INT Ballroom

Dimitri and Petra enter from right, silhouettes.

Petra wanders slightly into the open, looking around in the darkness.

The lights turn on.
Petra marvels at the place.
She says it’s beautiful, runs to his arms
He spins her around, sets her down, steps back.
“What’s wrong?”
Dimitri smiles as best he can, then takes her gently into his arms to dance.
With a slight nod, he begins.
She looks at him skeptically, but relents.

Photoshop and digital imaging tutorials:

http://tutorials.epilogue.net/tutorials/advanced-digital-painting-techniques
http://tutorials.epilogue.net/tutorials/digital-landscape-painting
http://tutorials.epilogue.net/tutorials/painting-rocks-and-grass-in-photoshop/1/
http://www.seb4d.com/tutorials/Mattepainting/mattepainting_english.htm
http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-freehand.html
http://tutorials.epilogue.net/tutorials/perfect-clouds-in-5-easy-steps
http://tutorials.epilogue.net/tutorials/digital-portrait-painting-realistic-skin-tones-with-photoshop-and-painter
http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials

7 archetypes

Victim – follows murder scenes, doesn’t talk, unstable
Serial Killer – stalks, kills, doesn’t talk, unstable, hangs around death
Detective – inquisitive and forceful, generally rude, follows murder scenes, hangs around death
Journalist – talkative, nosy,
Private Investigator – nosy, sneaky,
Copycat Killer – stalks, kills, follows murder scenes, unstable,
Vigilante – ignores law, stalks, kills,


Get a letter from a woman close to you.
The letter is frantic, asking for help? Or maybe the letter is a warning?
- if player goes straight to the woman, +victim
- if player kills a random individual, +serial killer, +copycat killer
- if player looks for other sources of information, +detective, +private investigator
- if player talks to no one, +serial killer, +copycat killer, +victim
- if player talks to everyone, +detective, +private investigator, +journalist
- if player follows up on information concerning unrelated events, +journalist
- if player steals items, +detective, +copycat killer, +vigilante
Encounter Transient
- if player ignores him, +vigilante, +victim
- if player questions him, +detective, +journalist, +private investigator
- if player sticks around and listens to him, +journalist, +vigilante, +copycat killer
- if player follows him, +vigilante, +copycat killer, +serial killer
- if player kills him, +copycat killer, +serial killer
- if player tells him to go away, +victim, +detective, +private investigator
Emergency vehicle goes past
- if player follows it, +copycat killer, +detective, +journalist, +vigilante
- if player goes the opposite direction, +serial killer, +victim, +private investigator
Incident
- if player asks people questions, +detective, +private investigator, +journalist
- if player hangs around and looks at stuff, +serial killer, +copycat killer, +vigilante
- if player leaves when asked, +victim, +serial killer
- if player does not leave when asked, +vigilante, +copycat killer






Murderer MO is to stalk two people at a time, then kill one and leave a recognizable memento to the other one. (e.g., if the couple is married, the wife might find the husbands ring finger in her mail box)

Serial Killer paraphernalia: rose, coin, playing card

Or MO is to leave a personal item in the hand of the victim

Story:
There is a woman who calls to you about a problem.
You take care of problem. You encounter an insane transient, rambling. You return to the woman, who thanks you. She mentions that it’s getting late, and asks you to walk her home. She says goodnight, and then an emergency vehicle drives past. She tells you to be careful out so late, and thank you again.
FOLLOW THE EMERGENCY VEHICLE: You encounter the incident, and police.

