Project Two-Character design: Post One- Questions/Research

Vaas(Far Cry 3)

(http://static9.cdn.ubi.com/en-GB/images/far-cry-3-savages-vaas-midtcm2165303.jpg)

Aesthetics:
Medium build, 5ft 10in, Hair Colour: Brown.

Vaas has a look very similar to Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver. They both have Mohawks, darkly outlines around the eyes and both are very emotionally unstable and dangerous. He also reminds me of Heath Ledgars The Joker as they both have a dark sense of humor and they both have scars that tell a story people can fantasize about.

Colour Palette:
Vaas has a red colour pallete, he wears a red singlet, red cloth as armbands and a red necklace relating. The colour represents his hostile attitude and personality in the game.
Style:

Vaas is a pirate and wears a red singlet, black faded jeans with black boots. He wears a lot of red, he also has red arm bands and a red necklace. His style is very much like the other pirates found in rook islands.

Accessories:

Vaas wears a necklace with a green stone tied onto it. He also wears weapon holsters for his guns and walkie talkies.

Personality:

Vaas has a sarcastic, hostile, joker personality. He is the antagonist, however he is very attachable.

Motivation:

Vaas' was a pirate in the rook islands and plans to kill Jason Brody. However as the game progresses, his motivations start to go in much more depth. In the sequence where Vaas and Jason have their final fight he says "Take me into your heart. Accept me as your savior. Nail me to the fucking cross and let me be reborn". This quote makes it look like Vaas wanted Jason to kill him and let him be reborn in Jason as his successor to kill Hoyt and Citra.

Relationships:

Citra- Vaas' sister

Hoyt- Vaas' boss

Jason- the protagonist(Vaas is the antagonist)

Backstory:

There is a rumor that Vaas was once a part of the rakyat much like how Jason Brody becomes a part of of it throughout the game. Failing to live up to the expectations Vass turned to Hoyt for a life of money and drugs. Days before Far Cry 3 Vaas captures Christopher Mintz-Plasse as himself in the mini series The Far Cry experience. In the final scene of the mini series shows Vaas capture Chris preparing to kill until Vaas is informed by another pirate that tourists (Jason and his friends) have skydived onto the island.

Crash Bandicoot 

(http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110619013458/spyro/images/e/ef/Crash1d.png)

Aesthetics:
Crash Bandicoot, the original playstation mascot, wears blue jean shorts, fingerless gloves and red sneakers. Crash bandicoot was the Mario for sony's debut gaming console- Playstation. Both are simple in character design and silent protagonists, yet both were icons  by their gameplay aspects. However sony brought their mascot more personality with their promotional commercials. The commercials gave Crash a silly and cocky personality, which explains his casual and youthful character design.

Accessories
Crash wears blue jean shorts, fingerless gloves and red sneakers. Crash acquires different tools to proceed to his objective, these include weapons, jetpacks, boats, and airplanes. He also has abilities --a tornado spin and a sliding kick-- smashing everything and anything out of his way. He gains more abilities by defeating different bosses, these include stomach slam, double jump, speed boost and many more to help him with his journey.

Personality

Crash's personality isn't very well developed in game as he has limited English. The only word that he appears to know is "woah" which he says when he gets hurt. However he did gain personality in commercials. The commercials gave Crash a silly and cocky personality.

Motivation
Crash is set with different challenges from different people in different games. These challenges vary from collecting crystals and gems to save the world or Crash's loved ones.

Relationships:
Aku Aku- Aku Aku is the father figure of Crash.
Coco Bandicoot- Crash's younger sister
Crunch Bandicoot- Crash's older brother, who was set to kill Crash before his defeat.

Back Story
Crash Bandicoot, a bandicoot, was one of Doctor Neo Cortex's experiments to evolve various animals living on a trio of islands southeast of Australia into beasts with superhuman strength. Cortex plans to have Crash under his control and be the leader of his growing army of superhuman beasts, however his plan fails as the cortex vortex resulting in Crash escaping.


Evolution
Crash Bandicoot originally came from the developers Naughty Dog, Sony Computer Entertainment. Naughty Dog developed the first three instalments of the series and the spin off racing cart game, Crash Team Racing. From then, Crash has been moving from developer to developer that has given different iterations to the series and character. Crash has evolved each time and as he evolved the original PlayStation slowly faded away into nothing but a memory.

