lynette design

project 1

My first concern when I approached the project was to learn some flash. I had tried to learn it last semester, and given up, so I was very concerned to make sure I could learn enough in four weeks to produce the project. I began doing the tutorials earnestly, and tried to think always of the project as I was doing the tutorials.

I found brainstorming the idea of flip very helpful. I wanted to produce a more interactive environment than I had done last semester. Last semester I really just produced an animation that played through and then could be replayed, but this time I wanted to take into account designing an environment that the user could make different decisions in in different orders.

I took a simple scene of a light, coin and flip-book, that the user could interact with so that I could spend the time learing flash and exploring the word flip. I wanted there to be some variables to store the state of the light and the coin, and for these to be remebered so that they would effect the outside environment. I took the idea of flip often involving two sides - like off or on (of the light) or heads or tails (of the coin). Flipping the light effects the environment to have the light displayed as off or on, and flipping the coin effects wheter the "heads" or the "tails" annimation is shown when the flip book is flipped.

I wanted to explore the idea of flipping and animation. The idea of an invironment that has various interactions that the user can make at different times, and the flash movie remembers what choices were made, and it affects other things.

For the sound, I played a short repetitive melody on my violin and recoreded it. I tried to make the melody sound kind of like flipping because it has a repetative sequence of notes that flips from a low note to three descending repeted notes, that makes the melody kind of like flipping. I also chose notes that I thought sounded good on their own, but that would combine harmoniously when flipped over eachother.

I wanted the soundscape to repeat and randomly flip over itself, as a random result of the users interactions with the movie. I found that I liked playing with creating deliberate patterns with the soundscape and can make very interesting interactions when the layers of sound flip over eachother.

To help navigation I also included "flip" and "back" sounds to help people know how to navigate the movie.

I am happy that I achieved my aims for the project. I feel like I learnt alot about flash in a short time, and I feel that I explored the idea of interactivity by creating an environment where various user action effect different things in the environment.

I think I would like to have improved the animation by exploring other elements about the word flip, if I had have had more time and more knowledge about flash. I would especially have liked to explore the idea of flip-flop as being the type of circuts in early computers, and extending the idea of the essentially binary nature implied by the word flip. There are two sides to a coin, you flip something over and inverse it, you flip and then flop. If I had have had more time, I would have liked to explore more abstract concepts about the word flip.

posted by nicole @ 5:47 pm