Victim:
The woman is family
The problem is
You meet the transient after the problem
Transient is rambling about seeing the Murderer
The woman thanks you with a hug
As you walk her home, there are many people
The incident is a murder
The police tell you to leave

Serial Killer:
The woman is a friend
The problem is
You meet the transient after fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about the cold and the screams
The woman thanks you with a hug
As you walk her home, there are no people
The incident is a murder
The police tell you to leave

Detective:
The woman is a victim
The problem is
You meet the transient while fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about the dead bodies
The woman thanks you with a smile
As you walk her home, there are few people
The incident is a murder
The police ignore you

Journalist:
The woman is an informant
The problem is
You meet the transient before fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about the Murderer
The woman thanks you with a smile
As you walk her home, there are few people
The police ignore you
Private Investigator:
The woman is a client
The problem is
You meet the transient while fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about dead bodies
The woman thanks you with a smile
As you walk her home, there are few people
The police ignore you

Copycat Killer:
The woman is
The problem is
You meet the transient after fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about the cold and the screams
The woman thanks you with a
As you walk her home, there are no people
The police tell you to leave

Vigilante:
The woman is a lover
The problem is
You meet the transient while fixing the problem
Transient is rambling about the cold and the screams
The woman thanks you with a kiss
As you walk her home, there are many people
The police tell you to leave

INT BALLROOM HALL

The hall is darkened as PETRA walks out into the clear of the room. DIMITRI turns on the lights, and Petra starts.

PETRA
Wow! Would you look at this!

DIMITRI
You like it?

Petra runs to Dimitri’s arms, he catches her and lets her spin once, before putting her down with some reservation.
PETRA
It’s beautiful!

DIMITRI
So you like it.

Petra takes his hands in hers.

PETRA
Of course I do. How could I not? I mean, just look at all this!

She turns and looks at everything again.

PETRA (CONT’D)
I love it.

Dimitri flourishes. He half runs/skips over to a wall and begins to pull a rope, raising the background curtain.

DIMITRI
It gets better.

On cue, the band starts to play. Petra, overwhelmed, staggers forward slightly, agape. Dimitri stands behind her proudly.

DIMITRI (CONT’D)
Well?

Petra spins around and embraces him. He takes her in, and then pulls away one hand. As she looks up at him in surprise, they begin to dance.

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http://havard.no-ip.info/pics/insignia/hitman.png
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http://www.ps3newsresource.com/games/assassins-creed/assassinscreed-6.jpg
http://www.tothegame.com/res/game/5374/logo.jpg
http://www.cnet.com.au/i/r/2006/Games/xbox/22057941/sc001.jpg
http://www.generation-nt.com/images/biblio/art_test-hitman-blood-money-xbox-360/000000030352.jpg
http://m3.idg.se/blog/public/images_upload/060406-hitman-dh.jpg
http://netgames.apollo.lv/upload/2006-06-27/4805/hitman-blood-money-20060319083551368.jpg
http://www.x-power.be/_gallery/Hitman:%20Blood%20Money/48941320060526_161507_4_big.jpg
http://jeuxstrategie.free.fr/jeu_stratego/exemple_de_partie.jpg

