Here is the address of our project:

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~yy2572/video_project/1

The disciplines of the second obstruction are:

1. shot in a miserable place
2. don’t show where it is
3. Leth is the man in the film
4.  Leave out the woman in the film but retain the meal

It may be one of the most obstructions among all five ones, both techniques and emotions. Leth needs not only to convey a sorrowful feeling which he tries to get away from, but also has to show that feeling with his own acting. Moreover, since he is not allowed to show the place or people there, he has to interpret the atmosphere there and tries to bring it to the audience on himself. 

However, Leth plays a trick, he did block the people and place, but he did this with a transparent curtain. Thus even it  provides a feeling of isolation, audience can see the people around and the street there. Though Trier doesn’t think this film satisfy his request, he admits it is a good work.

In this film, Leth acts as a traditional European just as Claus Nissen does in the original one. He deletes the woman part and largely reduces the man part. He only uses a little time to do the movements part and the meal takes most of its time. 

I think by doing this, Leth was trying to point out why that place is miserable, why the people behind the curtain is not perfect. It is not because they don’t have eyes or ears or mouse, and it is not because they do not how to act as a human. It is because they don’t have material insurance. Also, considering the isolated empty white space in the original film, the transparent curtain is a intermediate state between isolated and not isolated. It shows the secret place outside that perfect white world, with blocking the imperfect people out of the place. And this ingenious set also makes Leth and the local people contrast with each other.

Here is the link for our project: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~yh3245/chemlab/

A description of the project:

We both like the combination of different sounds, so we begins with think up things can be combined with each other. Then we find out that chemical material is a good choice. And this is also inspired by Professor Didakis’s suggestion of micro-world. So we want to build a simulate chemical lab with different kinds of materials. They have their own sounds, you can play them by click the button around them and pause them by click again.  You can also drag them in the equation, and then click the equal sign to make the reaction happen. And the products of the reaction will appear, and the sound of that reaction will be played.

A discussion of your process and how the project works:

This is not our original idea, the previous one is to narrate the experience of a man who works alone on the street from night to dawn. And we want to create an unique atmosphere by playing the sounds he gonna hear during his journey. We have already recorded the audio materials we need and the basic structure of the website. But it seems kind of boring and the audio is not the major part of this project, then we change our topic to our current project. So we are a little bit more about t left behind.

In this project, we do the recording work together, most of the audio materials we use are from our dorm, and others are from the streets and academic building. During that process, we found that though the preview of the records is good (when you click record only once and it is actually not recording), but the actual records is not satisfying. So we change the record set to a higher recording quality. After, that we discovers our records become much better. We have recorded the sound of the crash of the metals, sound of water, and sound by shaking a bag of rice or sugar. We also record the sound of the air (similar to the sound you can hear when you have a tinnitus), we think it is interesting and gives the listener a feeling of silence.

Then we separate our works, I do most of the coding part and she processes with the most audio materials we got and draws the image we use for our project. My partner writes the html and css of the images, putting them in right position and give the code to me. Then I work on the javascript part to fulfill the functions. I give every object a drag function and they will only be dropped to a constant position when you drag it close enough to that position. And once it is dropped to the equation, the variable of its will change in javascript. And when you click the equal sign, it will get the variable of all the chemical materials and know which reaction should be processed. And by running the reaction function, the images of the products will appear with the sound of it. And then I gave my code back to her. She add the processed audio materials into the file and do the coding part of the sounds. 

I also work with some audio materials, I change the frequency of the sounds, and cut them to make them have proper starting point. I give the echo special effects to an audio. And I once put nearly all the sounds we got in order to make it sounds like a band with strange instruments. Though we did not directly use that, it is close to the situation when you click all the buttons in our website. 

A post-mortem on whether or not the project met your goals:

It mostly meet our goals, but I think the elements in our project in not enough, so we cannot put more audio materials into the website. 

