WEEK 1
Ok let's go...Well I'm Cyril Sellam,
My first name is Cyril (don't even try to pronounce it correctly, impossible for a british mouth, just call me cereal, I'll understand, I think I'll be not more than a big Rice crisp for the whole year...). I live in the students village in Jordanstown in a very little room with a very little bed and a very little desk (table in fact...) but that's ok, I learn to live with the very essential.
Oh yeah, by the way, I want to apologize for my english, I'll certainly make a lot of mistakes in each page of this weblog. I used to have a good english some years ago but in France, at university, they don't think foreign languages are importants so I lost a lot... So in your lectures I won't get most part of your jokes but don't worry I'll laugh as if I understood.
I came here thanks to the ERASMUS programme, an organism that allows european university students to study in another european university.
I began my undergraduate studies with DUT SRC (Services et Réseaux de Communication) at IUT Bobigny, Paris 13 University (a two years college degree specialized in communication and Computer Science). Then I joined a Licence 3 in Multimedia and Digital Arts at Marne-la-Vallée University (just near Disneyland Paris... good memories there...). And last year, in Paris 8 University, I was in Master 1 in Digital Creation and Edition.
During my studies, I was working in freelance for an audiovisual and multimedia agency as a Flash developer. Actually, in your line, I'm closer from the nerds boundary than the designers one but I'll try to approach it a little bit more at the end of the year.
I like music (my ipod is my best friend here), I practice karate since a while (and recently joined the
university Jujitsu club, crazy sport!), I like good food, good cinema, good travels with good people.
I'm not yet a big fan of Guinness but try to work on it each evening.
Don't like when I have to ask to irish people to repeat 5 times their sentences so that I can understand the third.
Ideas of projects
I don't really have precise ideas for my major project but I know it will be a kind of experimental project cause that's what I'm interested in. When I saw the ones you showed on your first lecture, I was a little impressed cause last year we had to make such kind of projects but by groups of 4 or 5 people and now I understood I've got to do it all alone, it won't be as easy as I thought before coming in Northern Ireland...- Interactive guitare bass teaching
Last year, for my birthday, I asked to be offered a guitare bass. I got it, I tried to learn it but didn't get enough time to practice so after a month, I let it taking dust. I planned to take it here with me but thanks to Easyjet and its fucking taxes for excess luggage, I couldn't (I had 19kg in excess so had to pay £100, more than the ticket, that hurts... I could have invited some friends at this price...). But normally, when my friends will come to visit me, they'll bring it. So I thought about making a website or a cd-rom teaching how to play bass, using as interactivity as possible and maybe using the keyboard to work on the agility of the user fingers. I found a cd-rom dealing with the same subject on www.guitarandbass.com, I'll try to get it.
- Navigation thanks to the sound
I'd like to work on the concept of navigation thanks to the sound so that the visual doesn't take the main place like in almost all the websites. Last year for my Master project I worked a little bit on it but I'd like to go deeper because it was really interesting and gave a new approach and different feelings to the user. - Online stormy portfolio
I also thought of creating my portfolio that I should have made a long time ago but always postponed because of lack of time. The main concept would be that instead of the mouse cursor, it would be a storm that shakes and sometimes blowns away each element the cursor passes over.
Les Chinois
I'm really interested in experimental projects mixing all kind of different types of content in a same page like in
this website for Les Chinois, a french multimedia agency. In this website, videos, vectorial and bitmap pictures, sound, animations are mixed and what is amazing is that this mix isn't shocking as we could think before
seeing it. What is crazy also is the big part of interactivity between each of them and the big immersion it
produces for the user.
