Assignment 2- James Bond: One Entity, Many Faces

I will be explaing a lot of my project here due to my short presentation.

James Bond is the oldest secret agent to date. He is 60 years old. Through out his 60 years he has made 23 films. After looking at these film in depth I came to realize that they are more alike then I imagined. Every Bond film follows a pattern.

1.You are introduced to the plot of the movie. The issue that is happening and not knowing who is behind it, but you have a lead.
2. Bond travels to his destination only to find a beautiful girl. Of course this "Bond Girl" can't resist James charm and class, which is led to them sleeping with one another.
3. As she awakes, James disappears for he has a job to do. This lead to investigating.
4. As he is investigating he is caught by the "enemy(s)", where they fight it out.
5. He manges to escape and some times, he barley makes it out alive.
6. He reports his finding to M, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
7. He then visits Q (Quartermaster) who gives him all of his gadgets. This of course includes a car and his famous pistol the "PPK" which is in all the movies. James also exchanges little insults. (reminds me of the jock and the nerd for james bond is always in the field while Q is always inventing new gadgets).
8. With his new car he travels to his next destination in which he notices that he has a "tail". This leads to a chase scene where James uses his car maneuvers to get away, leaving the tail dead, or injured to a point where they can't follow.
9. This is where the centuries differ a bit. In the older movies, which I have stayed true to for reason I explain below. James normally gets caught at the chase scene, where there to many tails or his car breaks down because of these "tails" and so on. He gets captured is what I am getting at. In the newer movies he gets away but still goes to the enemy's headquarters.

Either way he is welcomed with open arms. For this enemy sees this as a gentleman game, in which they try to get james over to there side by having dinner or a nice conversation. I honestly mean they have a nice conversation, they both know who each other is but yet they don't try to kill one another. James find outs information of this enemy plan, due to his charm and calm nature. This normal lead to him getting locked up, or desperately trying to get out of the enemy's headquarters.

10. He escapes and if a "Bond girl" was present with him while in the act of getting caught, she goes with him. The base is destroyed the main villain gets killed and the "Bond girl" who is normally different then the first "Bond girl" at the start of the movie, sleeps with James.

This is the exact pattern in every James Bond film. I show this pattern in the 2:58 minute preview of the movie "James Bond- One Entity,Many Faces".

BEFORE YOU WATCH THE MOVIE!!

The percentage of the preview's minutes in both audio and video have been broken down by the "amount of the certain actors minutes in all their films / the total amount in minutes of the James Bond movies"

Example:
Sean Connery:
110 + 115 + 110+130+117+120  = 702(total Sean Connery Movies in minutes ) / 2897(total minutes of all Bond film) = 25%

These are the percentages:

Sean Connery-  25%

George Lazenby- 5%

Roger Moore- 30%

Timothy Dalton-  9%

Pierce Brosnan- 17%

Daniel Crig -  14%

Because the older movies adds up to 69% of the total Bond movies, I decide to make this preview resemble that theme.
The older movies show Bond of a more classier gentleman. He does more investigating and talking rather then fighting and shooting. In fact he has had sex with women more then he has killed.

I didn't create this info graph.

I hope you enjoy this preview as much as I enjoyed making it.


JamesBond-One Entity, Many Faces from One Week Notice on Vimeo.


If you made it this far. Here a picture of me as James Bond.

Here what the full length preview looked like, as you can see there are many edits

Citation:

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Dr.No.DVD.Terence Young,1962

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.From Russia with Love.DVD.Terence Young,1963

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Goldfinger.DVD.Guy Hamilton,1964

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Thunderball.DVD.Terence Young,1965

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.You Only Live Twice.DVD.Lewis Gilbert,1967

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.On Her Majesty's Secret Service.DVD.Peter R. Hunt,1969

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.On Diamonds Are Forever.DVD.Guy Hamilton,1971

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Live and Let Die.DVD.Guy Hamilton,1973

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.The Man with the Golden Gun.DVD.Guy Hamilton,1974

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.The Spy Who Loved Me.DVD.Lewis Gilbert,1977

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Moonraker.DVD.Lewis Gilbert,1979

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.For Your Eyes Only.DVD.John Glen,1983

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.A View to a Kill.DVD.John Glen,1985

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.The Living Daylights.DVD.John Glen,1987

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Licence to Kill.DVD.John Glen,1989

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.GoldenEye.DVD.Martin Campbell,1995

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Tomorrow Never Dies.DVD.Roger Spottiswoode,1997

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.The World Is Not Enough.DVD.Michael Apted,1999

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Die Another Day.DVD.Lee Tamahori,2002

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Casino Royale.DVD.Martin Campbell,2006

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Quantum of Solace.DVD.Marc Forster,2008

Metro Goldwyn Mayer.Skyfall.DVD.Sam Mendes,2012

Presentation on David McCandless

Here are my slides

Citations

McCandless,David. Snake Oil,  InfoGraph, 2011.http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/.

