We had to create a range of sounds using different objects, for example some of the things we tried were, an electric whisk on different objects such as metal bowls and trays to create the sound of a machine gun, but in the end the best result came from using it on a full packet of rice.

some more examples are...

for walking we just used hitting fists on a metal tray and on carpet for the different surfaces in the game.

for the lift we recorded the sound of a fan lid sliding against the table, mixed in with the actual sound of a lift.

One of the problems I had was that I was expecting to be doing the sound for another game “devil may cry 4” and so had been researching how I could go about creating sounds specific to that trailer, but in our group we decided to go with “dead space 2”. Not only did I have this set back, but the college was closed for a few days due to snow. Which meant I was not able to spend as much time as I would have liked in the sound rooms producing the assets. I also had an issue with getting the sound levels right, a lot of the tracks decibels were too high, this meant that some sound clipping was occurring and I was loosing quality. I had to go through and lower each of the wave peaks that were too high, because I did not want to loose overall volume and wanted to keep all the tracks fairly proportionate.

For this unit we had to use adobe sound booth, we had to create all the sound assets we needed, add them to the tracks and sync them up with the video. I also had to ajust all the sound levels to prevent distrotion. various effects helped me to create the sounds I was looking for, for example pitch and timing shifts, compressions, distrotions and equalisiations.

in our groups we have to decide on a game which we can make a scrpit for and make a live music production for it using foley.We have decided to go with the game dead space, this is a good choice becuase it has a huge veriaty of sound for example;doors opening, screaming, blood dripping. our task is now to think about how theese sounds can be re produced and what we would use...some of the items we could use are cans to create metallic sounds such as bullets, pasta to sound like rain, or maybe even a stapler to sound like a gun being reloaded??
tommorow we are going to start creating the sounds we need for our video, we will need to think about some of the items we need to bring in...
Dead space 2 trail sounds

Mask breathing inhaler (tom)

Metal clanking metal on metal (felix)

Glass shattering Smashing glass

Bullets electric Wisk hitting bowl (tom)

Metal bar bending metal bar on metal slab (joe)

Armour hitting metal wall pipes (jake)

Flesh foot hitting metal floor (heavy) cabbage with wet t-shirt (jake)

Lift door opening (mechanism) lift door or online sound

Boots walking on thin carpet boots (tom)

Boots waling on grate boots (tom)

body hitting floor joe’s body (joe)

Metal floor coming off trays (drum sticks) (felix)

Screaming Jake (jake)

Hurt sounds us (us)

Sparks coming off cables matches (tom)

Cable as lift goes up fan lid (Joe)

The best foley is so well intergrated into the game/film that it is unnoticed by the veiwers, they don't think about it being created outside the game and therefore it creates a sense of realim and believability.Foley gets it's name from the sounds effect specialist Jack Foley (1891-1967) who developed alot of techniques that are still being used today in games and films, for example: old wooden chairs are still used to create the sound of creaky floorboards,and cutting water melons are still used to create the sound of blood and gushing sounds.

I have been researching how sound is made for computer games, foley is one of the main methods which is when you reproduce sounds that you needin the game or film by using objects to create the sounds, for example to make a sound like horses hooves foley artists would usually use two coconuts cut in half.To make the sound of snapping bones, celary is snapped in half.

I have decided to change my game to something that has more sounds, I realised world of warcraft was a bad idea in the end becuase it is mainly footsteps, spell and music like most MMORPG's. Which doesn't give me much to work with, after looking at the last year's final peices I decided to do devil may cry 4, this is a great game for this unit becuaseit is packed with sounds, from the most noticable sounds such as swords clashing, magic, and gun shots, to the more suttle thingssuch as footsteps and wind in the background.

Sound unit

the first task was to analyze a game trailer and fill out a form about what the sounds are and what there purposes are, I chose world of warcraft cataclym.

