Futuricity Blog

Our project guidelines require that we undertake some audience testing to ensure that we don’t become overwhelmed by our own greatness! It’s amazing how much a fresh pair of eyes and ears can make you see your work in a different light. We showed our work to a seminar of first years to gauge their reaction and get comments and opinion. The benefit of using first year students is that they haven’t yet been introduced to the tools and techniques that we have used on the project, Maya being taught in the first year and green screen techniques in the third.

The reaction we got was generally positive and we have taken away some useful suggestions that we’ll be implimenting if we can. We only had a rough cut of the film to show to the seminar and so inevitably several of the comments were based on aspects that weren’t complete yet.

A trailer for Futuricity is now available online - please note some scenes are not complete and there is a lot that will be visually different in the actual film. The trailer is just to give you an idea of what Futuricity will be like.

This is the first media item that will be available on your mobile phone as well as in the web based media player. You can tell when a media clip can be accessed on your mobile because you will see the mobile icon next to it - .

Watch Futuricity Trailer

More about our mobile service.

I’ve been working on the site recently to bring you some fresh new features. Well actually some are more updates of old features but there are a couple that are new - I promise!

The first thing to mention is the updated Media Player, it now has swishy DHTML effects to show you what is available. On a more serious note is also includes a greatly expanded information section for each clip. This means that we can put more details and links together with our media to give you a better idea of what it all means.

OK so that’s the updated stuff out of the way, now for the new! The first new feature is the search function which you’ll find on the bottom of every page, its faster and more powerful than Google! (that may not be true) The site is growing at such a fast rate now that it seemed only sensible to include a search function, to be honest I was hoping no one would notice but Bryon brought it up the other day at a meeting so I felt obliged.

Talking of all the new content - the best way to be notified about new pages on our site is to sign up for our RSS feeds. These have been greatly improved over the last week and now include more information than ever before. The media feed now includes all the expanded information that you’ll see when you load each clip. The new page feed now shows you the first paragraph (or so) of each page so you can decide if you want to view it or not.

Now that we have the new search and RSS systems it seemed only sensible to connect them together! Each search has an RSS link at the bottom of the page, this is a dynamic RSS feed. That means that every time something changes with that search the feed will be updated and you will be informed. You can also make up your own dynamic RSS feeds simply by adding the correct URL to your feed application.

For example if you wanted to search for all mentions of ‘Pixelbox’ enter the following URL into your RSS application:

http://www.futuricity.info/rss/dynamic/pixelbox

You can replace the word ‘pixelbox’ with any word of your choice and the feed will update every time a new page is added that contains that word. Please note that the keyword you enter must be all lower case.

That’s it for the new technological developments on the site, we are adding new content every day as the project rushes towards its completion.

We successfully completed all of the live action filming across two days (16th + 21st Feb) and now have to move on to compositing the live action with the 3D graphics. We are currently working on documenting the entire process and you will find pages of detail at futuricity.info/filming.

I would like to extend a special thank you to all of the people that helped to make the live action shoot such a success. Thanks to our actors Matthew Fell, Larissa Hunter, Peter Byrom, Lizzy Soar and Martyn Trigg who put up with numerous changes to the script and location alterations.

The team owes a dept of gratitude to Bryon Homer Senior and Ellen Homer for the assistance they gave us and for knowing how all the technical stuff connected together. Their efforts have helped to bring a level of professionalism that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve.

The final thanks goes to Stuart Miller, our director. He bought the project to life and the help that he has given us over the duration of filming has been invaluable.

Details of everyone’s role can be found on the Futuricity Credits page. That’s it for my acceptance speech, now I should probably get down to some work!

Today we have a presentation to members of staff at the University to allow them to see what stage we are at with the project. They were generally impressed and came up with some good ideas for improvements.

You can see the presentation we gave by taking a look at the Mid-Project Critique page.

I’ve added loads of new media to the site. As Futuricity is at a very early stage in it’s development they are samples of what the final product will look like.

Take a look at the main site for details of all the new media.

Monday (24/10/2005) was the deadline for completing the research for the project and also the day that we had to give a presentation on the direction of Futuricity. The report weighs in at a meager 31 pages and the presentation took an impressive 10mins (we ran over)!

You can find all the details of the research and presentation on their respective sections of the site.

There will be a massive media update on this site in the next few days as we add all our prototype stuff (including some cool sound samples) into the Media Player.

After the long summer break we are finally getting started on the Futuricity project. The script is all set, all that is required are a few minor changes to where scenes take place. Some snappy dialouge would be nice too.

The site is going to get a lot larger over the course of this next term. We are required to submit all our research very soon and that will include details of the technology we use, as well how we got our ideas about what the city would look like.

More soon….promise!

So after days of me sitting and almost crying at the keyboard the site is almost ready to go. I say almost because I’m sure there are bugs in there, probably all over the place. For anyone interested here is a run down of the technology behind the site.

The page engine is based on PHP and MySQL using mod_rewrite to deliver the pages to the user as if they come from different directories. In reality the pages are all saved in a database and pulled out by one file. For example if you access about/syndication you’ll see futuricity.info/about/syndication. What actually happens is the site looks for the syndication page, under the about category.

The Media Player works based on a similar principle. Each media link is a JavaScript call to a function that opens a new window. When you call that function it looks to see if a media file is specified, we do that so we can send you to a specific file easily rather than you having to click through to find it. If a file is specified then the Media Player looks in it’s database and presents the file selected. If not file is specified it starts up in a sort of stand by mode, waiting for you to choose a file to play.

The other major part of the site is the RSS engine, this allows us to produce lists of just about anything that’s database controlled on our site, which is everything! Currently we produce feeds for the latest media file and the newest pages on the site.

It’s only fair to mention that the Media Player and RSS engine are licenced by PerryTech and not created specifically for the site. You probably think that this isn’t important but it needs to be mentioned so it’s clear that they fall outside of the Universities copyright.

Over the coming months we should see the site grow into a fantastic resource for everything Futuricity. Who knows I might even add a spell checker for the pages!

Mark