We have decided today that we need to change and develop some of our questions. I suggested that we incorporate questions that delve deeper into peoples personal lives. Most of the answers we were given were very short as people were being put on the spot. I feel that we should alter how we go about confronting the questions of money to avoid the "yes" or "no" answers. I also feel that we should start by asking the person briefly who they are. Perhaps a quick overview describing a bit of their background. This would bring greater understanding of their answers and allow audiences to connect with the viewer on a higher level.

I came to this conclusion from watching the 'Talking Heads' documentary which explores peoples lives using a few well worded questions.

The money network

We have spent most of our time refining our ideas and developing a concept over the first half of the semester. In this project we aim to reveal the fact that money is not just a form of currency. With it, is carried a vast amount of emotions and connections that affect all of society. It is a powerful force that has the ability to rift entire communities and brings to life every human emotion available to us, ranging from hatred to something as strong as love. Not only is money a network that provides a sense of order to civilization but it is also a key driving force to our cultures, behaviors and most importantly to our social network. In a sense, the money network acts as the spark that ignites the connections between people revealing the hidden network that both bonds us together and drives us apart as a society. To show this fact we want to conduct a series of interviews with an wide range of different demographic groups, ranging from children to the elderly and document their views and opinions of how the money network effects them both behaviorally and emotionally. We want to use such a range of people because we believe it will reveal the fact that the view of money is changing over time. We wish to inspect how peoples perspective of how money effects them as they progress through their life. By interviewing people of all different backgrounds and social classes we want to further convey the flexibility of how it affects interactions within our communities.


We really want to explore how different demographic groups view money. We wish to do this through the use of small interviews where questions will be asked about the effect money has on their lives. Using this information we will then construct our own artistic view of how money controls society and how we interact with each other.


We are still experimenting with questions, but here are some of the primary things we will be asking people:


What does five dollars mean to you? / What does fifty thousand dollars mean to you?
Do you think the amount of money you have affects the person you are today?
Have you ever judged someone that you assumed to have more or less money than you? If so, how did this change your perspective of them?
Has does money effect your relationships with other people? Negatively or positively?
(Optional Question) How much money do you earn a year?

We have spent much of our time trying to debate a concept, in the end we decided to focus on money. However we found ourselves going around in circles and confusing each other every time we began research. I knew that what we were doing was heading down the wrong track but I thought it would be a strategy of exploring the network more in depth. The problem was that we were too narrow minded with our concept of money, and the network was far too complex to do a video on. We needed to condense our findings down to a point and focus our attention on that aspect.

From the very start of the project we also hinted at wanting to do a video, however I personally wanted to keep our options open for us to explore while researching our network. I felt as though we were all focusing on the final product and jumping ahead rather than developing our idea gradually. However we addressed this issue. I thought about ideas such as exploring the concept of money within video games. Perhaps designing our own currency to be used within a game much like World of Warcraft's "auction house," that uses the games gold in order to trade items. I felt as though money within the real world was too broad of a topic. Looking back I feel as though we should have pushed our boundaries more.

After a talk with Zoe, we were advised to watch a documentary called "The Lift." In this documentary peoples interactions and lives were studied while they went up and down a lift to their apartment block. It was amazing to see how the people change over time as they gradually grew to know the man filming in the lift. You felt a connection to these people and you only saw them once or twice a day. I thought it might be interesting to explore a scene similar to this. Perhaps film within my old work "a dairy in St Heliers" and film interactions between customers to explore the relations generated between the clerk and the buyer.

Another idea I had was to develop a currency system that worked within BCT. I  have had a few issues with the amount of teaching going on and having to learn everything myself. I remember being told in first year that we were chosen for the course based on our skill sets and interests, some people

Another concept was exploring what the world would be like if we did not have a currency. Could it be that money was created because of mankind's selfish nature? Was it necessary to make the world operate the way it does? In changing peoples outlook on life, could we change the need for money? It seemed to me that money had changed the way humans think over time. Gradually we have become more individual rather than unified. People no longer see beauty in the world, they simply see a means to gain profit and to tower over the rest of society. These questions heavily contributed to our final concept of how money affects peoples emotions, behavior and perception of the world around them.

Final presentation

Heres the link to my flash website:

http://www.wix.com/nikhodgson/studio2

For some reason the wix website is no longer running and has been down for quite some time. Im not sure if the server has shut down or not, perhaps it will be reactivated. In the event that it does feel free to check it out. :)

Finalising

It seems as though the work is getting a little one sided, I feel as though the group isnt doing as much as they should be as a whole. I felt that at the rate we were going nothing was going to get done so I had to step up and get the ball rolling for everyone. However the deadline is very close and we really need to get everything sorted. We finally have a solid framework to work around. All we need to do is make the clues/props and set up the opening crime scene. There has not been much blog work after the last post quite honestly because I have been so swamped with doing the work for the project. There has been quite simply too many things to even blog about. For example, the CD case, the emails, the story, setting up, filling gaps etc. A lot of this work fell on me to complete as I had the most solid grasp of what we were actually doing with the game. I did try my best to keep my journal and blog up to date, but eventually the workload just took over. Near the end of the game it was more a stage where we had to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Changes

Once again, we have changed our ideas slightly after another talk with Maggie. At the start of the project we said to ourselves that we really didn't want to do the same thing as everyone else. We didn't want people being lead to meaningless clues one after another. We felt as though this took a lot away from the experience we wanted to portray. Upon review, we realized that we had been leading ourselves down this exact path. We took a step back and decided to change our clue system. We simplified it down a lot and decided that the main clues that we would show the players would be using images. There are also the other clues within the office. Because of this we are now focusing our journey mainly on discovering the hidden plots of our story.

We were not entirely pleased with TJ's  script that he wrote so we made quite a few changes to it. We also began to create some of the intel that we wanted the players to discover. These including such items as emails between the Lieutenant General and John Key.

Talk With Maggie

After another talk with Maggie we realised that we were planning things a bit too far ahead of ourselves. We were aiming at completing the entire game. However  we found out that we did not have to finnish everything. Just give Maggie and Gabe a taste of what we wanted to convey to the players. We only have 30 minutes to present so we are simplifying almost everything. This is disappointing as I had high hopes and saw a lot of potential in our game.

I went outside to inspect the surroundings and found a billboard that could come in very handy for placing something like a QR code. Because we do NOT want to involve the public on any level with this game, I decided it would be a great idea to split the QR code in half. The idea of the particular clue would be to join the two pieces to reveal information about the terrorist. By doing this we also limit only people in BCT to be able to read the AQ code. The person following around Gabe and Maggie will have to have an app on their phone which can read these codes.

We also have started to put up posters around BCT about NZ army recruitment's. We wanted to do this emphasize the fact that our troops are in fact fighting with America in the war on terror. This is not highlighted in media a lot so we really wanted to make the BCT building feel that we are at war.