Economics, the study of money, its significance, and how it moves, is finding new application in and around video games. The industry itself has grown to rival movies and music, but more than that, the games themselves have become microcosms of economic movement. In addition, video games are opening up new avenues of research and experimentation. Add to this the fact that, historically, video games have led the forefront into technology that has since become standard proceedure in the business world and the result is a powerhouse force capable of literally changing the way today's history will be written.
The game industry, though a relatively new market, is doing extraordinarily well for itself. The combined revenue of console and computer based games has already surpassed that of the entire movie industry. This ever growing behemoth is experiencing the same economic growing pains that all the other ones did, but at an accelerated rate. While the rest of the computer industry experiences the ever baffling phenomena of forever falling prices and forever growing functionality, the game industry has met its match in economies of scale. With the coming of the new generation of console technology, the cost of development is expected to skyrocket by millions of dollars. The new systems allow for more to be shown on screen, for more calculations to be processed every second, and for more content to be stored in a single game, which means that all this new content needs to be created, and that every individual asset that goes into the production of the game takes longer to create. MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, among the most popular available, generally have a cost of production exceeding $20 million just to develop the game, which doesn't include the day-by-day maintenance that these games require.
Even so, MMO's have become successfull and even lucrative, with games like World of Warcraft, Lineage, Everquest, and Ultima Online bringing in the largest number of players globally. With all of these people interacting in their respective vitrual worlds, interesting societal phenomena have cropped up naturally in a controlled environment. This has tremendous implications for research, as everything in these worlds can be monitored and quantified, making even the psychology of economics a measurable attribute. Within these MMO's, players accrue currency that they then use to purchase in game objects. The fascinating thing about these in-game marketplaces is that while the world is virtual, the economy is very real, and responds to abuse exactly the way it does in the real world. In one particular instance involving Ultima Online, a popular game with thousands of players logging in each month, the developers actually designed their own economy, with all of its rules and factors. During the first year of its life, though, the economy in this game went through a tremendously tumultuous evolution, experiencing a wide variety of problems that the developers had not anticipated.
For one thing, there was over-production, spurred by the incentive that every time a player created an item, it improved their "skill" in creating that item, making future iterations better. Players expected to make a profit for their efforts as well, and complained when non-player shopkeepers would not purchase their wares, reporting it as a 'bug'. When the development team changed the system to account for this, the result was shopkeepers that would, in effect, manufacture currency to buy items which were not only not in demand, but were also over-saturating the market. While many items in the game could be found in the wild (collected from defeated monsters as loot) or created by players, the NPC shopkeepers did sell two things that were important in the Ultima Online economy. The first is raw materials, the price of which were kept artificially low so as to encourage new players to begin creating their own items and thus find more incentive to continue playing the game - the result of which was further irritation to the overproduction problem.The second thing these shopkeepers exclusively provided that players wanted was magical reagents. A group of players discovered that they could corner the market on these by buying them up from all the stores as soon as they were made available and then selling them off later at a higher price. The second major problem they encountered was hoarding. The players would each seek to accumulate wealth and items, and would generally simply keep all this wealth and items once acquired. The developers had built a closed economy that ultimately failed. Add to this the rampant counterfeiting that occured due to loopholes in the game, and the amount of hyperinflation that occured in the game was staggering, and the economy almost collapsed. The simulated market reacted exactly as it would have in the real world, so we can see that such games now can have more meaning than simply the fun the players have participating.
Other games have been more successful with the economy, but an interesting effect of these economies is the real world transactions they sometimes spur. In many games, the actual sale of characters and items is prohibited, although these transactions often occur anyway. Characters in games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft have been sold for thousands of dollars. A popular game called Second Life is actually built with the capatalist economy as the main selling point. Players join the world, create their own content, and then sell it for in-game money that can be exchanged for real money. In Second Life, the most important commodity is land, which translates in technical terms into server space. Players buy land (renting it for $9.95 a month), and then do with it as they please, storing their items, or setting up shops, or selling off their land piecemeal to other players hoping to open up a store or club. There are actually players who make their living creating content for this game, and one player in particular (known in the game world as the "Baroness") who became rich building a lucrative land sale empire.
In a certain way, the games themselves have become their own economy. Norrath, the virtual world of Everquest has become the 77th largest economy in the world! Internetnews.com ran an article that said that Norrath has a "gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's economy". The current exchange rate of Lindens (L$, the currency in Second Life) is 252 Lindens to 1 US Dollar. According to an interview of the developers, the "GNP of Second Life in September 2005 was L$906,361,808 or US$5,596,674, based on the recent L/US exchange rate." These games are significant members of a world-wide economy, with players on all corners of the globe participating in the circulation of all this money.
Video games are becoming a significant presence in the real-world economy, and now that their virtual world equivalents are becoming so prevalent, these additional societies have begun to leave their mark as well. As always, it appears that games will lead the way into the future of business technology, just as it has in the past. Examples of this include the color moniter, higher resolution hardware accelerated graphics cards, sound cards, improvements in networking technology, and increased processing power of computers. Now, once again, games pave the way, now introducing the idea of what is being called The Grid, a system which will allow all the computers connected to share their processing power, effectively creating a world-wide supercomputer built of nodes of individual computers - all for a game. Games are no longer flights of fancy. They have grown into their own as both economic model and pioneer. One day soon, perhaps, games will allow use to finally understand that bigger game - the game of life and society.

