1.1 Individual Work
My individual work is basically defining how the sound influence or interact with visual materials; so I put three music pieces and one video in silent and edit in Max. My conceptual purpose is to let audience get involved in my production through choosing any of the music and apply it in that silent video by themselves. The three music I used are totally different in genre—classical, rock and blue jazz, which is easier to make comparisons within sounds. Furthermore, it can show the interactions between sounds and video, so that the visual and auditory effects generated by their interactions are more obvious.
In terms of my technical aims wth Max, I make my work looks succinct so that audience can clearly understand each icon’s representation (honestly it’s because I’m not familiar with Max cuz I’m a beginner). Firstly I need to figure out how to switch the sounds and the video is playing at the same time. I added two playlists, one is for music and the other is for video. Then I need some message boxes to notice the system which music is gonna to be played. I also add a toggle for playing and stopping the video, as well as an volume control linked with the audio playlist. The most challenging thing would be adding the special effect on video, I need helps from Camille.
1.2 Group Work
Referring other artists’ work, we found interested in building a story and invite audience to develop the storyline. We focus on the interaction between audience and media. We want to tell that audience is active and they can either give order or make response to the computer. I think our work would be really interactive because audiences’ role here are the directors — they can choose what’s gonna happen according to their minds.
To achieve our conceptual aims, we need to make a general structure of the story, think about all the scenes to provide choices for audience. And we should find out how to place the options in Max and how to link it to the next scene through clicking each toggle. We have a huge amounts of toggles uses in our production — each step has around three options. I think this is the biggest challenge for us. The transitions between each part would be another challenge, we have pre-edited them in Premiere and should finalize in Max. Lastly, one or more relevant sounds are needed to be our background music and we should either make it or find the resources.
1.3 What Have We Done?
When talking about interactive media, the first thing comes to my mind is all the messages are transferred in both-side, computer can also feel audiences’ thought and respond immediately. In this case, audience become active, which I think is the biggest difference and improvement compare to traditional media. Contribute to our artwork, our group originally had a conceptual aims about presenting the interaction between auditory and visual media. However we found some similar ideas in class; therefore we change our direction — tactile interaction with audience. Finally we took the shoots in Melbourne museum, and our theme would be kind of an interactive tour there. It works tactilely with operating the keyboard to make order. The following result is different depends on the choice you’ve made, which means the exported information is controlled by audience.
During the work, I learned some technical skills with Max, which can achieve using simple program to operate a complete media production. What we need to do is change the unidirectional conveying into both-side. We make an overall story and let audience complete the story by choosing the direction and developing it. Audience here is acting as the first perspective, which is more interactive rather than just control it as a third-person perspective.
In my opinion, we did well in our concept. It is a good way to explore the interactive relationships between human and digital world. In addition, we have more a variety of scenes to be the options and make use with Max, which helps gain experience in this editing system. However, I found the work is not that good as my imagines through we finalized it. Firstly, it looks a bit messy — the signs are not clear enough, and the composing overall is not that simple. Besides, the videos are not uniform, some of them are not in the similar mode as others (such as the pace, the filter, camera angle…), which causes a bit disharmonious overall. Also, I think we can make better background music to match the videos. To improve our work, we should recompose the structure in presentation mode, and create relevant music for that. We should make a clearer instructions for audience to understand and operate.