Narrative in Sound and Motion: insights learned

What's been interesting is that towards the end of this project a new way to bring everything together emerged. Originally I thought I would put all the videos, sounds and narration into a view-of-a-garden type interface or maybe looking out of a shed window. However when I was thinking about the music it struck me, that we are all like little plants ourselves and how we need someone like a gardener to take care of us. That was when I thought of the song "All you need is love" by the Beatles and decided to play the videos on the surface of a persons heart. Just like in growing plants, even the smallest act of kindness can help a person flourish become confident and a moment of love can give meaning to a life (that line I heard in Blood Diamond)

Above all, the process of bringing everything together in this stage of the project, using the sound effects, narration and videos has opened up a whole world of possibility. An interface like this is a way to bring everything together and not only that, there is more power available in communication using all of these medias in one module. I have a new appreciation for advertisements on the TV, for title sequences at the movies and documentaries made for screen. I think if I could do anything differently, I would think about just exactly what I wanted to communicate right from the beginning, now that I know how to harness (in a beginning way) each part of the whole.

Flash is an excellent tool to be able to bring the mediums of speech, sound and music together into one seamless unit (a few screen grabs of the project in the build stages):




I think user testing could have been a huge part of this project to get the interface really singin. From the feedback I got I could make tweaks to make the user experience much better. I think it would be fun to do this. I need to work on image placement, sound quality, taking some of the sounds off and replacing them with better ones etc. I have 5 roommates so they will be able to see if they can break it too. User feedback is so important to getting this thing to a point where it makes sense. Otherwise, what is the point of making it if people can't enjoy it?