Out of my Hands/Thinking about user made content.

Today we had our first workshop since our briefing, it really helped me understand what the Alright project could potentially be all about and how i could incorporate myself within it. We started off going round the room and discussing who could Alight be aimed at, how old the people were and why they would decide to come to the Alight Festival, most of the conclusions consisted of:

During the day it would be pretty much everyone, men and woman, young and old.
During Twilight it would consist of upper class concert goers with the possibility of other music lovers and family members aged 25+ and their kids brought along for the crazy ride.
During Alight at night pretty much the same as Twilight with the added exception of younger children being out of the equation because it's past their beddy byes.



After this we were introduced to the idea of user made content, this idea being that something doesn't have to be designed completely by the designer, it could involve interaction of some sort. Spore was mentioned which is a semi-popular video game where the player makes an online account and designs a creature, planet, buildings and almost everything else, this content is then put on their database and uploaded into other games creating a very unique experience. If this were introduced into a design for the Alight Festival it could make for a very interesting concept, and idea sprung to mind that anyone could text a service that would change the colour of what was going on behind the orchestra but be held in a que for 20 seconds.

Other user made content is well.... all over the internet, the means of giving someone a website to post their things, such as this website. Practically every website is user made content, the tools to create them are at our fingertips, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia. They would all be nothing without their users constantly updating their website with new interesting information for them.

 

However this all aside, we proceeded with the workshop, a workshop that turned out to be extremely enjoyable. We were asked to each take a letter of "Alight" then make one change to the letter, have a photo taken of it then pass the letter to the person from the left of us. This task lasted around 30-45 minutes, then all the pictures taken were uploaded to Flickr to be turned into a animation short.

This is Flickr.... hazzar.

The "out of my hands" workshop. We did this to all the letters in Alight, this is just to give you an idea.

We were asked to look at a user produced film called "Life in a Day" a film which captures the lives of many different people and cultures, presenting either their everyday lives, fear, what makes them happy or just what they do to survive but more importantly it is entirely user made. The idea that one day filmed all over the world is to me personally quite magical. things like this are truly one off. If something as simple as this can feel so special then making something interactive for alight would really create buzz among the public eye.

This is more user created content, a site dedicated to making free modifications to existing games. People all over the world work together to design, produce and release new games built on an existing game engion or sometimes creating their own, the reason I've mentioned this is because i think it is a prime example and also a unique one... also i play a lot of games. More to the point, the content on this website is absolutely free provided you own the original games, this opens up for unlimited possibilities for creating new content for 10 year old games.