shoving advertising banners in your face telling you that you could win this or earn that, but most often times it turns out to be a scam. I have however seen several reliable ways of making money on the internet.
eBay: If you’re like me, you have truckloads of useless crap lying around and no way of getting rid of it at a profit on your own. Or better yet, maybe you are an aspiring artist with no good place to sell your art. This is where eBay comes in. You can, for a small service fee of 25 cents, post anything you want on their site, and let the world take a crack at bidding on it. I can finally get rid of those awful card games I spent so many allowances on years ago! Or sell my all natural holocaust memorial piece (It was an assignment) to willing buyers of folk art! A definite must for any budding capitalist.
Next we have Banner ads. I have several friends with very successful websites which receive heavy amounts of traffic on a daily basis. There are companies out there who are willing to pay for space on your site (provided you get enough hits) and if your site is popular enough, you can make a tidy profit. Such sites which use this business model are many of my webcomic buddies, like Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del, which is based out of New Haven, or Nuklear Power, by Brian Clevinger, based out of Florida. These men have made well, rather large amounts of money through banner ads and merchandising of their own creative works.
Last but not least, is the online survey. My mom is hooked on these things. For 100 dollars a survey, companies call on her to do these surveys as part of a product research group for professionals. She usually does them for drug companies or larger corporations. She let me do a couple of them for her once, and passed the money on to me. I wish I could do that every week. Easiest hundred dollars I ever made.
Last but not least, is merchandising. As artists we have creative works which we may hold the copyrights for. Come up with a clever idea for a graphic or a t-shirt, and you can use a company like ThinkGeek.com to get your idea out there, and make some money off of it in the meantime.
And those are some of the ways which I have found one can make money using the internet. Legitimately.

The digital storytelling site splits the process of digital storytelling into many sections. I would like to focus for a minute on number 3, or relating the story to the (potential) audience. This is something I have a hard time with, relating to other people, especially since I invariably see the negative about any and every situation I enter, but this is also an asset in a way. People have two reactions in my experience to things they dislike, laughter, and anger. Since I’m far more likely to attract flies with honey than vinegar, I will point out those terrible things that I see in an engaging and humorous manner, as best I can, as in my interactive narrative website which I entitled “This Webpage is an Interactive Narrative”, where I poked fun at Bill Gates. It can also be seen in many alternative culture advertising techniques at use in the real world. Once again I will reference Fight Club, as on the second DVD with all the advertising supplements, there was a section with all internet spots that they had done, directly focusing on the computer user. Computers are solitary media, with one person usually using one computer at a time, focusing the content in a very personal way. They augmented this by tailoring the message to their target audience, with the simple message “I know you” They did seem to know me very well, they got some points wrong, but the overall message touched me, about being a person who either does or does not care about many social and environmental issues which plague our generation. It made me feel that the creators somehow related with my personal experience of the world, which is a comforting thing.

Ohm…. Ohm…. Ohm….

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the topic of color. The blog that this is replacing was on the same general subject, but somehow I think I came across as being…. well, off-color if you’ll pardon the pun. My recent series of websites from this semester has lead me to the disturbing conclusion that I favor black backgrounds in all my works, leaving me with some areas of stickiness when it comes to choosing complimentary colors that won’t be too contrasting or hurt my viewers eyes.
My first few designs were pretty bad up until I started using CSS. This was a godsend. I could go back to my design, recolor specific areas of it, and have everything work how I wanted. I couldn’t code it on my own for the first three projects I used it on, but on the 4th one, I got it! Afterwards it hit me, once I started using the CSS, I favored black so heavily, that all my work was kind of hard to read. White letters just don’t show up well on a black background in additive color schemes. The backlighting just hurts my viewer’s eyes too much. Reds and greens however, show up very well on this kind of background, provided they aren’t too dark themselves. I was able to push it back to a forest green in some cases, or a deep magenta if the need arose. But never white. My one offshoot from this was a dark yellow. This kind of worked, but the theme for the website was spies, so I decided that it had to go. The only colors that would have worked in that situation were a pink (too girly) or a lighter purple (too dark). The resulting combination looked pretty good.
Another color scheme I’ve been looking into recently, was that used in the movie, video game, and book (well not so much the book, but the ideas were there). These colors, were things you would not normally want together, but in the context of the grody, anarchistic movie about losing oneself in an anti-establishment philosophy, it works perfectly because of the juxtaposition to contemporary design thought. Aged reds, pink, puke greens, paper bag browns, yellowed edges, green push on the frames, and cornflower blue, mix together to make a horribly wonderful kind of poor man’s industrial palette. I’d like to do something with those colors in the near future. I think I will…
In my Typography class, I used the wonderful artist Roy Lichtenstein in my ads, and I had to use primary colors for the whole thing because of the comicy nature of the art. In one ad I used yellow and red, and in another red and blue, all the time, aware that the colors had to closely match so as to not throw off the overall scheme of the work, allowing the art to match, but not oppose or camouflage the information which needs to be conveyed.
So what this all boils down to in the end, is that it should not be just preference that dictates your choice of palette. Subject material plays a very important part in choice, as does legibility and the orderly flow of information to the reader.

I just recieved a wonderful new piece of interactive technology this week. Its a little program from Lionhead studios called "The Movies". I purchased it at my local software shop for $50 dollars, and I'm already amazed at its functionality. With it I am able to write and film my very own movies.

As an IDD student, this opens worlds of possibilities to me. I can easily create content for any site I design, or as I am doing now, creating a movie so that I can add sound for my soundscapes final project later on. My 12 and a half minute master piece is called "Evil Geniuses"

The program works by building virtual sets, and having virtual actors, who you can design the look of, follow prescripted actions that you can plug in to create cohesive storylines. You can even change the weather, lighting, and emotion on the sets through different variable sliders. Props and sets are interchangeable. Its everything I could have ever wanted in a piece of design software. Even better, there is a game element to it as well, which allows you to explore the entire business of movie producing. However, I think I'll stick to writing scripts and makin movies!

I have no idea what the assignment was, so I'll just write something inane here.

I have written out my idea map in a standard outline style. Now I just need to convert it into an idea map format. I'll go do that now. BBS

Almost forgot to link the page!
http://mywebspace.quinnipiac.edu/jdmontycarbonari/