Wednesday 14 November 2012

Another year another project.

The Return 

So here we are once again, a new university year and all the projects which come with it. Lets do a nice lengthy post for today seeing as its been over a year since my last one, I've been out on placement and having to discover the joy of managing a house.  

Mongoose time 

So some people may have heard of this company, its called Mongoose publishing and its the biggest tabletop and role-play game maker in England. Mostly that entails making books, rulebooks for games and source books for settings. Now that's something I could really get into, I've been reading books since someone decided I should have an education and introduced me to a library, and it was genuinely fascinating and fun to make these timeless objects from the ground up. So this is what I will be dedicating this years project to, the creation of a book.

This is the big one

Year 4, the last call, the final onslaught. Ok lets stop that there before I just sit here listening to Worms Armageddon on a loop. But still this is the most tense year of university, so what on earth am I going to do? Well looking back through everything I've done before I'm surprised I hadn't done this already. I am going to be taking all those little folk stories from my 3 month stint in Africa and putting them in a book of my own. But that's not all, no we need to make this harder so it's worthy of a final year project. What else am I going to do? Why I am going to Write, Edit, Illustrate and publish this book (limited private printing of course) all on my lonesome. That should just about set the scene, raise the stakes Etc.

The dreaded spectre of ACADEMIA

 But what would a final year be without the fearsome prospect of a dissertation? Well a little friendlier for a start but this ones in the bag, my main piece required a few research materials to start with, amongst them my first personal copy of the Grimm fairy tales, and to make the best of my purchase I will be using that in my dissertation, in fact I'll linking it in with my Africa work. How do folk stories from dark and forested Europe tie into Bush stories from sun baked Africa? why they both developed from oral traditions and both of them have been retold and remade countless times. So why have we remade them so many times, and are they really the same after all those years and versions? well lets have a look at that shal we. But as you may have guessed from the title, academic works aren't really my thing, so lets make this a little more fun shall we? Let's make something a little easier on the eyes, like a magazine or a journal article.

 oh That... 

Well I've rambled on long enough for today, so I'll leave you with this parting 'gift'. See the powers that be made a stupid decision, really dumb, they asked for a specific format for a presentation and by god they weren't going to let me get away with anything else. ok that doesn't sound dumb, but this does. They wanted 20 slides, and they wanted them to last 20 seconds each. But not to worry 5 of those slides could be replaced with video that you made... well excuse me if I'm not an animator and thus have no video for you. And don't penalise me for making an inherently unimpressive visual object. It's a book in early development, meaning its mostly just a bunch of text documents. But they insisted on this stupidity so I've indulged them and followed their orders To The Letter. Behold The Frankenstein's monster of presentations!



This is not my style, this is not how a presentation should be made, but it gets the message across with a minimal amount of wasted time and breath. Yes I can still be bitter, a years gone by not an eon.

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