Below is the link to my Project 4 Draft. It is a rather general and rough draft for my fourth project. Due to the COVID-19, I am not able to shot the film that I need as much as I want. Since the resources are quite limited, I may consider developing my web design with coding to figure out a better way to get my audience involved in.
Communications Lab S20
Week11: Interactive Documentary Idea-TinaZhang
Subject: the life choice under this Choranavirus. People from different age levels, different countries, different professions may all have different choices in the same circumstances.
Unique aspects: I would first shoot videos describing a normal daily life, but it should be very comprehensive, revert the normal life mode to the largest extend. I may need to first have several categories based on the different age levels. This project will be able to collect people’s information about their real-time choices, and in the end, they can explore the documentary in a much macro way.
Week 11: Reflection on the documentary-Manufactured Landscapes-Tina Zhang
This documentary is mainly talking about the manufacturing industry in China. It starts with an overview of a specific factory and focuses on the problems, especially the E-waste problem which is becoming more and more severe nowadays in China. This documentary uses a unique technique, that is interweaving all the video clips that they have recorded into one TED talk. In this documentary, the producers use Montage several times to make the transition between video clips and TED talk smoother. Also, there is one sparkling technique that I observe in this documentary, zoom in and zoom out a photograph at the end of one video clip. This transition is not only really smooth but also works well in putting an end to the videos as well as reminding the audience of the central idea of that video clip. Furthermore, it uses a lot of zooms in and zooms out during the video. They are used for magnifying some important details and putting emphasis on those.
Speaking of the narrative structure. It first starts with the working patterns of a specific factory, then moves on to a village where all of the villagers are living on collecting and recycling E-wastes. In the end, it keeps on to the manufacturing wastes and much more huge construction work that is being carried out. Although this documentary focuses on telling the public a fact existing or going worse around us objectively, I believe the central idea is quite strong with the use of such abundant visual materials that were collected by the team in the past ten years.
Week 10: Project 3-Soundscapes-Tina Zhang
For this project, I created a soundscape that described the life of a blind girl to the audience. I drew three maps of the rooms in her house by myself. The three maps showed to the audience is actually three buttons. Therefore, the audience can choose which space they would like to explore first on their own. After the audience clicks the button and go into that specific space, they will be shown a bigger map so that they will feel like they are really in that room. And in each room, I inserted at least 3 sound clips on different objects for the audience to trigger by themselves. In the following, I would like to explain the sound that I inserted, my central idea, and the future development that I can have based on the suggestions given by my classmates and professors.
In the bedroom, I have made four sound clips in total. The sound of getting up, in which I combined the sound of an alarm clock, the sound of the dog waking the girl up, the sound of the girl getting up and her footsteps. The sound of a bear, I combined my own sound in an original song, implying that the girl is full of love and likes talking to her bear. The sound of the dog barking and chewing food. The sound of taking out the headphone, and listen to music from her headphone.
In the kitchen, there are three sound clips. The sound of boiling water, drinking water and taking pills. Also, in this sound clip, I recorded one sound of the bottle cap’s falling down, indicating that there are some difficulties in her life (1). The sound of pulling out a chair. The sound of her playing the drum.
In the living room, there are three distinctive sound clips. The sound of a radio which she used to listen to the news. The sound of going out and shutting the door. The sound of her playing the piano (2).
For the interaction part, I chose a very easy way, mouse click only. But I used jQuery to add a bunch of “fade in” & “fade out” effects to the elements, and also fancy transitions when the mouse has hovered on the buttons. I also add “fade in” & “fade out” effects on the audio that I inserted, especially on the transition between the sound clips and the background music.
The central idea that I try to deliver is that the physically disabled people do have difficulties in their daily life, but they actually have much less difference than we thought. There are over 1.3 billion people suffering from visual impairment all over the world, namely, one-fifth of people in the world. They actually are capable of many more jobs than we thought, however, on most companies’ recruitment requirements, there will still be a statement: “not for physically disabled”, and I want to use this project to arouse people’s awareness about this phenomenon.
For future development, I think I can focus more on enriching the audience’s hearing experience. Also, for the last ending sound clip, I can add a conditional function in JavaScript to make the button only appear after the audience view all three rooms instead of being there all the time.
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tz1422/ACharmingGirl-cr_ttina/
Week9:Demo-TinaZhang
Here is the link of my demo:http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tz1422/0416/
Week 9: Sound Effect Practice-Tina Zhang
Here is the link of my assignment: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tz1422/0413/