For this project, I paid a lot of effort, and I would like to share the story behind creating this project for you.
To begin with, I will share my idea of the story choice and the revision I made to the original story. Afterward, I would like to state my main idea in creating the whole project as well as the reason why I chose to integrate those certain interactive actions in this project. In the end, I will put forward several deficiencies in my current project and look ahead to future development.
First of all, about the basic story, I chose a famous animation movie called “Zootopia”, to be the original story of my project. There are two main reasons for me to choose this story as the base of my interactive story. One is because “Zootopia” itself has earned a high reputation in both artistic achievement and central idea. The other is that I feel it interesting to revise this story. I only put the focus on the first part of the story, the part that the heroine, Judy, seeks for realizing her dream, to be the first bunny police. Speaking of the revision I made, initially, I rewrote a completely different story that has 12 distinctive endings in all, which you can see more details in my last blog post. However, due to the time limit, I decided to change my previous thoughts. I create a world of memory, in this world, users can take a peek at the fragments of Judy’s memory by some interactive actions. I took some screenshots from the original movie, but, instead of directly use them as the elements in my project, I wrote my description on each of them and created a brand new one with my thoughts, my handwriting, and my drawings.
Secondly, I would like to share the central idea that I want to deliver through this project. In my project, the webpage is divided into two parts, one is a storyline that is consistent with the plot of the original movie, the other is some hesitations that the main character had. What I want the user to notice is that they can choose to believe whether the storyline that is consistent with the original movie plot is fact or not. To be more intuitive, those hesitations that the main character had can be the fact, and the original movie plot can be only an illusion. Therefore, I develop the basic “drag and drop” interactive way into an advanced one. The picture of “Judy” can be dragged to everywhere on the webpage, even drag out of the webpage in which the user will get the PNG image of Judy. While dragging, the storyline will appear gradually (the opacity will change from 0 to 1), also, I put one blur filter on the images while the mouse drag through them. Ultimately, I want the users to choose what they tend to believe and finish the storyline by dragging by themselves. Furthermore, I insert two audios in my project. One is the background music that I found on the website. It is used for creating a relaxing atmosphere for the users. The other is a recording of my voice, “This is a world of memory. We are glad to have you here. But, please bear it in mind that all you see are just memories in Judy’s mind, so you can choose to believe whether they are facts or not.”Not only does it work as a tip for the users to get the experience that I would like them to have, but it also works as a way to deliver my central idea in creating this whole project.
Thirdly, based on my observation, the first major deficiency lies in the incomplete storyline. I am looking forward to integrating more interactive actions into the whole storyline that I created at the very first beginning. The second major deficiency, based on the suggestions that my classmates and professors made, the current storyline is a little bit messy. They suggest that I should use other interactive ways, such as deciding to view one of the storylines through the different scrolling directions, and maybe add some real choice options to the hesitation part, making the hesitation more practical and real for the users. In conclusion, I think I should consider developing a more user-friendly way in the future.
Last but not least, I think this project is a fantastic experience for me. Although the time, as well as the current coding skills I currently mastered, is really limited, which bothered me a lot, I still found the appropriate way to realize my idea, learned the skills by myself, and obtain a relatively good result.
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tz1422/Project2_InteractiveStory_tina/
