- Name of your project
- What inspired you to make this work?
- How does the content of your work related to some of the concepts we’ve covered in class?
- What tools did you use? How did the tools affect your creative process? (If you found the tools limiting you can also comment on that.)
- What have you learned as a result of making this work? What surprised you?
I made retellings of the story The Little Prince for both my visual and sound projects, and I am quite happy with the results, so for the final project I sought to find a way to combine the works of visual and audio onto a webpage and add some interactions to them.
It is quite a challenging project for two reasons. One is in the aesthetic design of the website, and one is in the technical side. The only resources I have were static pictures made by VQGAN, which is not terrific for making complete and aesthetically pleasing characters to create any sort of motion in the storytelling, and the best pictures are those with more of an environmental grandeur. But a story is not as attractive without characters and movement. Though the pictures can be good as illustrations on a story book — which I already did, they would need more design on a website to tell a story on their own, or it would look more like a photo gallery than a story.
The second challenge is quite big on the psychological side too: I am not familiar with the techniques of making websites. The last time I made a basic website was two years ago in a course called Communications Lab, and though I have documentations for it in this very blog picking the skill up wasn’t easy, especially I was aiming for something more advance than what I did before.
So I was stressed about it for days. My experience and instinct told me to leave it be till inspiration naturally comes up, but anyhow I was a bit agitated for about two weeks. I really started making the website only two days ago, and after two whole days of work I am surprised by what I did achieve.
The biggest problem with AI production is that it can only be enjoyed when distracted. It is not always good enough to be enjoyed on full attention to every detail, and that’s why design is important to veer the audience’s attention onto something else and trick them into believing that it is good. I did that with the background music and extra sound effect in the audio project, and edited the images with Sketchbook in the visual project, not mentioning experimenting with prompts and selecting the ones that looks right. So with this project I attempted to do the same. Each element cannot itself be the object of appreciation, but creating an immersive experience together the audience gets a lot more tolerant to the flaws of the individuals.
To be honest, the real working part of the process isn’t so fun. It was pure coincidence that when erasing the edges of the pictures I thought that it looked like the silhouette of a face, so I made it into a boy’s face. The plane has a sense of movement, and I pondered about whether to make the plane move or the planets, and what kind of code I would have to use to reach the effect of flying. This is the simplest and smartest way I could think of. Then I just added in little surprise elements, such as sounds, plane getting covered by the clouds, etc. The coding skills I have regarding animations are pretty basic, so I made do with what I have.
I think the project serves as a good conclusion for the things I’ve learnt in this class this semester, and I am happy for that. Thank you professor for introducing us to so many cool things, and look forward to working with you (if positions are available, of course:) in the next!