Blog 387: Black Ninja’s Revenge

Sometimes in life, you reach 4th year of a long hard Software Engineering degree. It’s been programming and reports and difficult stuff like that.

Then you discover a module that lets you make a film.

The module was called “Design and Evaluation of Multimedia Systems”. Not a name that inspires one with confidence, but as I’m quite fed up of university by now I felt that I was allowed at least one piss-take course to finish things off.

The coursework brief was “a multimedia presentation”, which should tell a “non-linear story”. In terms of interaction, we just put the video into a My First HTML Website and added some behind-the-scenes cast pictures and interviews. This made it non-linear, bitch.

You can watch the fruit of our labour on the Tube.

We did originally want to have multiple endings, so you could choose the method in which Jar Jar is brutally murdered… Alas, we didn’t have time for that.

I suppose it’s somewhat poetic that my final piece of assessed coursework to be submitted (barring the solo project itself) was a Lego video and a cheap website (not XHTML strict, by the way. We tried putting the embedded video in marquee tags, but there were some graphical glitches that made that course of action unworkable) that really, we could have made when we were 12. Not a programming challenge, not a tough research project… But a Lego movie.

Okay, so instead of the LegoCam we used Ross’ digital camera, so all the frames were at an obscene 3000×2000 or something until I cropped and resized them all down to classic television 640×480. But it made for lots of nice ease-in shots without just focusing on a single pixel of Jar Jar’s shiny beige nose, so it was ultimately better. Not to mention it coped with the lighting much better. And the images were really nice and crisp. And it had an auto-focus-on-foreground feature so most of the shots weren’t dud due to me forgetting to spin the focus ring every time.

What a stunning way to end a life-long career in full-time education.