Wednesday

Start up company

I have decided to create a digital magazine with a similar premise to aggregation websites such as hypemachine & elbo.ws.
The magazine would work like a news site, constantly updated with options to favourite stories, share them, comment them. However rather than reporting every story subjects would come from whatever is popular on the web at the moment, using information from blogs and social medias. There are already iPad apps which work in this way, however my idea is that not only would the service be an iPad app, it would also have a strong online presence which could be transferred to any tablet or smartphone through an app. Subject matter would be music, working with services such as last.fm and spotify to learn your music tastes and recommend videos, gigs, other artists and articles.
Google attempted to launch a service similair to this in 2009 with Fastflip, however this was unsuccessful. Whereas free iPad app, Zite, was recently purchased for $20 million by CNN, showing that when done right this can be an extremely lucrative market.

Thursday

StartUp factory report

While looking into what I wanted to create I was looking at production companies and as I was researching I realised I much prefer to analyze these companies rather than to create my own. Which brought me to think of magazines and how they are changing with the new digital medias. We were shown a digital magazine in a tutorial which was an app in which the articles were clickable and they brought up videos and other media. This is the kind of route I'd like to go down with my company, I already have knowledge of these as I read digital issues myself so research will be to look more in depth at these existing apps and how they work.

For my digital magazine I'd like to focus on culture - the arts and music, as there is so much interactive content which could be included it seems like the obvious choice as that's also where my interests lie.

Zinio - digital reseller of magazines/books.

Start Up Company Research

Websites of existing companies:

Tribe Inc set design

Left Eye Blind music promotions and film making

Wednesday

Research project

I've been reading more to get more depth on my research topic cause I'm really struggling to find a question. I looked into how colours make you feel by reading a journal about an experiment tested on university students which has given me some inspiration. I also looked at the Technoetic journals following on from Simon's lecture on the research project. I found some really interesting articles regarding projects which experiment with perception and interaction and I'm going to read more into those tomorrow. I really want to create some visuals for my project which can be used in club environments, looking at people currently doing this like Kenzo Digital and Ali Demirel, amongst others.



Thursday

Ideas for Simulated Client Brief


WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.


Made by Everynone (in Collaboration with WNYC's Radiolab & NPR)

Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman


A short film by Everynone made up of clips of everyday situations. Thought provoking, it makes the audience think about what they are watching as each clips flows into the next, linking different meanings and descriptions for the same words, then flowing on to others. Below shows the film recreated using existing YouTube videos.


Re:WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.



Watching these and the other films created by Everynone have really helped me in getting a direction I'd like to take with the project for the Nottingham Trent Alumni. I'm hoping to focus more on which part of the Alumni I'd like to advertise and hopefully start to think of some shots. Originally I was going to focus on the donating side, possibly with a thank you film or showing where the money went to, however in my tutorial Danny suggested that this may work well with the cancer research part of the donation scheme.