Hair Creatures

The current idea is now to create a home navigation page, made up of a face with hair and a beard, which will be buttons. Clicking the buttons will take you to an animation of some creatures made of hair playing musical instruments, combining the words hair and suite. These are some rough ideas for their design.

Idea Development

The idea has now developed on from the wall of hair, to a beard. The beard and hair grow on a face as music plays, or, music plays while the beard grows. Alternatively, the hair and beard can be used as buttons to activate different sounds, almost as if it's a suite of hair. This could either be created in Flash or as a stop motion animation using cut out shapes.

The beard idea is still developing, with several variations. The first is to divide the face and beard into different sections, each being a button. when clicked, the hair grows while the music plays, and so the viewer is directly controlling the appearance of the face.

The second idea is to divide the face into separate sections, one for hair, beard, sideburns and moustache, with each as a button. This is combined with a screen featuring several different sound buttons that can be combined to make music. The buttons will have their own separate animations accessed through the face buttons.

Ear Hair

As the ear contains lots of tiny hairs that allow us to hear sound, I considered some sort of animation of sound going into an ear and triggering the hairs. As a hair is triggered, a sound clip plays, and as more trigger, the sound builds up.
Or the diagram of the ear could be used as an interface, using the hair as buttons to play sounds.

Current Idea

My current idea is to create a page in Flash featuring several buttons. Once clicked the button will play music while hair grows from the button. As the music plays, the screen will slowly fill with hair. Not sure how possible this will be.

Using Flash

Today we created a simple page in Flash, using buttons and sound to navigate. While a bit bewildering, it seems to be fairly logical in the way it works. I am considering using Flash for my project, although multiple sounds got lost in my test.

Animation Test 1

We used iStopMotion and a DV camera to creae some stop motion animated videos. Set at 12-14 frames per second. What was interesting was the way in which people not involved in the animation move so quickly in the finished videos.

Tea in mug.