Crash has kept his casual look throughout his evolution, however his personality became more unpleasant. Since 'Twinsanity'  Crash Bandicoot became more and more wacky, silly and outright stupid. 'Crash of the Titans' was the first time Crash Bandicoot had a change in his overall look with the addition of a tattoo. The tattoo also gave Crash more options to attack, instead of the usual jump, spin and slide. Crash can now do light attacks, heavy attacks and dodge. After 'Mind over Mutant', Crash Bandicoot never made another iteration in the franchise and is now owned by heavy-hitting publishers, Activision and has not yet seen the light of day since. Rumours have been circulating the internet about whether Sony have bought back the rights to the franchise, but nothing has been confirmed.

Splicers (Bioshock)

Aesthetics

Splicers are adam addicts, which affected them both physically and mentally. This has resulted them to look like someone you would expect to be an extreme methamphetamine addict. Their skin is like rotting and their eyes are bloodshot. They wear masquerade clothing to keep a part of themselves from the past, to remind them what life was like before their addiction.

Colour Palette

The masquerade clothes have fantasy colours such as pink, green, purple but it is rotten which makes it look dirty and dull.

Style

They have a 60's style with their sophisticated, formal clothing for a masquerade ball.

Accessories

There are different types of splicers that acquire different accessories.

Thuggish Splicers: Thuggish splicers are the level 1 class of all splicers. They are fairly week, but are fast and agile. They usually have a melee weapon equipped with them such as a crowbar or a steel pipe.

Leadhead Splicers: Leadhead Splicers use range to their advantage with firearms. They are also more tough than Thuggish Splicers.

Spider Splicer: These Splicers throw hooks from afar and can climb the walls and rooftops of Rapture. Their agility and mobility make it hard for them to hit.

Houdini Splicers: Houdini Splicers are very different compared to the others. They use teleportation to get the lead on the player. They attack with fireballs and ice instead and will melee, like the Leadhead Splicers, when in close quarters combat.

Nitro Splicers: Nitro Splicers use bombs and Molotov cocktails. They keep themselves at long range and when in close quarters they throw a smoke bomb, which blinds the player and allows them to flee. 

Motivation
All they want is adam. The only way for them to get adam is to kill Little Sisters. However they can't do that without getting past Big Daddies who protect the Little Sister at all costs.

Back Story

Splicers were once normal citizens of the underwater utopia, Rapture. When plasmids, a genetic modification, were invented in the city of Rapture citizens overdose, resulting in them getting effects of what you would expect from extreme methamphetamine intake and turning in what they call them now, Splicers.

Jacket ( Hotline Miami)

Ellie (The Last of Us)

Project One-Post Three: Ethical Statement

All of the work I have submitted is my own or has been provided by my teacher.

Project One-Post Four: File Management

Post Four:File and asset management

Task one: You will need to explain how asset management and file management are applied in the development of digital media outcomes(3-d animation).

Assets are things that can be managed within an application. For example in Blender, the assets are the camera, lamp, cube, etc. They can be easily managed in the outline editor as shown below.

During my development of my first character in Blender, managing my assets in the outline editor has helped make my development easier and more clear.

The eye icon next to each element gives me the ability to make that element visible or not. This has helped make whatever i want to focus on the center piece without having any distractions or accidents being made to other assets. Managing assets should be more suited you're own style and liking.

Project One-Post Two: Ethics of Digital Technoligies

Copyright, Creative Commons & Piracy. 

Task One
In your own words define and describe each of these aspects.
Copyright
Definition:
Anything originally made from you whether it's a video, written content, music etc. will be automatically protected legally by copyright as soon as it becomes recorded in material form for a fixed number of years.

Copyright Act 1994
Public Act 1994 No 143
Date of assent 15 December 1994

The Copyright Act 1994(New Zealand's Copyright law)  therefore gives owners of original copyright material the right to prevent others from doing things such as, copy their work and stating it as their own, i.e. plagiarism, Sell copies of their work, present their work in public, and to give another the authority to do any one of these things.

