Living in Oblivion

First, Frankly, I don't like this movie. I mean, personally, I don't like it. I had a fun time watching it and it's one of the most clever movies I've seen but :)) the gut feeling is that I don't like it (of course, I don't hate it either).

Now, the first impression is that the narration (correct word?) is very much like Run Lola Run: you see it and it turns out to be not "it" and so on. It's a rather interesting technique (although I have to admit that I somewhat feel annoyed). The black and white scenes remind me of Ed Wood (also because Ed Wood's theme is about similar: filming). I don't particularly like black and white movie (because I feel that there's something missing: color) but I do appreciate the way it's used in Living in Oblivion. The scenes are switched smoothly and cleverly.

One more thing that's great about this one is lighting. I don't usually notice the impact of lighting in movies, but I do in this one. It creates quite an atmosphere and emphasize the actor's facial expression.

And last but not least is the acting. I think each of the actors did his part very well. Frankly, I still can't image how they can do a right acting of a wrong acting. Sounds complicated (to me).

In conclusion, this is a definite recommendation to someone who hasn't seen it yet, but as for myself, I don't think I'll watch it again. I find the film innovative, great (in almost every aspect: acting, lighting, script, music) and interesting but, nah, gut feeling is something that you can't deny.

Project content

I'm in charge of writting the lectures for this project, which eventually means I'm responsible for the whole content. The file can be downloaded here. Except for the quiz, the document has generally every bit of information we put on the flash.

Contracted Hiragana

This is the contracted Hiragana charts: characters created by combine a "i" sound (ie i, ki, chi...) with eather kya, kyu, kyo to create a new sound. There are totally 33 of them.

Hiragana with two dashes and one dot

This is the chart of Hiragana with two dashes and one dot. The dot and dash are put to present more sounds. There are totally 25 of them

Nekoshiro

Nekoshiro is the character who will serve as the class instructor in our application. The name is a combination of "neko" (which means "cat") and "shiro" (which means "white"). So basically Nekoshiro means "white cat". However, because we think less people know that neko = cat, so we just have to call him "Nekoshiro cat" (even though literally, it would become "white cat cat"!)

We will create Nekoshiro with little animation, only some facial expression changes and tail waving, since we don't want to too much distraction.

Nekoshiro will have different outfits through the class.

In our application, we have the following sections:

Introduction
Lessons (7 in total)
Basic conversation
Quiz
Credits

We will one outfit for Introduction and Credits, one for Lessons (but with different color and pattern for each lesson), one for basic conversation and one for quiz. So generally, he has 4 different outfits.

Nekoshiro design is still under construction.

Flowchart Content

Flowchart content for our project. It looks pretty linear and simple. However, since everything is practically connected to each others, it is indeed much more complicated to link every pages.

Note: There are actually 7 lessons but because they all have the same structure, I just use one for all.

My Hiragana Chart

This is the Hiragana characters I've done in Illustrator. Above are 46 ones that will be animated. There would be more, because there's more than one way to write a character but we just plan on animate the basic 46 characters. The alternative ones will be shown, but they won't be animated.

After doing these, I had to break down the stroke to make it easier to animate, then import everything to Macromedia Flash and get them prepared for Phong to animate.