Exit Through the Gift Shop

Today in class we viewed a documentary titled Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film from what I gathered was about how one man's fascination for the camera turned into a huge sensation, especially for what he filmed. He started out filming just whatever he saw at all times because people who knew him always saw him attached to the camera. However, unlike just about every other film, there was no true purpose at first and he was just doing it because he loved it. That all changed with his cousin.

His cousin did a type of street art that was illegal like any type of graffiti, but what distinguished them from just plain vandalism was that it had a message or some sort of point. They weren't doing it because they hated something and wanted to destroy, but rather make it more interesting for the rest of us. His cousin accomplished that by placing space invaders wherever he went like on curbs, buildings, bridges, signs, and much more. The man's fascination with this was matched only by that of the camera and started following them everywhere. So now this man's film had a story or a central focal point that would guide the rest of the film.

Eventually the man met his idol, Banksy, who has eluded him and his identity was still kept in check because some lighting techniques were used to make him a silhouette and a voice changer was used whenever he spoke. He told Thierry, the man filming, that he could film him, but only his back and hands, never his face. Eventually it got to the point when Banksy's work was being bought up for enormous amounts of money and everyone had to have a Banksy. People were now thinking he was just doing it for the money which wasn't true. That is when Thierry was told he had to finally sit down and edit the footage into a film so people know the real story. Well this is where he went wrong. When editing, you can't lose the sight of the message behind the story and Thierry's initial attempt did exactly that. Banksy then took over for that and told Thierry he should try street art to better understand it. The basic philosophy of the movie is to never lose sight of what is important and to strive to give the accurate rendition of other's work. It is a fantastic film and I encourage all to go see this movie especially if you love art.

Objects in Scripting

In scripting, objects are probably one of the most important components if not the most important component because without them we wouldn't need any other code, merely because we would have nothing to animate. To be blunt, objects are anything that has the metaphor of existence in the world. Objects range anywhere from flowers, dogs, planes, people, buildings and any other pictures all over the internet and things you can place on the stage. Buttons created in flash are objects as well because we created them and they now exist. Probably the trickiest object to wrap your head around would be sounds because unlike the others, you can't see sound. However, they still have the metaphor of existence or our world would be a very quiet one.

I mentioned before that the objects are anything on the stage. Well, in Action Script anything you place on the page to work with is an object and that page to work on is known as the stage. Think of it as our world and how it holds all the objects from water to people. Without it first existing in the world or in this case, the stage, you can't animate or control it.

Existing on the stage is how we can get objects to move and do what we want but there is a little more to that than just dropping it on there. In order to animate you need to make it either a button or a movie clip and give it an instance name. However, this explanation is just so you understand what a symbol is. To give you a look at some of the code and what to expect I have written a very basic code for a button.

jump_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, personjump)
function personjump(event:MouseEvent){
              person_mc.gotoAndPlay("jump");
}

Thats a lot to take in I know and it takes a little bit to understand, but for now just focus on the highlighted sections. Those are the objects in this code and essentially your telling one to make the other jump. In this case it is jump_btn that is causing person_mc to jump. Those are the objects that we have created and are giving actions through some coding. Think you have a good grasp on objects? If you don't right away thats no big deal because it will come to you soon I guarantee it.