Software Design II

FINAL PROJECT

Well....it's finally done. After my apartment got broken into and I lost all my art, I really had to take a step back and figure out what I wanted for this project. Without my normal base of photography to work from, I decided to sketch out an imaginary scene and try to bring it to life in flash. It turned out to be really refreshing, to start totally from scratch. I spent a lot of time on small details and making the animation smooth and seamless. Even though I worked in flash, a program I'm comfortable with, I still learned a lot. I used a random function for the first time (to make it rain) and did a lot with shape tweening and shape hints.

I'm pretty happy with the end result, but at the same time there are still so many things I would like to work on and add. The scene is so detail oriented that working on one small thing ended up taking so much more time than I expected. I worked for a total of 36 hours, and I think for now, that's enough!

So I changed my mind about the final project, for like the 100th time. I'm gonig to use one of my sketches as the base. Here's what I have so far:
Project 4
Right now it's just a rough sketch of the final, but in the end everything will be ineractive.

I'm going to do my final project in flash, but I hope to create a unique effect by having many small flash movies on one page. The background for the html page and the flash documents contained within it will be white, so hopefully the user will be unaware that there are multiple flash documents. I plan to put the flash movies in a table, but make them different sizes and leave gaps in between them to create an irregular shape. Each of the flash movies will have interactive elements and some will have sound. The content of each flash movie will be different, but what exactly the content will be I'm not sure.
Since both my computers were stolen I no longer have a database of photography, sound, animation, or anything to help me, so I will have to start from scratch and try to find computer labs with Flash that I can work in.

Here are the animations I've started to work on and the general idea:
work in progress

Apparently my project doesn't work on macs.....

Project 3

Oye.....

I made a big mistake with this project by trying to do it in JavaScripting. I wanted to branch out and learn something new, since everything I do is in Flash, but it proved to be too much to handle. My initial concept got pretty much lost in my poor scripting abilities. Initially, I wanted to create a random music generator, where the sounds were correlated with colors. Black and white squares would randomly move around the screen, and when a colored one appeared, a certain sound would play. I planned on having the sounds layer, to create a random kind of music.

I got the black and white squares to randomly move around, but when I started working with tying sounds to certain images everything got messed up. I couldn't get the sounds to overlap, so I had to make just one scare rotate through the colors, that way two would never play at once. But, that also meant it couldn't rotate around like the other ones, otherwise two might pop up at the same time, and the sound wouldn't work. So what I ended up with was the black and white squares doing their random thing, and the colored square hanging out in the middle and playing certain sounds correlated with the colors.

I learned a whole lot doing this project. I had NEVER done anything with JavaScripting before, so, even though the project didn't turn out how I had initially planned, I spent a whole lot of time and effort on it, and it does fulfill the assignment requirements. And even thought not everything went as planned, some things still turned out OK. I spent a lot of time making the audio that would go with the colored squares. I researched the meaning of colors and their correlation to sound, and then tried to generate audio that had the feel of each color. As for the parts that didn't work out, at least I have a much better understanding how to write JavaScript, how functions work, etc. If I could do it all over, I would probably chose to do it in Flash, so the end result would be better, but, I guess school is the perfect place to make mistakes and learn from them.

Because I haven't done much scripting I want to keep that portion of the project simple, and embelish the page with flash and other images to give the project a more complicated feel. I have a basic javascript working that randomly pulls images from a specified folder and displays them on the page. I have four different boxes to display the images in, and I figure I can place them on the page, and accompany it with some flash..somehow. I haven't decided on the content of the images or what kind of Flash I want to accompany it, I've mostly been concentrating on the scripting.

1. Islands of Concsiousness
randomly arranged musical phrases take direct influence on the visual outcome

2. Caligraft
Generates random variations of the letters you type in

3. Boom
Three generative image processes

4. Mutations
Computer interpretations of famous works of art