Tuesday, November 27, 2001  11:41 pm  <|>
<119> Creative control: That is basically what my day is all about.  I have this game that I must create for my core studio final project, I believe I mentioned it before.  We can do this digitally or non-digitally, it just needs to be done in two weeks and even though I'm not extremely concerned after this morning, that all could change at any moment.  For class today, which happens to be my core studio class, we are just getting time to work on our projects as well as time to meet with our prof one on one to go over our web work and assignments from this semester.  I'm going last I believe, so I basically have just been sitting in class trying to flesh out my game concept.  It's working out pretty well actually, but once I explain this to my prof I'm not sure if it'll be as I had planned.  Basically I want to do this game digitally, because well, it's all I know.  I've never been much of a craft person, which probably means I will be forced to do a physical game.  It's not that I'm opposed to it.  It's just I don't want my nice idea to turn out crappy just because I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to gluing pieces of cardboard together.   We shall see though.  I think I could do what I want to in flash or even just plain old html, though it would actually work best in director... the thing is, next semester we do a digital game in director so I can't do it now because of that, not to mention I wouldn't know how to pull it off.  I don't really know how to pull it off now in any form, but that is what today's class time is all about.  I'm thankful for it too, because I really don't need anymore work, I just need time to think for once.

Last night I managed to get myself out of my 6 hour night studio class 2 hours early.  I was very proud of myself, but the bad part about that is I got to leave because I had no way of being productive there.  I was trying to be ahead of the game.  You see, for our final video project, we are supposed to take found or shot video clips and put them together in any way we want (because it's an abstract piece) to create some kind of emotion over a 4 period piece.   This is all well and good to me.  I found a bunch of underwater video clips online, more then I thought I would, and burnt them all to a CD on sunday when I returned so I would be all prepared to sit in class Monday night and work.  This was not to be though.  The macs would only read about 2 of the 40 some clips.  This is not a good way to start a project...  They worked on both my pcs, so right away I had to blame the mac system (and just when macs and I were starting to get along!)  I came home to work on it more and I think I've discovered the problem - macs don't like the mpegs I'm using for some reason.  I know the files work on pc, so I know they are valid, why can't mac agree?  So my brilliant solution was to take these mpegs (even though mac SHOULD be able to read this file type to the best of my knowledge) and convert them to avi or mov files... yeah, this would be a great solution except that no program I find wants to convert mpegs to anything... they just want to convert avi and mov files to mpeg!!!  So, if this is the case, and all video clips want to be converted to mpeg, then why doesn't it work on mac????  It's beyond me and I got fed up with it last night, so I just gave up eventually and will have to figure out a solution this week as it's due on Monday.  Like I need one more thing to worry about!

So Thanksgiving break came and went.   It was decent for me I suppose.  I went home Wednesday night, attend my old high school's football game on Thanksgiving because that's the only time some of my friends could meet up, stayed about half an hour, and went home for a nice little dinner.   I came back in to Philly on Friday night to hang out with one of my friends who couldn't make it home for Thanksgiving, which was a fun time.  Then I was supposed to meet up with some friends from home who were coming into Philly on Saturday morning but they never called (and I still haven't heard from them) so I assume they got tied up or plans feel through.  Not a big deal though, it was still worth coming in.  So Saturday afternoon I went home again, went out shopping with my mom, spent money I shouldn't have, then went out with a few really good home friends of mine Saturday night.   That was fun, you know, catching up times.  Then when I went to go home my car decided it wasn't going to start, marking the first time my car has ever not started for me.  It's probably mad at me for not driving it anymore and it has been cold so the battery got drained.  We charged it, but I'm going to have to get a new one over break - joy more costs!  It's worth it though, I love my car. 

So now I'm back in the city.  I got back around 5pm on Sunday and ever since have been attempting to get things done - but there are so many distractions.  I'm not complaining entirely because distractions usually come in the form of good friends and other interesting stuff... but still.   There is two weeks left of this semester and I need to get crackin on my final stuff.  For some reason it doesn't feel as crazy as midterm time did, which is a little scary because I feel like it should be worse.  We shall see, won't we?