Different Roles - or should I say walls

Several developments since the last post which have kept life pretty busy. First of all though, I had several emails resulting from the Jane Austen demo posts, showing interest in the project. One in particular was from Linda Robson Walker, the author of 'Why Was Jane Austen Sent away to School at Seven? An Empirical Look at a Vexing Question' which formed the basis of The Talking Walls' virtual build of Steventon Rectory. Linda mentioned that the first few paragraphs of the last blog were quite technical in the terminology used, for which I apologise. I forget that readers may not be familiar with animation terms so I will explain a little.

The house had been built in 3D for the earlier demo that was posted. The little clip of just the house spinning and looking dark brown, was an experimentation in another piece of software, where the materials previously shown on the house were discarded in preference for a flat beige colour. This was to help decrease the file size in order to upload it, the file size was initially large due to the program through which it had originally been built. I hope this is a little clearer, the original house can be seen more clearly on this link

Thankyou Linda for your response and contact, it was wonderful to receive such a great email (I will be in touch).

Regarding the title of different roles, I am very lucky to now be a part-time lecturer at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, in the subject of branding and marketing to the 2nd and 3rd year students. Alongside of this, I am also lecturing at the University of Winchester in Animation & Games (Specialist 1 module)for the 2nd year BSc students on the Digital Media Design course and also about professional processes (Processes 3 module) for the BA and BSc 2nd year students. Extremely interesting and varied subjects, and great places to work.

This leaves me some 'spare' time to continue with various projects for The Talking Walls and continue researching for my PhD. As part of all of this, I was honoured to be invited to talk at Winchester ENetwork by my Director of Studies, Dr David Birks, last Tuesday at the Winchester Business School. This was my first visit to the Business School, and I was amazed at how the building had been adapted for use as an art gallery, seminar, conference and study rooms. The 'room' in which the talk was being held could not have been better, it was in the old chapel with a vaulted beamed ceiling, beautiful windows and yet all the modern technology for giving presentations / conferences. I think my voice was a little lost in the vastness of the room and the fantastic turn out - approximately 100+ people from the University, local business and support organisations such as Business Link.

My talk was about the challenges I have met in the development of The Talking Walls since its conception in 1996. The title was Building Talking Walls, an apt title in many ways. From the feedback, it seems to have been received extremely well, and has brought me into contact with several people who I would not have met otherwise. Thankyou David and Professor Neil Marriott for inviting me to talk and welcoming me so warmly.

Winchester ENetwork is an excellent opportunity for students and businesses to network, an ideal way for prospective creatives to understand how other creative businesses started in their chosen field, and learn from their success and the many pitfalls that can occur when first starting out in business.

Steventon Rectory (Parsonage) rebuilt

The above is a cel shaded anim of just the Rectory (Parsonage taken from the original 3D file of the demo and passed through Swift 3D. Initially with the idea of creating an interactive Papervision3D file so that users can rotate it and explore the building. Unfortunately, due to the building having been created in Autodesk Revit Architecture and then exported to Autodesk 3DS Max as an .fbx file, there are too many faces and Papervision struggles to show them all. A rotation only was then decided on, until more time can be allotted to simplify the 3D model.

The small amount of research committed on this so far brought to my attention that there seems to be a discrepancy on what the building actually looked like due to conflicting sketches. The fact that the building no longer existed made it a prime consideration for being the first of Jane's homes to be re-built in 3D, discovering the uncertainty in how it looked made it more of a challenge.

Below are the sketches in question:



The two images above show a much smaller building than the two below, although each image states that it is Steventon Rectory (Parsonage).



These two images although on first look appear similar, the chimney placement is very different. There is a central chimney in the lower image, and not in the one above, although they both have a side chimney, which is not visible in the top two images.

There is a theory that the lower images are actually depicting Ibthorpe House, you can see the likeness to this building in the image below. Certainly the top of the second set of images above looks very similar - except for that central chimney.


I puzzled over this for a while and read various articles from Jane Austen experts such as Linda Robinson Walker in order to come to a decision as to how I portrayed the building. Within Linda's document Why Was Jane Austen Sent away to School at Seven?
An Empirical Look at a Vexing Question there was this image of the land around the house which helped considerably in making that decision along with the logical explanation / view given by Linda Robinson Walker:


This image certainly helped place the building in the surrounding landscape and provided very useful information in regard to the outbuildings and garden. There may be further information available from the Jane Austen Memorial Trust and / or other organisations that would clarify this further, as it stands the look of the animated building has been created from the information found only on the web.

Many thanks to the organisations / people who have posted this information on the web, the sources mostly used were:

Jane Austen Society of the UK
Jane Austen Society of North America
Astoft
Jane Austen
Hantsweb
Pemberley

Jane Austen demo now on YouTube

Finally succeeded in posting the Jane Austen demo up to YouTube. I say finally, as it has taken most of the day. Codecs, converters and then disabling all firewalls, anti-virus software on the laptop. This last part was because the 'old faithful' BT HomeHub kept losing signal - a few brain scratches later and my grabbed-at theory worked - Windows Defender, Kaspersky, Windows Internet Security and Pop-ups, all disabled, and hey presto, the file uploaded successfully.

I would love to know how you are supposed to know these things and plan your time accordingly. You are left with such a choice of what it could be: wrong codec, wrong converter program, wrong fps (frames per second) - all of which were thankfully clearly explained on the YouTube upload page. Having made sure you have now complied with the standard settings, and it still it will not upload, where do you go now? Could it be a problem with BT, or YouTube, a compatibility issue maybe, firewall on the router, on the PC? Maybe Kaspersky, ZoneAlarm? Very frustrating.

Still, with the above stated brain scratching session, I turned the whole lot off and risked catching a serious cold, but at least it worked, and so far no cold has appeared. I shall know this now and when I come to upload some more animations, I will be prepared.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the Jane Austen - Steventon Rectory demo on YouTube.

Jane Austen 'themed' Talking Walls application

This is an idea we have had since before Christmas, and at long last have found some free time to work on it. The demo has taken barely a week to produce from initial research through to the final editing of all the different elements. It always takes longer than you think it is going to, this time mostly due to research and putting some finer details in to make it that much easier to watch.

The general concept is to create a Famous People 'themed' Talking Walls series, covering the homes in which they lived, their family, friends and their work. Jane Austen is planned to be the first of these. The series could include famous figures such as William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, The Bronte Sisters and Charles Dickens, building a rich architectural, heritage and digital storytelling resource.


We hope to receive funding from interested parties to develop this project into a full Talking Walls application, exploring the buildings over their lifetime, pulling in the work they created there and their stories whilst living there.

The raw Revit file before taking into 3DS Max.

The application (as in all Talking Walls applications) would be available for iPhones, smartphones, handhelds and kiosks, accessed via The Talking Wall web server so that you would be able to visit any one of the homes, viewing the real space and exploring the virtual with your phone or provided handheld, continuing over the web once back in your own home / country.



The demo above has been greatly reduced in quality to fit within the guidelines for uploading video on this blog, nonetheless it still gives a good idea of Steventon Rectory, how it was positioned and its closeness to the church. This has been modelled based on several hours worth of research over the web. A better quality version can be seen on our website www.thetalkingwalls.co.uk. The images it is mostly based on are shown below:



More images will be placed on The Talking Walls website soon, with information gleaned albeit mostly on the rectory. If you have any information that may help with this project, please contact me, I would be grateful for any help clarifying the structure of the building. Thankyou