McCandless,David.The Billion Dollar Gram,  InfoGraph, 2010. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-billion-dollar-gram/

McCandless,David.The Sunscreen Smokescreen,  InfoGraph, 2011.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2011/the-sunscreen-smokescreen/

McCandless,David.What Does China Censor Online?,  InfoGraph, 2010.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/what-does-china-censor-online/

McCandless, David. "The beauty of data visualization." TED Talk. November 23 2012. Web, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zg-C8AAIGg.

McCandless ,David. "Bio." Accessed March 02, 2013. http://www.davidmccandless.com/bio/.

McCandless, David. The Guardian, "David McCandless." Accessed February 26, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidmccandless.

Reading Response #4

Within this article Mitchell Whitelaw talks about the different between data and information and how it pertains to art. People do normally interchange there meaning and I am glad Mitchell shows and explains the difference between them. I learned this in data management which is why I would never interchanged them.

Data- a collection of raw material.

Information - a meaning that is derived from data.

Through out this course we have learned that every info graph has a story behind it. What does the information in this graph mean? What is the concept? To hear something as a data graph/art is a bit odd to me, for data means nothing, data has no context. Something without a context can't have a meaning and without that meaning what is the point to the art work? What is the artist trying to show? What story are they trying to tell me as a view? Well the answer to all the questions is nothing because as I mentioned, data is nothing. But this raises a different point which I believe in, that data graphs/ art work don't exist. Here me out for a second and I maybe wrong but like I said this is my opinion. When a user looks at an art work, they try to interpret a meaning. When presented a data piece like Dragulescu’s work where the "data isn't important" that is not the case. For the user is trying to interpret the meaning, they are seeing your piece, looking at your data and themselves are trying to find a definition to the work. The user is making that data art work into an information work by giving it meaning. As I mentioned above, a data piece will never exist because the user will always try to make meaning to an art work.

This also goes into the idea of “junk is structure” or “structure is junk” as well as "everything is everything". I personally believe that junk is structure. It comes down to the fact that an art piece will always have a meaning, because people will constantly try to interpret. The real beauty here is that art has a special connection with each user including the artist itself. Where there is no right way to interpret a piece, for the artist interpretation of there own work is not the right answer.

I hope I explained myself properly and I hope I didn't get to far off from the article topic. This is just the process my mind took when I read the article.

Reading Response 3

Alex Ormat's Roller Coaster info graph is what I decided to critique for my reading response. I would first like to state that this graph is very appealing and that is due to the simplicity of the way it was designed. The orange and blue fonts were contrasting to one another, which brought it out more. I like how he added the clouds, it reminds me of what he is showing in his graph, how high the roller coaster are. At first I wondered what the graph's axis were and was going to recommend that he label his axis, but with a little bit of interaction that fixed my curious issue. He nicely showed the roller coaster high with the mouse pointer. As you moved the cursor across the graph it showed the height and well as the speed. Once over a roller coaster it showed you it height and speed in a better font and gave it a better presentation. When clicked it not only pointed to it location on the map (real liked this idea) but it also showed you how many drops it had by the number of cars that was dropping from the graph to its location on the map. Finally he showed you an POV of the roller coaster. I don't know how he got these video shots, but it was a nice add to the graph.

Personally, I thought the added cars representing number of drops wasn't the best way to represent the number of drops. It would of been better to put more curves in the line that was going to the map (representing more drops). I also wasn't a fan of the video, yes it added something more to the graph but to sit there looking at it for a long period of time isn't my cup of tea.

Other then that as I mentioned before, the design of the graph was fantastic, the graph was nice and simple and the mouse cursor over the graph was very unique and nicely implemented. The fonts made an outstanding (pun intend) look on the entire graph and made sure your focus was on the attention of which roller it was and how fast and height it was. (when you placed the cursor over a dot on the graph). Just to repeat my self, I really liked how the roaster coster dropped to it's location on the map. I found that very creative.

Where is the line?

The topic of anti-sublime vs sublime within visualizations is a long debate that I believe doesn't have an answer yet. It like the discussion of what is art? Something that can be argued but only can be answered within a certain amount of rules to restrict the broad definition. But for this response I am going to discuss my own feeling towards the topic of anti-sublime vs sublime within visualizations.

Coming from a computer science background I want to agree that anti-sublime is better. In my User Interface class my professor put strong emphases on "you can have the best program in the world. It can compute faster then any computer program and tell you all the information you want. It can have over a billion functions but if the user is unable to use it, then by default it is the worse program because all that power it has, can't be used." I do believe this does transfer over to visualizations for you can have all the information you want that shows and proves a very interesting point, it can be as beautiful as you want but if the user can't understand it, then the whole visualization is useless.

