Author: Yue Yao

link: http://www.exhaustingacrowd.com/london

Description of exhausting a crowd:

This internet art is produced by Kyle McDonald. The interesting interactive space shows the hustle and bustle in four sites: London, Netherlands, Birmingham, and Gwangju. From the view of a security camera installed in the corner, the user can make annotations on the 12-hour video. They can also click on some object and create the dialogues or any kind of encounters by typing the words in the text box.

I consider it meaningful because we can watch the prosperity of the modern city from a different perspective. This time, we are involved in a digital and art world. We are able to take an insight into the utility of public place, the surveillance, and the interpersonal relationship.

Link: https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ys3041/videoproject/start.html
Partner: Susie, Ying
Instructor: Moon

Main idea:
Our project mainly shows how a story ends with a magical turning. It was adapted from a well-known Disney movie “Snow White”. We got some whole new feelings when we look back on this interesting cartoon we watched at a young age. We found some plots quite dramatic and funny, so we want to act them out. Our interaction is to let the user make their own decision and compare two different plots in each scene. One of them will continue the story and the other will end the story.

Process:
Susie and I worked on the script and storyboard together. And during our shooting, we also changed a little to achieve a better effect. I acted as the snow white and helped shooting their parts. Basically, we finished our shooting on the 15th floor.

After that, I’m in charge of performing, picture processing and web coding mainly in our team. So I will talk about these parts. Web design can be divided into two parts. One is the opening page and the other is video play, with some interactions involved. In the opening page, the user can “scrub the dust” and see the picture by clicking on the diamond continuously ( or you can just skip it ).

The next part is playing the videos. Initially, when the audience clicks on the picture, it would show a popup window of the brief introduction of the whole scene. When they close the window, the two options of ending or continuing will be shown and each button will lead to a new website containing the video. Susie improved the webpage later by adding the “click count” function in javascript.

Reflection:
For example, when Ying was editing the video, the render somehow won’t work. And for coding, we initially wanted to fix the webpage with the video page moving horizontally and smoothly only, but somehow didn’t make it. Also, I think I should focus more on javascript, or say the animation so that the page will look more dynamic, not static. It’s a quite good opportunity for us to learn about shooting and video editing, and I find there are still lots of things to be improved.

(Somehow the file was still too big after I exported it. So then I had to revise it in fcp.)

This is the story board of our group:

Proposal
Our group’s video project is “to end stories in one sentence”. Based on some famous stories that everyone may possibly know or hear about it, we will create different storylines that may end these famous stories at the beginning or before the key scene. These endings may be interesting, funny, bad or open endings.

We now have two plans for this topic. The first plan is to focus on one story and make four different endings. For this plan, we will pay more attention to the variety of endings. The second plan is to find four different stories with an ending each. For this plan, we may think more about the stories themselves. We can all make funny endings or bad endings.

Next week, we will start to find the stories for us to create the endings and try to design the layout of the website.