Week Four

Introduction to Lingo

I was surprised to learn that Lingo is rather easy to use - we changed variables, animated assets using the language. It was relatively simple until we got into strings and physically manipulating text and icons from one form to another.

We had an issue tho - our project was pretty much fleshed out now (our proposal should be linked on the side of this blog), however we did not know how to use scripts to scrape information from another website. Therefore, we decided to meet this past weekend (Saturday) and get the basics down for what we would be doing.

Essentially, we are going to be creating an interactive map of the freeways in San Diego that will give estimated drive times from say school to downtown or that sort of things. We were considering adding video and sound to it as well in order to further contain the viewer within the space.

We are still attempting to flesh out how to do this though - we have yet to figure out what is involved in scraping or how long (and involved) it will be.

Week Three

What happened?

Unfortunately, Krystle (me) was the only one who showed up for lecture/section today (Connie came, but was late - she was sick and definitely needed to rest!). Anywho, in class we began going over the basics of DirectorMX and how it is both alike and different from Flash.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the program is to use and understand - things are organized a lot better and it is very much easier to create vector images within the program as well as changing to properties of the asset. It's very exciting to know that I can at least get the hang of it rather quickly! Of course that is without Lingo incorporated within.

At the end of class, Connie and I set the same goals from last week, except amongst my own I decided to play more with what I could and could not do with Director (meaning I would be playing with timelines and the like).

Week Two

Introduction of class, division into groups

Today we were split up into groups, depending on what experience we have within programming, design, sound and organizational skills.

Connie - Has the most experience with programming, including java and actionscript. Therefore, she is kinda the 'programmer' of our group, yet she is still going to be dabbling in design.

Adrian - A media major who does a majority amount of his work with Photoshop, Illustrator and film along with some expertise in sound.

Anna - Another media major who primarily does work with photograpy.

Krystle - A media major with emphasis in computing, i.e. web design, digital media, etc. I am the person responsible for maintaining this blog, publishing our stuff to the web, administrative duties and along with Adrian, Anna and Connie, producing a project.

We had several ideas for what we could do for our project. Adrian started us off with perhaps composing a network that could be used, in conjunction with Facebook, to create a map of books that students could purchase off one another for their UCSD classes. The pros of doing this would that it would be something relevant for students on UCSD - everyone that I know borrows or buys their books off of friends or friends of friends that have take the classes a prior quarter. A concept we had for how we could put this together was creating a map of the campus (and a possible extension to about a mile off campus) and showing where these people were, what books were available, etc. It would be the UCSD/Facebook network. Problems that we faced were that we know that people would probably not feel comfortable putting so much information online. Also, this idea ended up being already taken and we felt, therefore, that it would be redundant to do it again without significantly improving on it.

Anna then had the idea of perhaps mapping Hollywood - taking pictures of the Hollywood walk of fame and creating an interactive tour of the area. The problem was that we felt like it needed more. So then we branched into perhaps including more streets in L.A. or maybe including freeways.

In this first class, we could not get a hold of a theme, so we decided to set goals for ourselves by the next class:

- Buy a book that incorporates learning DirectorMX with Lingo.
- Attempt to buy/get a hold of Director for our personal computers. This would save us time when later trying to work on the project together because we would not be forced to come to school at odd hours of the day.
- Play with director or start looking at projects/tutorials online that use director.

Week One

Unfortunately, this lecture/section was doomed.

Nothing happened and no groups were made.