The Show (Must Go On)

Last night we had our senior show and displayed our final projects. Everyone's work was amazing. There was a huge turnout, I would guess that over 300 people came throughout the night.

I think that my project came out well given that it took me until a month ago to narrow down exactly what I was doing. I do wish that I had a few more weeks so that I could have tweaked a few things, and I wish that I had made a book/instruction manual now that people could have flipped through instead of having to rely on just listening to the 4 1/2 minute video. I thought that my poster was well received - even though it fell off of the wall about half way through the show (which was very frustrating).

I have a new respect for showing work in a gallery. I never realized how much work and how physically and mentally exhausting an opening night can be.

Poster...Done!

Finished building my poster and just went and hung it in the gallery. It came out awesome! It has the 3D version of the timeline vortex from my interface design, along with a brief overview of the project, and the title. I'm stoked about how it came out, I juts hope that the glue holds now that it is hung on the wall.

Making a few tweaks to my video and adding the voiceovers. I discovered after listening to my voiceover recordings that I can't pronounce the word "accessing" for the life of me! What a weird word...

Another Update.

Things are moving along now and I am getting excited for the show. I am learning that I do my best design work under pressure! It's the friday night before the show and we are supposed to have our projects pretty much complete by Monday.

I'm just wrapping up the revised intro animation and it came out killer. I'm going to be making a book that has a similar slip cover, printed on black paper. The interior will have a small eye printed on the right (part of the interface from the sight) and a transparent slip case that has type, and the guide book for the interface will slide into this. The cover of the guide will have a black cover with a circular cut-out in the middle that has the title of my project within it. Opening the guidbook reveals a blurry/zooming time ring. The interior walks through the interface step by step.

The poster is also going to be similar to the intro and the interface in general. The rings on the poster are going to create a 3D tunnel. It's going to be sick.

Timeline redrawn. Flash interface nixed.

So. I redrew the entire timeline so that everything can be scaled, when zooming through time, without losing quality. I built one file with the entire timeline that I can now import into all of my animations, I should have done it this way from the beginning - it would have saved me a ton of time.

I also spoke to my professor Ziddi and he said that adding a selection interface to my project doesn't make sense, and to just have a looping video running, with still slides in-between sections that have text explaining what is about to be shown. I'm also designing a poster that will have a brief introduction to the project written on it. I priced getting it printed on lenticular material and for a 30"x30" poster it was $800! Yowza. So now I'm thinking that I will print it on a semi-translucent paper/fabric and have the text on one layer and the time-line graphic behind!

Venting

I'm running into a number of issues that need to be resolved:

1. Zooming in on the timeline is looking very pixelated. I originally imported each ring in the timeline from illustrator at the size it is relative to it going back in space - so the further back rings were much smaller. Now when I am zooming into the timeline to show examples of moving back in forth on the timeline - it looks like crap.

I'm going back and redoing the original timeline so that all of the rings are the same size and then scaling the size in AE, that way I won't lose any image quality. That is going to take a loooong time. I'll have to go back and replace and reanimate the timeline in all of my files after I finish building it.

On a side note I am building the timeline in a much better way now so it should be a lot easier to animate and look much better. So at least some positive is coming out of this.

2. I'm trying to build the menu interface for the show in Flash and am getting frustrated trying to do the ActionScripting. I can get the buttons to go to a new page and play a video but can't figure out how to tell Flash to go back to the menu page after the video stops - it just keeps looping and I have to reload the SWF file to get back to the menu.

I've been on Adobe's Forums talking to people and it's like they are talking a different language. I know what I need to do but I just don;t know how to translate that into ActionScript! Argh!

Controls

I'm designing the interface to view the interface design. This interface will only be used at the show, and perhaps on my portfolio website, to allow viewers to watch/rewatch/skip over/watch all/etc. so that the interface walkthrough isn't a totally passive experience - there is some interaction and choice given to the audience.

If I were presenting this to a client I would be able to talk them through these steps, and replay areas they wanted to see again. Since at the show I might be preoccupied I want the audience to have this choice for themselves.

O great

I started trying to add some subtle sound effects to the timeline and something is wrong with After Effects and I get an error message when trying to import any music files, I have tried every possible format. O great.

I might have to render all my movie clips and bring them into iMovie to edit them all together and see if I can add the sound effects there. Then export the finished movie as a multiple quicktime files, broken up by section, and bring everything into Flash and create buttons so that people at the show can navigate through the movie if they choose or just watch the whole thing.

I'm thinking that if no one touches the main navigation page for like 30-60 seconds that the zooming timeline intro will loop! I don't how much ActionScript is involved in doing that. It's gonna be a busy week...