Tribe Character

Brief:
Create an animated single character interface that represents a cultural
tribe of your choice.Your character interface needs to include two rollover animations. These rollover animations must express something about your chosen cultural tribe in relation to three out of the following four concepts:
• Hybridity
• Difference
• Gender
• Cyborg

Outcome:
The character is an IT worker who works 24 hours a day because he is part of the IT emergency team in a telecommunication company. This means he is very attached to technologies, which explains the headset, laptop, computer, cell phone, flat screen TV, robotic dog and the multifunction remote in his desk.

Click HERE to see the character
*I uploaded the .swf file because it needs to have an interactive interface to see the whole animation. Point the cursor and click on the lamp for gender, the window for difference and the robotic dog for cyborg.

Here are the screen grabs to get an idea of how it looks like:


Gender (Lamp)
In this scene, the character is given an order by his boss at night but then he passes it over to the woman employee, while he then back to enjoying his day by drinking and listening to music. This scene tries to show that women often get unfair treatment and have lower position in IT work field due to the minority of women’s involvement in IT job and men are the majority in this field, therefore they are considered to be more skilful. So women’s skills are not counted. I think this scene works fine as this situation happen a lot especially where the skill of women are hidden behind the men domination. In addition, the picture of opera house is a painting that tries to stress that he is a Sydneysiders and the robotic cat shows the attachment to technologies.

Differences (Window)
In this scene the character is compared to the regular worker/IT worker who works on regular time. The character uses more high technological gadget (computer, headset, phone) and looks unhappy because all his time is used for work (spend lunch time at the office [smoking and drinking coffee], while still paying attention on the system and must work at night), while the other uses paper and pen on his work and happier as he can have more leisure time (listens to ipod, has lunch with his girlfriend outside the office and sleeps at night). The scanned text is a text from computer system from a magazine, which tries to show the character’s skill identity, which relates to a complex computer system (same thing for same text in the gender scene). I think this scene is a bit weak, as it seems there are other worker that do similar things as the character but are not working in IT area.

Cyborg (Dog)
In this scene, the character’s car is shown to have high technologies system that helps him on doing his job as he might/must work while he travels. The system works as he presses the button on the wheel and as he mentions the key words for the actions (the screens that pops out and the phone that dials automatically) since the system uses a voice censor that is connected through his headset. This also shows his cyborg identity as he technically ‘wears’ and is dependable by those.