October 4, 2010

Combined Channels - Final Deliverable


For the combined channels assignment, I was tasked with using my type channel (which was digital) and combining it with the image channel (which was not). As you can see, the last result was, at the least to say, nothing special. This project gave me a lot of frustration, for several reasons.

First part of my aggravation was my own doing. Because my text was digital, I for some reason thought that there wasn't any real way to switch it to a static form. Being the kenetic, time-based type that it was, I thought that I would keep the type as an animation, and the image channel as the element that changed mediums. Kind of like a football game, type was the home team and image was the visitor (that's about the extent of my football knowledge, too). Anyway. I tried to scan in , digitally render, and place my drawing from the previous project into the flash document that was already existing. This did not work well, because the previous flash was white text, and making the drawings white (and subsequently cohesive) made them practically invisible. Not to mention, the level of detail that was in the drawings did not translate well into the flash file, making things a little hard to make out.

Having the text and the images run simultaneously didn't work out in the final. I STILL made the text move too fast, and it's impossible to view both channels at the same time, leaving the viewer confused and having to watch it multiple times to get all the information. Additionally, compared to the water-coloured pictures from the original image channel, these digital rendering make the drawings look really...bad.

The second part of this project that I had problems with was the technical aspect of what I chose to do. I kind of mentioned the frustration with the digital medium already, but more specifically, I guess it's the labour-intensive, not-quite-rewarding experience with Adobe Flash that made me want to rip my hair out. The best part of making an assignment in Flash is being halfway through with a project, importing some images, seeing that it looks terrible, and knowing that you don't really have the time to start the whole thing over. So instead, you spend the rest of your time (which is a lot) working on a project that–at best–will be mediocre. I know I'm whining, and this project was just incredibly unsatisfying. It's something that I will not want to ever put in a portfolio, and I don't think any amount of fixing and tweaking could salvage this thing. Narrative in general seems to be a class that I'm just not grasping. < /grump>

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