Internetnews.com: http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/10693_1107121
Harrow, Jeff: http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020527/20020527.htm
Vaknin, Sam: http://samvak.tripod.com/pp153.html
Criterion Economics: http://www.criterioneconomics.com/news/060713.php
Simpson, Doug: http://www.dougsimpson.com/blog/archives/000504.html
Rosedale, Phillip: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16023&ch=biztech
Simpson, Zachary Booth: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html
Koster, Raph: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/uoeconevolution.shtml

Goodbye, waterfall


I had to get out, had to go somewhere. I couldn’t bear these walls, still echoing her voice. I went outside, on the dark and empty street where I could be a stranger, a silhouette; featureless. I walked, aimless, down the street I knew best in daylight and now could hardly see. Eventually, the cool air of the evening began to calm me down, soothing my agitated mind with quiet patience.
I turned a corner and found my self at the old park, where I’d spent much of my time as a cub, scurrying about, exploring the world and sports and people. Like everything else, it was quiet, black, cold. As I wandered through, I couldn’t help but remembering the times I’d hit the baseball so hard it actually injured the kid who caught it, or I’d played with a little kid to cheer him up, or had driven myself to keep running until I finished training.
I walked through the baseball field, past the basketball courts and the tennis courts and the swings in the sandbox. Past the pool that had replaced the building that remembered how I’d trained for boxing, or practiced acting, or sculpted pots that didn’t work. I came to the edge, just beyond the little Japanese garden where I’d climbed on rocks, jumping from one to the other, trying not to fall to my doom just a foot below, behind the auditorium where I’d played basketball and delivered my lines on cue. The sprinklers had come on, and all the plants glistened in what little light there was. One of the sprinkler heads was broken, and sent a gushing stream of water fifteen feet up before it rained back down.
It was beautiful. I sat down on a nearby bench. Watching this self-proclaiming fountain gave me peace. The water shined as it flew majestically into the air before disappearing against the trees and shining once again on its way back down, changed, better – this water had done something, had been a part of something, this beautiful and glorious arch that defied nature and man. I listened to the soft pattering it made on the cobblestone path.
I left earlier than I wanted, preferring to remember it bold as it was in its prime, rather than to watch it die as I knew it inevitably would.



I had done something wrong again. It was a recurring theme, by this point, so in a way it wasn’t so bad – after all, it was nothing that hadn’t happened before. History supported me, showed me that there could still be a happy ending. But in a different way, it was almost infinitely worse: was I doomed to live a life forever riddled by mistakes and foolishness? I’d been here before; had I not learned? As always, she stayed supportive. As always, I found a way to make things worse.
It was my turn to say something, but I didn’t. Unsure of how I’d managed to dig such a hole, I was terrified of making things worse. I kept quiet. She asked me what I expected from our relationship. Can’t answer. Can’t think, can’t speak. I can’t even move. I want to tell her I love her. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I mouth the words, but I can’t make the sound come out.
She deserved better than this. She and I both knew it. I tried my hardest to be a good boyfriend, to be a good person, but every step forward is a new mistake, a new word I didn’t mean, hadn’t meant to say. We had spent such great times together. I know I’d made her happy, once. I had. Even then, back in days that felt like lifetimes ago, it was hard to speak of the future. She’d join the army, I’d go to college. I never asked her not to. It was what she wanted, so it was what I wanted for her. I knew it wouldn’t be easy – no one had said it would be easy – so I prepared myself for the worst. I prepared myself for the months of silence that would come while she situated herself in her new world.
Hers was a world of success. It was a world of accomplishment. It was a world where duty and honor were manifest each day in each persons very way of life. It was a world I could never know or understand.
She asks me what’s wrong. There are no words, and won’t be for a very long time, so I smile as best I can and tell her that all is well. I feel guilty. Guilty for wasting her time. Guilty for gambling on our happiness.
I had to leave, had to go somewhere. I had to say goodbye.

