Here is the link to check out our project! LINK
Project Description
Our project consists of multiple elements shown through the display of a television. The primary interactive features of our project are the controls on the right panel of the TV, allowing the user to flip between channels, adjust the volume with a slide bar, pause the video, and other functionality. Our project’s theme is environmental catastrophe and the progression through the sequence of videos aims to emphasize that idea. We start with two light-hearted commercials, both in the environmental-warning realm, which starkly contrast with the realities presented in our final video. Our website is also designed in a way that the user must continue through the commercials in order to return to a previous video. This way the user must experience the full story (that is, all the videos in sequence). We purposefully chose to present our project on a retro TV and with added retro film effects to create the facade that we are in the past, even though the story is very much one of the present. In doing this, we urge the user to realize the environmental situation as both inherited from the past and continuing to the present.
Process
Our first hurdle was figuring out our story and then how to make it interactive. We knew early on that we wanted our project to revolve around a spoken word on the environment, from the perspective of someone living in a dystopian future wasteland. We then brainstormed added elements to showcase before the final video, allowing for interactivity that replicates flipping through channels in real-life. I felt my group did a very good job of splitting up work, and by delegating responsibilities we were able to meet all of our deadlines and progress through our project rather efficiently. Each week we went through the process of filming, editing, watching, re-editing, and then filling in the blanks or adding touch-ups. At the same time, we built our webpage starting with the foundational TV in front of video, and dug deeper into stylistic choices thereafter. Working on each aspect of our project congruently allowed us to monitor what was working and what wasn’t, granting us the opportunity to change elements accordingly.
Post-Mortem
Overall, I am very proud of how our project turned out. I can definitively say that every element matches what I envisioned and in many ways exceeded my expectations. I’m also very pleased with how well my group worked together and steadily tackled the workload of this project. It definitely was more work than what we initially envisioned, but the work proved to be worthwhile as we finished with a project that all of us are proud of.