New Worlds Open Up in Interactive Media Course

The college will offer a new course in Interactive Media for 2008 designed for year 12/13 students with skills in multimedia, graphic design, video, game design and writing.

The course will help students develop production skills in project teams and builds on the work done this year in game design and programming, machinima and video - such as this work by Shannon designing virtual worlds using the Neverwinter Nights Toolset.



Students will be assessed at 5C, 4C and/or in VET Multimedia modules according to their personalised learning plan. See here for course details.

Tribute to Pacman...

The Computer Games Programming class have been busy building their skills... Early work started with some basic Flash 8 productions such as the following grass skier "game".



This progressed to more adventurous productions such as Hunters and Assassins by Tom:



Others have been using game development software such as GameMaker. The following is Daniel's tribute to the very early Pacman games. It might look simple but getting the trigger keys to time correctly was not easy...



Next term students will begin to use more complex 'game engines' from some successful commercial computer games.

In the meantime some students have been playing the new game PeaceMaker. This is a difficult game where the player takes on the role of Palestinian or Israeli leader and attempts to bring peace to those countries. The game uses actual historic events and the player chooses from a range of security, political and development options to bring peace.



You can watch some video clips about the game here and here.

Multi-talented Multi-media Students

Some outstanding work already from this year's Multimedia students - and we have only just begun... We started the year setting up an online spaces to share tasks, student work and for assessment. We then jumped into Photo Story - creating digital stories from still shots. We used pictures we had taken or those from the FlickR Creative Commons site so that we can legally show them outside class.

We looked at techniques for adding text, clipping and panning. Here is a great example from Hannah using pics and audio from her band Majestik.

James put this one together on his laptop using sunrise photo's he took last year.

James also started some work stitching photo's together with Jade... Scott then took nine pics of our computer lab...

and made a great panorama from them.

Click in the window and drag the mouse left or right to look around the room... you can also zoom in/out... Some didn't overlap enough to get a good join but it shows what can be done...

Some students are now using Movie Maker to create more advanced photo-stories while others are working on short videos. Great work guys More examples later...