The Copyright Act pursue to cater a balance between users and owners of copyright material. There are parts of the Copyright Act that give users some limited use of copyright material for specified reasons without the need to ask the copyright owner and gain permission.

Copyright(Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011
Copyright(infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act is a new law to give copyright owners of things such as movies, TV shows and music an easier way to penalize people committing copyright infringement through online file sharing.

Committing copyright infringement through online file sharing will gain you a Detection notice for the first time you are caught, followed by a warning notice for the second time then finally an Enforcement notice when caught for the 3rd time from your internet service provider, then the copyright owner will be able to take you to the copyright tribunal within the first 9 months after informing the suitable internet service provider the infringement notices and information (penalties). Your Internet Service Provider will be informed the IP address (Internet protocol) allegedly involved in the copyright infringement to your account and will receive and check the notice for compliance with the law and regulations and payment from the copyright owner.A notice holds information such as:

• The date of the notice
• Your Internet Service Providers contact details
• The infringement that has resulted the issue of the notice
• The IP address of where the copyright infringement has taken place
• The date and time of when the infringement took place
• Name and type of infringement
• The file sharing network/service that was used
• Explanation of the consequences if infringement happens again.

Each notice from the copyright owner will cost $25 + GST to your Internet Service Provider. A notice can be challenged but can be rejected from the copyright owner, your internet service provider will receive the rejection and the reasons why and will send it to you. However if the challenge is accepted your Internet Service Provider will wipe the notice off its records.The account owner can still be accused even if he or she wasn't the person who broke the law unless the account owner is proven to be not guilty. Penalties vary depending on circumstances, it can cost from $275 to $15,000, payable to the copyright owner, however the law does allow a District Court to suspend your interment connection for up to 6 months. The law can be applied to infringements made on a mobile phone/network from 1 October 2013.

Creative Commons
Description:
Creative commons provide a set of licenses to protect copyright owners original material in a much simpler manner. The licenses give copyright owners the ability to share their content to the public how they want with specific conditions. For example With the Attribution license users of copyright material have the ability to remix, tweak, share, and build upon your work without the need to gain permission as long as they credit you for the original material. Therefore if the user does not credit you for the original work they will be penalized for copyright infringement with a fee from $275 to $15,000 payable to the owner depending on circumstances.

Creative common licenses
Attribution

This licence lets others share, remix, tweak and expand upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

Attribution-NonCommercial

This license lets others share, remix, tweak and expand upon your work as long as they credit you for the original creation.(Their remix/tweaked version of your work must be non-commercial).

Attribution-Sharealike

This license lets other share, remix, tweak and expand upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation and license their new creations under the same terms.

Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike

This license lets others share, remix, tweak and expand upon your work as long as they credit you for the original creation and license their new creation under the same terms. However new creations must be non-commercial.

Attribution-No Derivatives
This license lets others to share your work, commercially and non-commercially, as long as it is shared with no changes with credit to you.
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives
This license only lets others to download and share your work but unchanged and non commercial.

Piracy
Definition:
Piracy i.e. copyright infringement is applied to when a user of a copyright owner violates the rights of a copyright owner such as the right to copy, build upon, share or tweak the original content without gaining permission from the copyright holder.
Description:
Piracy can be applied to many different ways whether it will be from copying someones work in school to illegal file sharing there are many examples of Piracy. All acts of piracy in New Zealand will interfere with the Copyright Act 1994 which date of assent is 15 December 1994 and the Copyright(Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act which was later added to the Copyright Act in 2011 to give copyright owners of movies, music, etc. an easier way to penalize people committing copyright infringement through online file sharing. Penalties of both acts vary depending on circumstances, it can cost from $275 to $15,000, payable to the copyright owner.

Task Two
Discuss how each of these legal, ethical and moral considerations are related.
Copyright, Piracy and Creative Commons are related as they all should be considered when Ethics of Digital Technologies is interfered. Anything created by you is automatically protected legally by copyright as soon as it becomes recorded in material form. The Copyright Act 1994 was published for copyright owners to prevent others from doing things such as, copy their work and stating it as their own, i.e. plagiarism, Sell copies of their work, present their work in public, and to give another the authority to do any one of these things. Violating these conditions will interfere with the Copyright Act 1994 resulting in piracy. Penalties can cost from $275 to $15,000 depending on circumstances. Creative Commons provide a set of licenses that make it easier for Copyright owners to send out their work free for the public to use under specific conditions. If the specific conditions of the particular license are not followed copyright infringement is committed, therefore penalties from $275 to 15,000 will follow depending on circumstances.

