Music, voice and sound can communicate a story within a story.
Music without lyrics can evoke a mood, for instance, the dance music in my intro—after pressing the play button—adds a mood of excitement. Adding voice can add confusion or clarity for listener, depending on whether or not the lyrics make sense. For instance, the voice within my second scene, states, "the following program is an exercise in living in the moment," while the image is me about to press a play button. A severely literal person may not understand the connection of a girl who is about to dance her pants off to self-help audio. And lastly, even a simple sound effect can tell a story. One of the abstract sound effects within my forth scene is an alarm that occurs when a person appears at the door to discover me dancing; through a sound bite I have communicated, danger, bad, fear, hurry, make it stop.
Simultaneous and sequential communication
Simultaneous communication can alter the meaning of a sound or visual. For instance, in my initial cassette button scene, if the viewer clicked the button containing dance instructions, he or she might gather that this piece is about learning to dance. But when the instructions are layered with other buttons such as a crashing sound-effect and song titled, I Won't Dance, the meaning alters from stiff instructions to a nervous dance scene.
User vs designer control
Within my first scene, the user has control of turning sounds on/off /layering or playing a video. (The sounds have to be discovered and are not labeled, but rather a color flashes when a button rollover occurs.) If the user hits the play button, he or she is rendered helpless under my control to watch short scene teaser animation. When the animation ends, the user is once again in the driver's seat to turn any of five scenes on or off. Although the user is free to pick any of the five animation sequences and play them in any order, I've decided to establish designer control by embedding sound within the videos.
The initial frame of my interactive piece contains four sounds and a video launch button:
Upon pressing the big, pink play button, an intro animation occurs and takes the user to this sequence picker mainframe (pick any sequence of five):
after a sequence is chosen, an animation plays (with sound embedded) and the eject button to the right takes the user back to the sequence picker mainframe:
The initial frame of my interactive piece contains four sounds and a video launch button:
Upon pressing the big, pink play button, an intro animation occurs and takes the user to this sequence picker mainframe (pick any sequence of five):
after a sequence is chosen, an animation plays (with sound embedded) and the eject button to the right takes the user back to the sequence picker mainframe:
2 comments:
my favorite moments were the silent ones. They all seemed to be burned into my memory and lost at the same time. Its fun to watch you work on projects tammy.
One thing to possibly consider when elaborating on this narrative Odessy:
The possibility of something solid (typewise) to hold on to. I think the narrative is maybe a bit of a plane ride. At first I just got a little confused as to what was causing different things. This disorientation was interesting, and you should explore ways to harness that energy for greater purposes. This could be done a number of ways, I'm just someone who sometimes feels like a pig on rollerskates when he is viewing things on the computer.
great experience
I'm immediately taken with your integration of graphic elements. Just great. The duality of the buttons on your movie also being the buttons on a walkman is excellent imagery. The shape of the buttons themselves isn't clique because I access them more ass walkman buttons- as opposed to ipod, or some other brand new stuff. The use of the lines from the sound of music as your chapter breaks is very successful because it gives the viewer an opportunity to explore.
The choices of color are very interesting because the brown paper really sets them off. There's a quirkiness to the color palette without making me feel that the choices were forced.
The contrast of different styles on music in your sound elements is also very impressive because you pull from a very wide area of music. I especially liked the use of Sinatra's lyrics.
Post a Comment