Amalie Roberts

STUDIO WORKS

Project 1: Portrait of Place

Project 2: Materiality

Undertale OST: Dating Fight!_ This was incorporated to break the viewer away from the darker tone of the video, lending to ideas of distraction and the endless abyss of information that we can immerse ourselves with on the internet; such as looking away from a movie to go on TikTok.

A speed drawing of a digital artwork that I made. This was incorporated into the video in order to stress how digital technology is not restricted to video, and can be utilised for other non-traditional artistic means.

The Windows XP Error sound was chosen to work alongside the glitched aesthetics of the video, reinforcing the materiality of the artwork.

An in-the-works version of the video. I found that this verson was not nearly chaotic enough, and relied more upon the words and actions of the audio and video to convey a narrative, as opposed to the video itself coming across as a piece of media to be engaged with through a lens of materiality.

THE FINAL VIDEO:

Project 3: Colour

To create a sense of materiality tied to the colour I chose, I mixed the colour with paint and filmed it being used to create an artwork. This footage was then combined with found footage using overlay filters.

THE FINAL VIDEO:

Self-directed project

Concept video:

This concept video highlights some of the key inspiration for my project, as it showcases clips from Cowboy Bebop, Akira, The Scorch Trials, and the EXO- Lucky One music video. All of these references tie to the idea of a sci-fi/ dystopian aesthetic and story, and have influenced my own perception of such genres. The goal for my project is to be able to clearly display a similar tone to these pieces of media, while conveying a unique and gripping narrative.

Game mechanics development: Thanks to having used Twine previously for personal projects, getting started was not an issue.

HTML coding of the backgrounds: Since I have no background in HTML coding (or any coding for that matter), it was a bit of a learning process putting this all together. The links to all of the images needed to be hosted online, and figuring out how to manipulate the images to appropriately fit the background of the game took a while.

Development of an audio library: Similarly to the images, all of the audio needed to be hosted online. I found myself signing up for lots of hosting websites during this process to see what would work. Thankfully, I found options that were both effective and free.

Colour-coded passages to indicate the narrative sections: By the time I had written out a majority of the narrative, I was finding it difficult to recognise where certain story arcs took place. Thus, I colour-coded it all.

A view of what it looks like to work on passages: The passages involve both the text displayed in the game and any coding specific to the particular "page" being displayed. Once again, this was a learning process, and I spent a lot of time on Google scrolling through coding forums to see if the issues I was facing could be easily fixed. While the game is focused on the narrative, and thus has many passages full of words, I found that working on the coding was more tedious than working on the plotline. Perhaps this is simply because I have always loved storytelling, whereas the coding (although it didn't take as long) was something completely foreign to me.

Following the group tutorial, I adjusted some of the small details that were pointed out. I changed the font to be more sci-fi looking, and changed the colour of the 'link' buttons to be more readable over the backgrounds. I ensured that the audio was more equal in volume, and double-checked that the audio was working over all of the different passages- fixing a few sections that I had previously missed. Writing the narrative for this project took the most time, as i had to craft multiple timelines for every major decision. In doing so, I accidentally made it quite difficult to win the game, but considering it is set in a dystopian landscape, such difficulty can be accepted as a realistic challenge.