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.

Michel Gondry

This video for the Chemical Brothers is very clever in the use of repeating imagery. As the the track is made up of loops and samples, the video takes a similar approach, with trees, pylons and buildings being looped over and over in time with the track. The result is a hypnotic combination of sound and visuals.

Hair + Suite =

I have chosen to go with the word combination of Hair - suite. My initial thoughts are on the suite side of the combination, refering to a musical suite. A musical suite is described as a cycle of songs played in the same key. In reference to hot and cool media, I am thinking of creating something where music can be cut up and played in any order, making the hot media (the song) into cool media by allowing a viewer to edit it.

Hot and cool media

Today we had an introductory lecture in Hot and Cool Media. In terms of something being hot or cool, something is hot when it is set. As in a book, or gravestone, something that has been created and is uneditable. Something cool could be something interactive, or something changeable, such as a meal or Facebook page. Additionally, hot media can become cool. For example, a piece of written music is hot, but when played live, the music becomes cool as it interpreted by the person playing it. This was explained in a video demonstration by Bill Ver Plank.

Video Tuesday

We were shown several music videos today using reverse and stop motion techniques. The use of reversed camera footage in Drop, directed by Spike Jonze, creates quite a striking effect. It gives the performers an otherworldly quality to their movements.

Video Test Edit

Today we made video tests, using a camera, firewire and iMovie to record and edit footage. I was particularly interested in using repetition of the sound and visual aspects.

Rich Media

Design for Rich Media is the title of our new brief. Rich Media coverws a range of technologies, including video, animation, audio and Flash, usually within an interactive environment. The brief is to create a series of outcomes in response to one of four combinations of words. Tree - shape, Hair - suite, Flow - course, Coat - finish. This is then used to create a 'how to...'