MAiP Purpose
The initial goal for the overall project for the MAiP was to extend the Dunster project for my degree and complete it, as an educational CD-ROM ready for promoting to heritage companies/trusts commercially. This would then enable them to visualise how their properties could be animated and promoted via a CD-ROM, or even kiosk application. The idea would be to recreate time slices of a particular heritage site, according to the relevant ages in history pertaining to that site. We have already broached this idea to a possible client and in the ensuing brainstorm, the title for this project, ‘Talking Walls’ was born.
Talking Walls – implying ‘speaking’ stone wall, recounting tales of a castle, roman ruins, churches, museums and blue heritage properties etc.
i.e. ‘stories from the past’, ‘stories from stone walls’
Stories were always the way of transferring knowledge from generation to generation. Stories are also a good way of transferring tacit knowledge – i.e. information about cultural and social values and morals, which are more difficult to visualise.
There is no question that 3D computer graphics can be a powerful storyteller. By delivering observers to 3D worlds, the technology can also communicate ideas and messages that are difficult or impossible to understand through other means. You can also show things as they are thought to have happened over time, and overlay one period with another showing things at different times of its believed development, something that is just not possible via static graphics, text or verbally. The idea would be to provide digital versions of the site through which people can walk and explore as if they were there, experiencing it as close to first hand as possible.
The CD/DVD could include stories of the past with video clips of mock battles, jousts etc., in order to transfer and build the knowledge mentioned above. Various places hold these types of events now, I hope to video various events and use it within the CD, and/or hire costumes and act out some parts of the story-line if applicable.
Information about how a knight became a knight, a craftsman became a craftsman, a monk etc., historical events pertaining to that particular castle/heritage site can all be included briefly with cartoons/animation. A PDF document can be accessed should they wish to discover more.
The characters could be who told the stories, the snippets of ‘life’. They could be made humorous and full of ‘character’ i.e. the revolting peasant could be made to do various things, disgusting or otherwise i.e. his limbs could become diseased and ‘drop off’ if he wasn’t taking care of himself. If he became too irritating, you could imprison him.
Below are some extracts that conjure up images of castle life, scenes, which I hope to portray visually with animation:
‘….watched nobles in their rich, sombre dress with resentful fascination. He had come to the unused choir loft straight from the kitchens, still wearing his gravy-stained; even crouched hidden in the shadows he felt ashamed to be so poorly clad.’
‘….In the Outer Bailey, the animals milled in the commons yard, bumping miserably together in the cold, guarded by herders who looked scarcely more cheerful. Simon bustled along the rows of low houses, storage rooms and animal sheds, many of them so old and overgrown with winter-naked ivy that seemed only wart growths on the High Keep’s inner walls.’
‘….Main Row was roofed all over with stitched skins that stretched across the wide thoroughfare from building to building. At each way-crossing were set great stone fire-cairns, most but certainly not all – of their smoke billowing up through holes in the roof-tenting….’
Since starting the MA, different ideas regarding how to approach this project have been offered, the main one of which is building the CD/DVD as a template.
This makes a great deal of sense, particularly as we would be offering it to clients that will have a variety of different sites to be portrayed. Should they wish us to provide them with a complete CD-ROM, rather than dropping in the relevant material themselves, then we would also benefit from having a template already designed to drop the information into.
This will make the story-line aspect of the project an area that I need to look at carefully. Will it be something that will fit in with each type of property or do I leave it out completely, or can I add it as an extra facility to the template if it is required? I need to look into this and see whether there is a way of using a form of generic storytelling, something that is not specific to a particular property, but is still in keeping with the different time-slices.
There will be a lot of modelling involved in creating the castle/manor house from each of the floor plans. In the earlier ages, there are not any floor plans so I need to adapt historical artistic impressions of how the castle looked then, into three dimensional animations. This will be the case for quite a few properties and a provision will need to be made, possibly, for providing a generic set of ‘buildings/sites’ that can be used if there are no ‘artistic’ impressions available.
Will the template need to be able to adapt to any site or should there be a range of templates for different types of properties? I need to work on different storyboard ideas in order to work out the best way for this idea to progress into a workable template. I have already worked on some interface ideas with colleagues from our company in a bid to a client with regards to generic ‘medieval castles’ CD-ROM. They are a good start, but are not really ideal for developing as a template format.
Therefore, my goal for the MAiP is to create a template covering time slices of a particular space, such as a heritage site. In this instance I will use the information I have on Dunster Castle.