Here is a harsh review on visualization

http://eagereyes.org/criticism/visualization-can-never-be-art

At the same time I like what sublime does to a visualizations. It shows you information in these abstract interesting ways. These method that put emphases on elements that normally wouldn't be seen in an anit-sublime visualization. In a sense it shows you multiple meaning to a single visualization, and allows the user to experience the visualization in their own way. Which is better then just showing a visualization and saying "THIS IS THE POINT, THERE NO WAY YOU CAN MISUNDERSTAND BECAUSE I PUT LABELS EVERYWHERE". Its not aesthetically pleasing.

The question still stands, how can we find a mid point between anti-sublime and sublime. How can we make a visualization that is aesthetically pleasing without clouding all the information, or making it to abstract.

Personality this problem came up during my assignment 1. How can I make a visualization that is easy to read, looks appealing but doesn't confuse the user with to much information. I hope I made some right choices that will be discussed tomorrow in class. 

As to the topic, I am still unsure where the common line is between these two methods. Hopefully by the end of this course, I will understand more of the sublime for I do see my work being more anti-sublime.

Design statement for Assignment 1

Gaming has always  had an influence in my life, in fact the only reason I became a programmer is because of gaming. I've always wondered the mechanics behind a game and saw what was possible with code. Unlike the world we live in, with code we can create or recreate almost anything and this is anywhere from a building to universes that are populated with people. 

I have discovered in 2010 I signed up to a website called "raptr", I will provide a link below. This website keeps tracks of which games you played, how many hours you played each game and separates the games into genres. After going through all the hours and games, I noticed that I have spent over 1000 hours in front of a screen every year, seem crazy but if you think about it, that is only 2 hours a day for 1 year. 

Since visualization was the whole point of this project, I wanted to have a design that was simple. Something that didn't over complicate the data that was being shown. How to show a data set with the variables; year, games, hours and genres. When I think of games, I can pictures the games that are sitting in my room, piled on top of one another due to the fact that I don't have book ends. They looks like a stacked bar graph and normally would be in alphabetical order if I wasn't in a hurry to play a game.

Kinda looks like this:

The issue with a stack bar graph is that it's hard to put it on the screen, it has to be at the bottom for the graph is getting stacked upwards. The only fix to that solution is to make it upside down. This way I can put it to the top of the screen where a person eyes are naturally drawn. 

I made the games randomize there position because the stacks in my rooms are always different.

The point to this dataset was to see which games I played the most and what genres they fall under. The legend at the bottom of the screen shows which colour is what genres and when you click on either the genre in the legend or a game, it will grey out every genre except the one that you click. This way the user can clearly see how many hours I have played a genre and how it has changed over the years. 

To add further detail when you hover over a game, at the bottom of the screen it will show the hours I have played as well as the game title. Furthermore the game that you hover over will turn white in all years. This way you can compare the amount of hours I have played over the three year. In the picture below you can see in 2010 (which is were my cursor is) that I only played 50 hour of Minecraft. But in 2011 and 2012 you can see I have spend more time on the game.

After graphing this data a question did stand that I would like to solve. What does this all mean? When looking at the data, the obvious is that I used to play more shooters in the past, then I do now.What does that mean? 

After some digging, I found an article by Richard Bartle  that goes into gamers Personality types (Gamification Process and Game Design.) I will go into this during my presentation because this blog is meant only to explain my design choices.

Here is my project for those who want to see it.

Citation:

. ratr. http://raptr.com/ (accessed February 6, 2013).

Gamification, "Personality Types." Accessed February 7, 2013. http://www.gamification.org/wiki/Personality_Types.

Richard, Bartle. "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS." . http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (accessed February 7, 2013).

Data Visualization

At the top of the screen there will be 4 years in which you can switch between. There are going to be two scenes to my data visualization, rain and snow. You can switch in between the two visualization by clicking the rain droplet on the side. (It will turn into a snow flake when displaying the rain graphs). Both scenes will display similar elements, which are the top and bottom banner, the snow/ rain that will be displaying in the background and some sort of object (a snowman here) that will display the measurement of the snow/ rain (in mm). 

The following variables will be displayed in the graph:

The mm in snow- The snowman height/fatness and also as a safe measure the sign that it carries.

The percentage of snow within the given month (compared to the whole year) - the snow fall will either be greater or non existing depending on the percentage of snow to the over all scale.]

The snowman smile- this also relates to the amount of snow fall. The hotter it is the sadder the snow man. 

The month that you are currently in will be displayed by the green bar that will move across the screen. While the bar is in a certain month the snowman will walk around. In which it will transition it weight and height slowly as the bar gets to the new month. The font that I am using will be "Chalkduster".

Here are my data in typical bar graph forms.