Goodbye, waterfall.

Goodbye, waterfall

I had to get out, had to go somewhere. I couldn’t bear these walls, still echoing her voice. I went outside, on the dark and empty street where I could be a stranger, a silhouette; featureless. I walked, aimless, down the street I knew best in daylight and now could hardly see. Eventually, the cool air of the evening began to calm me down, soothing my agitated mind with quiet patience.
I turned a corner and found my self at the old park, where I’d spent much of my time as a cub, scurrying about, exploring the world and sports and people. Like everything else, it was quiet, black, cold. As I wandered through, I couldn’t help but remembering the times I’d hit the baseball so hard it actually injured the kid who caught it, or I’d played with a little kid to cheer him up, or had driven myself to keep running until I finished training.
I walked through the baseball field, past the basketball courts and the tennis courts and the swings in the sandbox. Past the pool that had replaced the building that remembered how I’d trained for boxing, or practiced acting, or sculpted pots that didn’t work. I came to the edge, just beyond the little Japanese garden where I’d climbed on rocks, jumping from one to the other, trying not to fall to my doom just a foot below, behind the auditorium where I’d played basketball and delivered my lines on cue. The sprinklers had come on, and all the plants glistened in what little light there was. One of them was broken, and sent a gushing stream of water fifteen feet up before it rained back down.
I sat down on a nearby bench. Watching this self-proclaiming fountain gave me peace. The water shined as it flew majestically into the air before disappearing against the trees and shining once again on its way back down, changed, better – this water had done something, had been a part of something, this beautiful and glorious arch that defied nature and man. I listened to the soft pattering it made on the cobblestone path. It was beautiful.
I left earlier than I wanted, preferring to remember it bold as it was in its prime, rather than to watch it die as I knew it inevitably would.

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Domino: 1 9/16 x 3/4 x 1/4 in

customize/unit setup
Click: US Standard
System Unit Setup: 1 = Inch

CHECK 1- value scale
2- monochromatic scale - green gray red (9 each)
3- color wheel (tint and shade and complimentary)
4- 7 harmonies (analogous 3, complementary 2, double complementary 4, monochromatic 3, split complemtary 3, triadic 3, subdued contrast 4)
5- high and low chroma (hugh chroma light value - yellow, orange, red-orange; high chroma dark value - blue, green, purple, red purple, blue green; low chroma light value - tint HUGE; low chroma dark value - shade)
6- munsell color wheel.

Gon Lucos
Blair Graphics
Sammy's Camera
BIG printing - 1646 17th St, Santa Monica, 310-396-4446

Name
Email
Phone
Quarter
Major
Career goal
Dream job
Passions/hobbies
Theme/style for midterm
Thoughts on the class
Understand syllabus and attendance policy

We are superhuman
we are something more
we are superhuman
and we won't be ignored!

We burn brighter
than you can even see
we fly higher
than you could ever dream
and we live lives
you only know in make-believe
and yet you think you'd understand us?
HA!
...ha...
We fight monsters
you only see when you're asleep
We fall harder
than what you could just concieve
We're more truely lonely
than you will ever be
so why do you think you'd comprehend us?

No one ever sees the good to being normal
Because none of you know's the truth:
that ignorance is bliss!
If I could just forget these horrid secrets I know
maybe, just maybe then,
my soul could be at peace!

Question: Is the song "Hikari" by Utada Hikaru the original song in that first cutscene in Kingdom Hearts? Or is it a Japanese remake? Because it's DEFINITELY the same music and tune. I don't know if it's the same words because (a) I don't know the original words, and (b) I don't understand Japanese that well. But I was just wondering. Anybody who knows, hit me up with the answer.
Thanks.