Task Three
Megaupload and Mega
Kim Dotcom, the creator of the online file sharing services megaupload and mega, currently living in Auckland, New Zealand has been the subject of many controversies since January 5th when he and six other megaupload colleagues were filed for copyright infringement related to the website Megaupload, the famous online hosting/file sharing service. Less than a month later, more than 70 New Zealand Police officers raided Dotcom's leased $30 million dollar mansion in Coasteville, Auckland, New Zealand arresting Dotcom and seizing millions worth of assets. Mega upload was then shutdown later by the US Department of Justice. On 19 January, one year later Kim Dotcom released Mega as a celebration to one year anniversary of the shutdown of Megaupload.

Differences
On the launch of Mega, Kim Dotcom said on his speech that Mega is " offering a smarter, faster and more secure way of cloud storage and we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law." This is proven to be true with the remove of de-duplication, where a file sharing service such as Mega and Megaupload reference files that are recognised as something that has already been created previously to the original file. This makes it less cluttered and removes all versions of that copyright infringement associated file. However this was a problem when Megaupload users who had legal use of music and movies also get their files deleted.

Project One-Post One: Ethics Dilemmas

Group work
Automated Law Enforcement 
Stakeholders
Public

1)In this scenario who might benefit and who might suffer?
The government would benefit as they would just have to spend money on the making of the robots instead of giving wages to the police force.
The society would suffer as those who would want to pursue a career in the police force may not be able to no more.

2)Who would hold the power in this scenario?
The programmers would hold the power in this scenario as they have the control to program the robots how they would want and could take advantage of this.

3)Could this new technology help to improve or could it worsen the state of society?
It would worsen society because in certain situations such as family violence, it takes communication to sort out a situation like this and robots are just pre-programmed and the robots might not be able to work it out and carry out justice.

4)Could humanity as we know it change?
Yes because us as a society would lose trust in the police force because the robots wouldn't be able to adjust to certain situations like suicidal people, they wouldn't be able to make the situation better because they are just programmed bots that have no feelings, how could they have the right to take a humans life if they don't know what its like to be a human and have human feelings.






Police
1)In this scenario who might benefit and who might suffer?
In the police point of view they might think it could benefit everyone e.g. themselves(the police), the public, and the government. But in my opinion I think the public will suffer as we will lose our trust in the police with emotional problems such as family violence and depression, etc.


2)Who would hold the power in this scenario?
The programmers of the robots could hold the power in this scenario because they create the robots and program the way they think.


3)Could this new technology help to improve or could it worsen the state of society?
It could definitely worsen society. We could lose our trust with police in emotional problems such as depression, family violence, etc. and the people looking for a job in the Police department may not find a job at all.
4)Could humanity as we know it change?
Yes, humanity could change definitely. We will have to think differently when approaching the police for help for emotional situations like depression, suicides, and family violence, etc. and therefore losing our trust with the police. However, with things such as detecting a speeding car or drugs the robots could be helpful but never with something emotional just physical.


Government
1)In this scenario who might benefit and who might suffer?
 Government point of view is that he could benefit everyone by making them suffer he could make the cost of taxes high and people will struggle to find job because of the robots and they wont be able to afford food and pay the rent or bills.
2)Who would hold the power in this scenario?
I think it could be the Government in this scenario because he makes the laws and he controls the police department plus he is the boss of this organisation.
3)Could this new technology help to improve or could it worsen the state of society?
 I believe it can make society worse because it doesn't have emotion like humans and it wont be able to handle family violence plus it wont be able to understand the situation.
4)Could humanity as we know it change?
 I believe it will change because some people want to be a police because of the robots people will struggle to find a job in the police department and robots will take over society.


By: Alan, Zephon, Rapi, Kenny

References

www.blogspot.org


www.blendswap.com