Sound Visualization

Jingran Zhang

A Million Dreams (Reprise)

By Hugh Jackman, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely
From the Movie The Greatest Showman

Music Soundtrack
Movie Clip Version

 

Concept and Design

The song has two cute girls’ voices singing and a low man’s voice singing at the end, and there are the elements of violin and piano with a gentle flow. The song mainly gives the audience a dreamy and emotional feeling. Also, as the girls’ voices are singing together, I used similar and overlapping black and white “S” to show the echoing feeling in the sound. Also, from my perspective, though this song sounds pretty emotional, it is still powerful and curable with the use of low voice, and the girls’ sounds are committed.

By using the theories including similarity, closure, proximity, and continuity, I think the work applied the Gestalt theory well. The uses of different sizes and orientations of “S”s used the principle of similarity and good figures and can bring a neat image, the curved letters matching with the flow in the song as well. Also, with the “f”s connecting with each other on a curve, we can feel the continuity and the gentle flow in the song being represented. Also, with the use of black and white in the design, we can view the closure parts of the work. In the figure and ground relationship, I used the white color as my background and used the black color and color contrast to give the work more depth.

Process and Conclusion

In the process of the design, I had my first draft before the mid-critique. In this work, I used the comparison between black and white to show the difference between the sounds. Also, I wanted to build the feeling of the words bursting out from the dark side to the bright side. However, the results didn’t go well. The image gave the audience a realistic imagination of something growing from the ground as there was a straight separation between the colors, but the whole composition did not seem nice. Also, the dreamy and emotional feelings could not be shown as there were too many angles in the image.

(In Progress Work)

Therefore, in my adjustment to the work, I thought of the advice from the professor and my peers about using curves and creating a dreamy feeling in the work. I started over and kept the dreamy, magical, and emotional feeling with the long flow of the song. I started with the white background and S as my main figures and got them connected to show the feeling of echoing. Also, for the violin and piano played, I used typing on the path to use a lot of f on the way and create the feeling of flow with the principle of continuity. Then, I added the part of black to create depth in the image and show contradiction and closure in the image. I adjusted a lot on the color contradiction part to make it seem more balanced.

(In Progress Work)

If I had more time, I would consider adjusting the black part to make the figure and background clearer to be distinguished as the professor advised. Also, the change in the main figures can be shown more clearly to highlight the main part of the work.

Project Presentation