Dream #97
Categories: artwork, and-another-thing, general-stuff
Tags: college, The Digital Forest, Artwork
Date: 08 June 2011 16:02:25
So I'm a dreamer. Occasionally this is a good thing - something like the 5 Guildford Big Book Draws could only have come out of dreaming up something amazing and seeing it through to final outcome, the Dr Sylver books came out of dreams and hopes, the IAMDA UK meet up required a lot of dreaming to see through to completion...
Sometimes it's a bad thing. I want and hope for so much... I see some things, outcomes that I think could be amazing, in my head so clearly that I then find it hard to accept that in all likelihood they won't come to be or, worse still, others will come up with similar outcomes and I'll be left with the double regret of a missed opportunity and the envy of someone else's fortune or timing. I still remember, years ago, having a series of arguments with the team working on Burning Ambition (a PC adventure game which was never released in the end) that it would be a good thing to have the characters head follow your mouse cursor around when it came near to it, to linger on areas of the screen which required attention etc. No-one gave it any credence and few agreed that my idea made sense. And then Grim Fandango came out and, amongst other things it did so, so right, the character's eyes followed the mouse cursor around and seemed that much more alive. Ironically in this case (bearing in mind the lead character is an undead skeleton). It still riles me to this day, not that we would have been first by that point and not that we would have been better. But I could see it so clearly and I knew it would work. And it did, just for someone else.
Let me tell you about the current dream/heartache, because I'm in the 'painted into a corner, expecting it to be added to the list of missed opportunities' point of proceedings.
A while ago the college I (currently*) work for heavily suggested I enter the courses and students I teach to a large scale London educational shindig. Wiser heads than mine said 'yes' while entering a pitch which was never likely to proceed. I should have listened to them, I think, but instead (because I'm a dreamer and an idiot) I thought up a pitch that I thought would look lovely: The Digital Forest.
You see I LOVE collaborative artwork, seeing people draw for the first time in years, seeing ideas come to be, creating something that they thought would be way past their abilities and smiling in an 'I did that' way.... It's why I loved being a youth worker and love being a teacher. So I thought: if we could get loads of people drawing trees and then get everyones tree into a forest that would be brilliant. :egozilla smiley to show I'm acknowledging my egotisticalness whilst pretending to be ironic:
The original idea in my head was for a large picture with all of the trees, growing as the days went on. And then I thought - that would look amazing if they were animated, 50 trees drawn by experienced and new artists alike, all waving gently according to a digital breeze, all lit and tinted by a digital day and night cycle.
Fab. And in a trade show, I'm sure we all know how much fun they are, an oasis of calm, a gentle forest which had been made by participants, I loved the idea of us all building a forest and stopping to watch it.
Plan B is for us to have a Flash file with 50 symbols, each set to invisible, each with their own animated settings. People would draw their trees on iPad (had I mentioned it's a mobile device art showcase ?) and these images would be sent to a central server. Then a student would paste the image onto the symbol, set it to visible and, bobs your apple, the forest has begun and, over three days, would grow into something more and more amazing by the hour, by the participant.
But that's Plan B. I dream of Plan A. An app on an iPad, where all of the art is drawn on iPads and sent to the iPad with the forest app. Everything in iDevice, everything automated. I want the app to be a continuous forest, limited to the trees it can show rather than a production line of students adding images to a set template. I want to see the app grow not only on the day but in sessions afterwards. I'd take the iPads to a special needs group and get them to do their own forest, to the IT students and do theirs, and do a master forest with everyones trees in as well. I'd like to see a list of forests, all done by different groups of people, all choosable and viewable, with no other need than to be an interesting forest to travel to, to sit and watch and to let wave around you. I want anyone to be able to download the app and know that they could add their own tree if they wanted...
But...
but...
It's a big dream. Ironically it's not the biggest or most unattainable of dreams because at the end of the day there's no AI, no variation, just a breeze, one animated symbol repeated on a grid/array and so on. But it's utterly beyond me and I can't see a huge amount of hope in seeing it done. We'll see, I've asked around and someone may get back to me. But it would work, and that's the frustrating thing, because I can't make it work. Games like Electroplankton and apps like Koi pond have shown that something like this has a place, it's just not a place I can get to, just one I can dream about...
Last year a group of students, some IT, some special needs and some art students,drew these trees on iPad and we had loads of fun doing it. Someday I want to see then move and wave in the breeze with my eyes, not just my heart. If only to refill my hope gland.
*I probably do still work for it, I don't know, there's a huge amount of paperwork obscuring my vision. We're in the process of yet another consultation - my third in three years across different departments - and I'm in the process of filling in the forms etc to keep my job.
**Edit 1: At the moment I have four college students working on a demo. They're good students so I'm at the hopeful stage. That said none of them have Action Script experience (the code base we've all agreed makes the most sense to work with) so... who knows. I'll know something more solid in the next month I guess.