For this critique, I looked over Justin and Shane's project, Facade.
I admittedly chose the project because its title immediately drew me in. The term "facade" has always been an attractive word in a literary sense, because it hints of misconceptions, or double-meanings. In other words, a facade can provided a literary gold mine.
Onto the project itself, I found each page highly attractive in its presentation, although sometimes a little draining on my computer's resources. My computer was not the top of the line when I purchased it in 2005, but it nonetheless has performed well over the last 4 years. I can only guess that since I haven't downloaded the most recent Adobe Flash Player (v.10), the presentation appeared a little jerkier than normal for me. Unfortunately, for projects such as this that are presented in such a manner, technological restrictions such as what I described always apply.
Plugins aside, the appearance of the project was very stimulating. The pictures altered from black and white to vibrant color, and connected to the text in a manner that made it intellectually fun. There is nothing more entertaining to an English major than being presented a word puzzle, a picture and then the assignment of assigning meaning.
Some pictures were simpler than others. While one was labeled blood, the picture itself depicted spattered blood over stone. In another instance, the text described a brief court scene, and the picture was a colorful Lego scene, complete with a pizza chef and Star Wars droid sitting on either side of the hammer-wielding judge. This nonsensical image stood out from the rest, especially with the dark theme that ran most of the show up until that point.
However, a few of the pages were inhibited by their presentation rather than augmented. For example, the typewriter scene was a little harsh on the eyes, and took time for the words to complete.
Two pages over, the falling text scene also took a long time for all the words to fall into place, and the presentation was more distracting than entertaining.
Still, to me, the most fun pages were the ones that combined both images and text. It made the experience most tantalizing, and as mentioned before I found myself assigning meanings to the images and text as I clicked through them one by one.
Excellent show - not perfect, but then again, perfection isn't (and shouldn't) always be the goal.
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Thanks for the critique!
ReplyDeleteRegarding the performance, everything was done with DHTML effects as opposed to Flash, so it probably made it even more draining on CPU resources than Flash would have been (since DHTML and JavaScript will really tax older CPU's, browser memory, etc.).
I agree with you about things like the typewriter effect and the falling text. I actually slowed the typewriter effect down a bit in response to another critique that it went by too quickly (although aside from that, I think admittedly the moving text itself makes it a bit hard to read), but it's definitely tough finding the right balance between anything animated going too quickly, and being too slow).
Generally speaking I guess that's also the larger challenge, that balance between the fun or "artsy" side of the presentation, and the text itself.
Thanks again!