Narrative Visual Perspective in Digital Media

Splash Page

One of our assignments in Digital Media had us revisit Pro Tools and Reason to create film scores to be potentially used in our narratives for our elective class. But really, I just made sub-par tracks. The intent was to use both Reason and Pro Tools together to combine recorded audio and synthesized audio. These are the three pieces of music I made. I was very rushed and didn’t have a lot of time to make these, so I’m not too proud of them… though in hindsight I do kind of dig the first one. I don’t like the second or third one very much.

We were also tasked during this time to create a splash screen for our website. We had just learned a bit of jQuery and used it to create a dynamic teaser page for our website. Here’s a snippet of some of the code that was used to write this:

I chose an image I’d taken over the summer on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe of a recently departed distant storm across the lake. I chose an instrumental of the song “To Sheila” by my favorite band, The Smashing Pumpkins, from the album Adore— an album I’d recently gotten into at the time. The audio clip I’d chosen was ripped from a YouTube video and it doesn’t sound right at all. If you’re curious, this is the instrumental I downloaded. It’s allegedly authentic, but I have a feeling it’s a recreation. Here’s the actual song.

Multi-Layered Wood Art

The best thing we did this unit, by far, was the multi-layered art project. We did it as partners— I partnered with Niko Jokhadze. We had a couple choices on what medium of art we were doing, and we ultimately decided to do wood art. Essentially, we’d design art to be laser cut into wood across multiple layers, enabling us to use a 3 dimensional field. We actually struggled at first to decide on what exactly we were going to do, since we have very different interests. But we decided upon doing a chess board with game pieces. At one point we had planned on doing some sort of dichotomy between physical game pieces (chess, Uno, Battleship, etc.) and electronic games pieces (Tetris, Pacman, Space Invaders, etc.). But we dropped the electronic games thing entirely and chose to just do a checkered board with game pieces on it.

The hardest part, without a doubt, was designing the sequence of layers— that is, which squares dropped on each layer and what order it would happen in. I had some plan to make the “black squares” much deeper than the “white squares” to show the difference between the two in a colorless final product, but it wasn’t really worth it. Still, trying to make the squares fall down at different points was tricky and confusing. The first photo on the left shows an example of what one layer looked like.

Multiple game pieces would appear per layer, and simultaneously, other squares would begin to drop, creating a staggered grid. It was really tricky to visualize, as you can probably imagine, as every line we drew ended up being a laser incision. The pictures on the left are for display— the actual file used a much more narrow stroke for fine precision on the laser cutter, which meant that even when zoomed in fully, the lines were very hard to see.

It got tedious trying to figure out when layers were dropping, why they were dropping, and if they could drop at all. You can also see a checkerboard pattern on the edge that we attempted— it didn’t look quite as good as it probably could have, but it still looked really fascinating. And overall, I’m really proud of the designing that went into all of this.

Once we printed it, the pieces ended up looking far better than I think either of us anticipated. As I said, it was a hassle making it, but once we printed it, all the individual game pieces looked really dang good. I thought the way the board that we created the cutouts from ended up looking great— like those sets you can buy to craft a model plane and such.

You can see a bunch of pictures from the process of constructing the final product with glue. And while I have never been a fan of arts and crafts, especially the dreadful curse of using glue, it ended up looking so good that it didn’t even phase me.

And at last, here is the final product. All 12 layers in their fresh-cut glory. For the most part, it matches up with everything we planned, but there weer just a couple changes made along the way. We named it “Tabletop Frenzy”— a name so tacky we just couldn’t pull ourselves to shake it. Enjoy.

   

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