And there are some ways we can improve:

1. When you drag the images, there will be a block to show that the position you are wanted to drag the images to.
2. When you click the buttons to play music, all the sounds should be played at the same rhythm. We can do this by make all the audio materials played at the same time with 0 volume before you can click those buttons, like making a introduction pre-page.
3. When you try to drag the image, you may click the button over it, we may solve this by turning the image to the button.

In this podcast, the producer carefully choose the background sound and the sound of conversation. In the first few minutes, which is the first meeting between interviewer and interviewee, it just records almost any sound we can hear if we are present, the sound of the crash of the forks and plates, the sound of water and the conversation of others. They are daily and normal, adding reality to this media. 

Then they have a rather long conversation, during which the background is very silent, mainly want to emphasize the content of their conversation. After that, they have a cool transition, like a very fast car passing by. Following is the record of a phone call, it is easy to recognize since the noise of the phone call is distinguishable. And the conversation is just clear to be heard under the noise. And then there is a paragraph of speech, like an advertisement and announcement. It is recorded without any noise so it is considered important and need to be heard clearly.

Here is the link of the first page of our project: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~xy1242/project02/opening/index.html

Concept – Rationale, and reasons that you have chosen this project

This story is created by my partner. He once wrote a short story for his favorite tomato fish restaurant. He wrote his story as a recommendation to his friends. And we like this short story because it is fun and unusual. Therefore we want to use this story as the blueprint of our project. We think this story can have multiple kinds of interactions with animations driven by buttons. 

Development process/methodology – What did you make, and how did you make it?

Firstly, we think the original of our story does not completely fit our project. Thus we restructured our story and modified some details to create the design and thinking of both of us. Moreover, we revised some plots of the story to make it easier to understand. We also do this to create more interactive modes, giving our players a colorful and enjoyable experience while reading the story. The major part of our project is our pictures and the animation, and we used the minimum of the texts to tell this story clearly. Because we want our players to focus more on visual parts, though they are very simple, we think they are interesting and unique.

Analysis of tools used – Technical analysis, problems encountered, and how where they solved 

In our first website, we simply use opacity and buttons to provide the background of our story and introduce the two main characters. 

In the second website is mainly designed by my partner. 

In the third website, we use a little hover and combine it with the code I learnt from the website to make a picture rotate when the mouse is on it. And we use transition to make it look like an animation. And at first, we failed to make the animation. And we finally discovered that we must write the style data that need to be changed in the css file, or it will change immediately leaving out the transition function. 

In the forth website, we design a difficult inner structure and many functions to make the picture move regularly and circularly. We also pass the variable in one function to another function to make sure the picture stays at its position after its movement stops. Moreover, we make a cute “float function” to make the picture float. This time is not technically difficult, but it took us lots of time because its logic structure is complicated.

In the fifth website we make a recursion by using the “setTimeout” function, so that we can load a new image every second after clicking the button, and we use “clearTimeout” to stop this progress after clicking the button again. In this website, we also use the “transform” function to make the image reverse left and right.

The sixth, seventh and eighth websites are very similar only contain simple animation using the transition when moving the image. 

In the ninth website, we use the drag function learnt in class, and we also learnt to unable the drag function from the internet. So when the image is dragged to the place we want, it cannot be dragged anymore. 

In the tenth website, we also make a recursion by using the “setTimeout” function. And a difficult part of it is to make the image rotate and move at the same time. 

When we complete all above, we began to worked on the dialogue part. Every page should be started with clicking the “Next” button, and then you can see the dialogue or the instructions. Also, you cannot see and click the “Continue” button to go to the next website until you explore all the plots in the current website. We do this by adding a similar function with many if statements to every js file we had completed.

Critical Reflection – What do you think about your finalized work? What things would you change now?

We want our project to have two different endings but we do not have enough time. And the interactive modes are kind of monotonous since most of them are driven by button. I think we should improve our images and pictures, we only used little time in this part and it looks simple and rough. Also, I think we need some audio stuff to make the project more interesting and colorful. Moreover, if possible, I want the project to be in website with a long page rather than in many different websites.