It was good for BAIMPs to represent Bournemouth’s debut at the show and we return with the good news of Chris Herring and Tom Schrimshaw having won Best New Blood awards for their projects Ruled by Secrecy and Douteki respectively.

Although again tarnished by being called out as ‘The Arts Institute at Bournemouth’ at the award ceremony, at least this time it was more laughable in being half expected and now a long-running joke since Computer Arts’ mistake in their Graduate Showcase.

As for other awards, Talkboards finished as a Finalist in the Rhizome Artist Commission 2007-2008 (the very deserved winners here) and a Semi-Finalist in the Adobe Achievement Awards – so while I won’t be flying out to San Francisco, I have got a nice shiny certificate

Seems now with everyone now slowing beginning to disperse, our three years have gone stupidly quickly. It really doesn’t seem that long ago that we were working through the night on our Flash Animation projects in the first year.

From: One of the Geek Team All-Night sessions – 19th April, 2005.

Not that I’m even going to begin to get soppy or anything but I think our coursemates and tutors have been truly decent and we’ve only benefited from being so close friends and always on hand to cooperate and help each other out – or lend hardware. A huge huge thank you to Craig, Matt, Chris, Joe & Chris for screens and computers loaned for the exhibitions.

To: The Final Studio 3 All-Nighter – 15th May, 2007.

It’s a shame to hear our other years don’t get on nearly half as well as we do – let lone do these ^^ kinds of things – so much so that it’s possible that rivalry and unhealthy competitiveness may have significantly negative effects on projects or prospective shows.

I think iheartplay was a huge success, with most people getting interviews, internships or even jobs already secured as a result. A whole load of card-swapping and networking went on, very promising for individuals and in promoting Bournemouth University and the proud IMPs that we are.

While there were only four of us demonstrating at New Blood, we plastered the iheartplay promo materials – visually and literally – all over our pitch. We also rinsed the remaining iheartplay catalogues, showing the work of everyone involved and did our best discussing everyone else’s projects as relevant to visitors’ interests.

The huge majority of the other stands mainly exhibited graphics, illustration or print media. So although there were a lot of visitors to the exhibition as a whole, we found (as most did in Brick Lane) that an instant panic and chronic fear of computers and touching mice came over to anyone in the vicinity and they rather take our brochures to browse links and read the copy in their own time and space rather than risk showing their lack of computer skills or whatever. Either way, for all these people it was actually irrelevant who was physically there, as much as any projects that caught their eye inside the books.

I’ve only been able to find two reviews of the iheartplay exhibition so far. Daniel Harris’ of SubSub, though brief, described the show as ‘well coordinated, felt coherent .. and in placed damn interesting’. The only other from a disappointed BAIMP student who unfortunately didn’t think to note the opening times and missed the show completely (found here).

If anyone discovers any more dotted around the web be sure to send me a message or link on del.ici.ous.

Finally, sincerely the very best of luck to everyone on the July 11th. Personally I feel if two hours of Image Studies for a year has set us up for top marks all round then we deserve them just for sitting through ‘em

I’ve been asked to put together some viral games in Flash that we can host and bombard forums with to create a little extra buzz and get a bit more exposure.

Anyway, I’ve adapted some very simple classic arcade games, basically just substituting sprites with iheartplay logos and with a bit of restyling hopefully they’ll do the trick.

Some very buggy demos are online as follows:

Space Invaders:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/invaders.html

Pac-Man:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/pacman.html

Asteroids:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/asteroids.html

A few more tweaks and they’ll go live on the iheartplay site, but feel free to have a go now and get yourself on the scoreboard – the more the better!

It seems everyone is putting together new online portfolios in preparation for the show, considering mine still claims my current project is design for small screens I think it’s time I sort one out too.

Tunnelling is almost done – *so* close to having it fully ready to roll, kind of a necessity Meanwhile I’m trying to get hold of some machines to run it locally at the show, that’ll hopefully be smoother too, as well as guaranteeing I can actually show something.

Congrats to those who got into the Computer Arts Graduate Showcase, good to see some Bournemouth Uni representation – well, Bournemouth, at least.

Also: New Header Alert! It’s actually Talkboards related now. The previous showed Alan Reed’s ‘City Poem’, which was part of the Public Pages project.

Looking forward to the Grad Show to properly get to see everybody’s work, cheers to the people who tested Talkboards in Uni over the night before the deadline. Right now it’s behind the impserver firewall, so you can only play with it properly on campus – you’ll be able to connect alright outside of Uni but it just won’t work properly (and not actually tell you why )

When it’s been marked I’ll get back on it and use RTMPT (tunneling) to get it working from everywhere.

Doing my part instead from home, I’ve made a fair amount of progress in various areas of the site. I’ve got a lot more PHP queried data being passed to Flash, those sections are now able to determine the environment initialisation based on who’s logging into what boards – essentially with regard to access levels, profile information, the admin’s specs and set up etc.

I’ve also established a linear log of chat history in the Flash interface, quite simple to create but I think necessary. Half of the brief I outlined intended the project to converge features of a number of ‘traditional’ communication platforms. This chat log not only offers a more straightforward means for returning visitors to catch up on activity during their time offline – similar to message boards or Facebook’s news-feed, for example – but it also introduces new users with a little familiarity, the non-linearity of the project could easily be confusing at first.

The ever-huge principal task of migrating all static Flash to shared objects via Flashcom continues but the majority is almost complete. Most of the shared objects are now persistently and remotely stored, organised and automatically sectioned by room instances. I’ve can now successfully query this info on re-entry to regenerate the rooms to their previous/continued states.

I’ve also combined some SSAS with multiple netConnections to handle the user’s data transfer – their connections in whole, rooms and connected user lists, webcams and now a centrally defined and independent server-time these all run by.

Plenty more to go, got to sort out image handling next. both inside and outside of Flash. For user profiles on the HTML sections and calculating some kind of pixel/size/quantity allocation for those uploading into communities.

I now have a better – working – webcam to test with, some prototyping with that has been successful so far. Unfortunately I’m not able to attend the 24hr Sponsored Work-a-thon tomorrow, but at least with the new cam I can be there visually if not physically.

Plus, I recently received an e-mail regarding my project’s proposal for a Rhizome commission and I’m pretty happy to say it’s made it into the final round of voting. Apparently it was very well received by the community and it’s now one of thirty-five projects subject to ranking and voting from Rhizome members and a special jury to work out the rest.

If anyone here is a member and susceptible to bribery and/or flattery I’d very much appreciate your vote