Assignment 4 Blog Post 1

For our final project, we decided to further develop out previous idea of how aural and visual components can influence the tone of a scene. For this iteration however, we went in with the goal of creating something that was a lot more ambiguous, and did not want to dictate the experience viewers would have like we did with our last assignment. We also wanted to further explore the idea of interactivity and modularity, and create an experience that was unique depending on who was interacting with our project. To do this we decided to try and make all the components of our project modular, and give viewers the choice of transitioning between the different states of the video whenever they saw fit, rather than restricting them to a linear story like we did last time. A big inspiration for this assignment was the dynamic musical scores in video games.

A series of games that showcase this very effectively is the Super Mario franchise, which transitions the tone of it’s music based on where the player is in the game; if the player goes under water the music will reflect this. If they fly up into the sky the music will adapt. All while maintaining the same melodic characteristics and structure, which makes it sound like one big evolving piece of music. An even better specific example is the 1998 game Banjo Kazooie, which does the same thing, but changes the theme of it’s levels based on much more locations; the song stays the same, but the tone changes depending on which area of the level you are in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JAcswUJAFE). It is a really cool technique that helps the levels in the game all feel unique and interconnected.

This is what we want to achieve for our final product, albeit on a much smaller scale. These games usually implement “loops” into the structures of the songs so that the song won’t end while the player is still exploring (Young pg 8). This might be something we need to consider with our music depending on the length of our finished footage.

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/rws_etd/document/get/ouhonors1340112710/inline

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