Martijn's CreaTe blog

Hello there, long time no see.

I guess the idea of posting regularly here had not been that successful, but I haven’t  abandoned this page yet .

A lot has happened since my last post here, but for now I will stick to stories about the Have Fun and Play project of Creative Technology.

For the project, we have started working on realizing the alternate reality game that I proposed about a year ago. It has been christened Tagle, and a website showing off our current progress can be viewed here.

The project has gotten the attention of the annual Gogbot technology festival held in Enschede. If all goes well, we may be able to provide a playable version of the game there!

Lastly I wrote an essay about the web and anonymity, fitting to the theme of Gogbot and Have Fun and Play this year, being data overload. Read it here.

You will read more from me in my next post coming sometime this week, as it is time to compile a portfolio of what I have achieved so far .

Probably the last post about We create identity . Not much to say here though, read it all in my essay .

The web technology course consisted of learning how to use HTML and CSS, and one of the goals was to set up your own website to serve as a portfolio. As you all know, for me that is exactly what this page is meant to do, so that part was relatively easy .

An other assignment instructed us to create the “worst web page ever”. I choose not to post a link to mine here because I can’t imagine that anyone would ever want to see that piece of crap .

Lastly we were required to write an essay about a web technology-related topic of choice, mine is about computer mediated communication (CMC) and you can read it here. I will warn you in advance though: it has a rather academic approach and may not be as fun to read my essay for We create identity. that will be up in a few moments .

EDIT: Anton insisted on publishing the link to my “worst page” so it is now included in this post. Be warned though, this thing may crash your browser, but I think that goes for most of the worst pages .

Also he noted that technically, this is not a portfolio. And well, I must admit that he has a valid point, so I’ll be on to fixing that little shortcoming sometime soon .

Well the link to our interactive video has been floating around for some time now so some of you may have already seen it, but I have now fixed the worst volume problems, so I think it’s time to post it here too:

Our interactive video! Enjoy .

So today we had an exhibition showing off all our interactive videos, and it actually went pretty well, the only real problem was the difference in sound volume between our clips, so after we fix that I’ll put it online for all of you to see .

Meanwhile, I still want to show off the postcard I made for the final assignment of Graphic Design. We were instructed to “design a postcard to express and promote what the bachelor department of Creative Technology at the University of Twente is about”. So I designed something that looks like a circuit board made out of words:

I already got some suggestions on improving it, including:

• Add soldering to the chips, to make it clear they are really chips.
• Make the words coming out of the chips match the text on the chip.
• Chance “creative” on the top chip to “creativity”.
• Replace the outdated university logo with CreaTe logo or the new university logo.

So I’ll probably update it in due time, but for now my priorities are properly finishing We create identity by means of fixing the sound and writing an essay, and creating an awful  webpage for the “worst page” assignment, more on both later .

Hello there

I know I don’t update this place enough and I also know I really should change that, so from now on, I will be setting a goal for myself to post about something at least once a week and also spend some time decorating it a bit to give it a more personal feel. I already changed the theme but it’s still one of the default ones, and since it should be more personal, I’ll see what else I can change .

On with the CreaTe stuff, the college year has started more than a month ago so a lot has happened already, the classes I want to write something about are We create identity and Graphic Design, but let’s start with the first one.

Our assignment for We create identity is to make an interactive video using Ximpel, which is a program that allows you to layout an interactive video using XML.

For our project, we decided to create a fairly dramatic story, which makes us limited in filming our own material (we can’t go around buying drugs and guns, and we would need a tremendous amount of ketchup ). So instead we will be using material from movies and TV-series that we know to create our final project.

What it will be exactly, I won’t tell yet, but you can see a small demo here.

More on Graphic Design later…

For the “Have fun and play” course, I wrote this document describing a game that can be played in a real world environment, check it out. It didn’t make it to the final project though, but I hope to continue with this idea one day.

Also, I’m currently writing something about the “Creative explorations of structures” course, I’ll post it soon!