Working in pairs, your mission should you choose to except it, is to generate "a living creature in structure, behavior, etc..." The final organism should be a form of interactive media, able to work on any platform from mobile, desktop, internet, ipod, etc. The intention is to make the organism accessible on a web site so the Shockwave movie should be embedded in it's own web page. This will have a dramatic effect on the size of your organism, be realistic.
Ideas Generation
Through what the brief is saying, we have to come up with a digital organism that thinks, eats and feels for it's self. Something similar to an A.I robot or a pet Tamagotchi, however it has to be able to work on different formats such as Ipods, internet, mobiles, and Desktops.
I've started this exercise in drawing down a small mind map that shows different elements that could well be part of an organism structure. The first thing most people think of when they hear the word organism is bacteria, Plankton, or even some kind of human anti virus cell.
OUR PLANET
The organism that really intrigues me though is our plant, people tend to think of our planet as just a heap of rock floating in space. However through what science and other clever people have discovered is that it is actually a living breathing thing, it's just slightly on a larger scale that moves on it's own accord (This is where Earth quakes, waves etc.. come in). The Earth seems to have its own natural movement and it can defend itself if necessary, a classic example would be the Ice Age where everything just got completely covered with ice and life had to replenish it's self again.
Stock image xchange website: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1155281CONCEPT
The concept of our organism is that it is not only teaching people about how fragile and moving our world can be. But also that if you don't look after it, the planet will start to suffer and therefore bring about it's own way of healing its self, most likely through certain events such as a new ice age, or the world gets flooded by water and so on. The hidden meaning behind this idea is that is it hinting to people about becoming more Eco friendly with their environment as well as making it just a piece of technical entertainment.
(Generating ideas)
Interaction
Using Flash will make it possible to create an interface for our world and make the world have it's own A.I system coded in (gives it the ability to think for itself). However we have to create ways for the user to interact with our planet and we're not allowed to use any form of buttons that change the way our world reacts or changes. So I came up with a list of methods that we could use that don't involve using buttons.
> Microphone - using the microphone you can tell flash to pick up voice and sound signals, making it able to move or change objects on the screen.
> Camera or Web cam - Can use tracking systems to detect movement and change objects and values on the interface.
> Mouse - Using the mouse would most likely be one of the key functions we will use for our interface, because even on phones and other formats you can still get mouses.
> Temperature - Could use the temperature gauge within mobile phones to get an output for the organism. E.g the colder it gets the more the planet dies.
Designing the Interface
I came up with a few design ideas of what I would like the interface to look like, the hardest part is getting the planet to rotate, also we have to make it so the weather patterns can wrap around the world and move when the earth rotates as well. We thought of the idea of using the 3DsMax software to create a rotating planet, the problem with this is that it has to be compatible with all kinds of different formats and it has to move with a weather pattern that is randomized.
Another way to create the world spinning with a weather pattern is to have a planet shaped mask within flash and have a map of the world placed behind the mask. The map of the world which is behind the mask will have a motion tween joined onto a loop function, this will give it the ability to move across from left to right over and over again. (See World Concept Illustration)
(World Concept Illustration)
Production and planning
we started our project with coming up with an events weather pattern plan, which gives us information on what state the earth will be at a certain time. So I constructed a map that will display the different weather patterns for our planet. (See picture below).
This graph shows the different processes on what our planet organism will go through. Most of the planet stages are on a timer, so if you fail to look after your planet, it will eventually die.One of my jobs was to create some elemental symbols that would indicate what state the planet is in, I had already done a project similar on another project that involved creating elemental icons (see my other blog: www.paulbirdblog.blogspot.com). Even though I was inspired by what symbols I had created before I wanted to create something new, so that is when I came up with these new designs for my elemental icons, I made these icons using Adobe Illustrator. See picture below.
Elemental Symbols which indicate the different stages of our planet.Map Effects
To present the different stages of our planet we created mapping effects for each of the planet functions, i.e Water, volcanic ash, Healthy planet earth, Ice age.
We created most of our mapping effects using Adobe Photoshop.
Map 1 - This is the original map of the Earth, this is what the 'Healthy state' would look like, maybe with some animated clouds covered over the land as well for more effects.
Map 2 - On this map I was experimenting with how I could get the End of the world kind of effect, where it shows the state of the earth when it is at it's last resort.
map 3 - This was the final end of the world effect that I created. I learned how to create this effect on a website called: http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Photoshop/Photo-Effects/2. Where you can learn how to make realistic effects within Photoshop. 
Map Experiment - This was a map texture I created for the Melt Down planet function, I did this to see if it could go well and merge into the volcanic ash planet. However it turns out that it didn't quite work so we went onto experimenting with other land textures.
Map 4 - This map is designed for when the planet has a Melt Down effect. I created two versions of the same effect, due to not knowing which one we would use as the final piece. Final Outcome
This was a group project by myself Paul Bird and Christian Cook. If you would like to see our final piece of work visit :
http://www.christian-cook.co.uk/blog/idat204/organism.swf
Evaluation
Once we had finished our Planet Eco organism we had to present our final piece of work to the IDAT class. We had problems getting the mic to work at first, because the computers that were stationed within the room didn't have microphones. So we had to improvise and use the microphone off a PC laptop which someone was nice enough to let us use. The presentation in it's self went really well, we got some good feed back. It is a shame this project was only for a few short weeks, I think if me and Christian Cook wanted to continue it, we would probably have made it into a learning base environmental game. Which teaches kids about how our planet functions more scientifically, but also how weather patterns and our solar system contributes to our planets environment.