I have chosen to do world of warcraft as my game for the sound unit, below are some examples of different sound types in the game

world of warcraft sounds:

acousmatic sound: bosses laughing in the background, you can't see where they are but you want to go and find out

Interactive diegetic sound: using spells

Illusionary and spatial functions: the music creates a sense of illusion and

communication of emotional meaning: music in different places portray the mood

Blizzard (the producers of world of warcraft) have there own orchestra which means they can
create fantastic music for each area in the game

Sound team

Sound Director-overall control
Sound designer-creates the sound assets
Composer-produces the music
Audio programmers-intergrate audio assets in game

Today I produced alot of research about graphic narratives in the form of a power point and I wrote my 500 word evaluation, some of the things I covered were for example what went wrong? what went well? what could I have changed? Etc.

I soon realised I had made a huge mistake, I had made all of my images exactly the same size with almost no room for cropping or changing. This meant that I could not really have any veriaty in terms of pannel shapes, for example longer ones or shorter ones in different positions like the first image.

There where only really two things I could think to do that wernt just one pannel in each corner and that was by having one image as a background and using the others on the top, and secondly by cropping the images as much as I could to make more interesting shapes.

I wanted to tell the story of (the contendings of seth and horus) and therefore needed characters, so I used Images I found on google and overlayed them onto my 3D backdrops, as you can see I have changed the positions of the characters arms in photoshop to show the fight scene between seth and horus, I simply did this by using the lasso tool to select the arm, then copyed it to a new layer and rotated it into the position needed.

Here is an example of a toon shaded render of my temple, the technique I used was very simple, I used a falloff map with 100% self illumination then used two colours, the main yellow colour and a much darker yellow colour to act as the shadow, I changed the curve editor so that the two colours where parallel to each other, therefore making the change sudden rather than a long gradient and lastly I changed the falloff type to shadow and light and added contour lines.

seeing as I wasent any good a 2D and drawing I decided to use simple 3D models and use toon shading to make them look as if they were 2D, here is an example of the first temple model I made I got the inspiration form my holiday in Egypt and the reference images I took.

Graphic narrative development

I originally planned to do my graphic narrative as a parody of the matrix film, where by neo would take the wrong pill and therefore and end up in a weird world, I also added things such as facebook as the main communication method to reflect post modernism and how youth would communicate. here is an example of what style I was going for. The reason I used this style is becuase my 2D and drawing skills are very limited so by using simple shapes like circles and lines, I could still achieve what I wanted.

Graphic narrative unit (working to a brief)

The main task of this unit is to produce a Graphic narrative, and to work to a professional creative breif, The brief states we have to comment on or contribute to predominant cultural theory of our time "post modernism" by using things such as, Parody, Homage Cyberspace, Hyper reality, and Identity.

Project planner

I have produced a project planner for this unit with shows each task and whats needs to be done, I will update this as I go and it will help me to keep myself on track and meet deadlines for the unit and I will make more for each of the following units in the year.

Lan party diagram

This is my Lan party diagram showing how to set up a connection with xbox 360's.



To connect a LAN part you must each have one games console in this case an xbox360 and a TV or pc monitor, each monitor needs to connect to it's xbox360 with a DVI or VGA cable, and the monitor and xbox360 must be plugged into the mains to recive power. Then each xbxox has to be plugged into the router, the router has to be plugged into the modem and the modem into the ethernet port.

The finished poster

This is my finished 80's LAN gaming poster I based it on the game midi maze becuase it was one of the only multplayer games of the decade, it was a first pwerson shooter, I couldent find all the images I needed so I made some of the graphics using 3dsmax 2011. I tried to make the font the same as the game font to keep the same style.

Poster to advertise LAN party

We were asked to produce a poster that would advertise a LAN party in our given decade, becuase I had the 80's I didn't have much choice when it came to multiplayer games, and so I chose Midi maze.

There were not many images of this game, and the ones I could find were poor quality so I decided to make a quick image using 3dsmax 2011.

Unit one (computer games platforms and technologies)

The first unit in the second year is called computer games platforms and technologies, it is about how computer games and platforms have developed over the last few decades, in one of our first tasks we have been split into groups and each group has been allocated a decade, our group has the 80's and so I have been given the task of researching how specifically the graphics have developed, we will bring all our research together to create a 3 min powerpoint slide and also a 1000 word eassy.