This project focuses on designing a website and implementing interactive elements within it. The website is made for a 30 minute film festival that features a new award-winning film each year. It also archives stills from films that previously won awards for their cinematography. As for the design of the website itself, it focuses on delivering artistic content with simplicity, not only for aesthetic purposes -which are influenced by minimalism- but also to avoid distracting the viewer from the content of the film or the images. As for the experience of the user, i designed the website in what i think would be a user-friendly way, and one that would only have the key elements for the purpose of the website; the winning film and some background on the festival. In order to do that i decided to go with a plain-ish look as much as possible. I didn't want to have anything that was useless on either of the pages, so I just decided to design a logo for the website using an image and typography. The spacing between all the images and the film were also something crucial to the idea, where i decided they should all be similar across the page. Moreover, it was important to me to place the stills' column a little bit higher from the level of the film so that the scrolling would be more obvious to the viewers. Moreover, i used so many resources as a guideline. The documents shared by Professor Sarah on the drive were my first go-to, until i had different ideas in mind which then lead me to look things up online and learn more about them on my own. This was in fact one of the most exciting projects i have worked on, especially after experiencing the feeling of being able to make the code work.
For this project, as a team, Gangina and I decided to create our story around a girl with a mild mental disorder. The purpose of our story is not only to raise awareness about mental health issues, but also to push people into being more compassionate with others as they would never really know the reality of their world/what they're going through. We aimed to make it unclear as the story starts so that people would kind of get what's going on from the visuals and then get surprised at the end of the story as they get to know she has schizophrenia. The theme revolves around un-clairty as the story starts, which is why we start the illustrations in black and white and then start adding more colors with each pannel (as you get to know a bigger part of the story). Also, in order to indicate what's not seen by everyone (a hallucination for example), we decided to make the colors in a recurring form. As for the team work, it was me that drew the illustrations and came up with ideas on how to visualize the thoughts and hallucinations, and i also wrote the script, while Gangina was responsible for most of the coding part. However, both of us worked together throughout it all, and there where times where we figured out things together in both the coding and creative aspect. This project was made out of so many sleepless nights, it took us a lot of effort to reach this point. it would've been way better if we had had more time to work on it and add more illustrations and interactivity, but it was honestly really hard to think creatively as well given this short period of time. for what i think works and what not, i believe the recurring images add to the effect we intially aimed for, as well as the color-changing background.
Nesf is a project that mixes the feel of an interview with a podcast, producing an audio that talks about cultural intermixture. In this project two girls talk about their Arab-Latino origins and how that affects them in terms of food, family and more. I believe the experience we were striving to create was to make people realize how we're all more or less the same, regardless of race. A way of implementing that would be the illustration in the background with two different women of two different identities. A bedouin woman seemed to generally imply that she's Arab without specifically pointing out one Arab country. And then we chose Frida Kahlo to represent the other Latino half, seeing that she has very Hispanic-representative features and a high presence in the Latino culture as well. Also there are parts where we invited Layla and Matilda (our subjects) to say words that are of the same meaning and sound very similar. For instance, as the audio begins you can hear them say hola and hala, which are both hello in Spanish and Arabic. Moreover, closer to the end they start listing Arabic words that gave origin to some Spanish vocabulary. This is to indicate how extremely similar some words in Arabic and Spanish are, and hence how that is part of the whole similarity between both cultures. We also chose to add very famous classical Arabic songs in between their responses to refer to their Arabic origins. Dani was the one with the initial idea for this project and as we worked along we developed it together. I was the one who recorded the audio, while he edited it and put it together. As for coding and the collage/illustration, it was I who worked on them. However, essentially, we helped each other all along. I helped Dani with the songs, while he helped me with the design idea, and specifically the Arab world and Latin America maps in the design. He's also the one that came up with the title design. Essentially, this project was one of the most enjoyable ones I worked on, and I believe I'm very much satisfied with the outcome especially when thinking about my initial expectations. If i were to change anything about it i believe it would only be adding more to the illustration to fill in more of the black space in the background.
Our Video project is one that addresses the whole dilemma around Battle of the Bands and how it almost got cancelled making everyone freak out. We wanted it to be more interesting and due to the humorous nature of our group, we came to a conclusion that Suzan should be a diva that steals the show, obviously because she was a band member as well. Humor was aimed for as one of our elements, which was both addressed in the production and post production of the video. I tried to take shots of both Suzan and Savion together as a team while performing and then zooming in on her to indicate the unimportance of Savion. I aimed to do that in other shots too such as in the interview with Hot Wok where I moved the camera from Aaron's face midway as he talked, and focused on Suzan instead as she took over. There were also the shots where Suzan pretended to yawn while watching other people's performance, and the one where she was annoyed with the fire alarm at the very end. So basically i was responsible for shooting everything on the day of the event, and I organized the video files by naming everything and putting them under categories to make things easier for the editor. Suzan helped suggest some shots and the questions we asked our interviewees, she also obviously performed both on and off stage, got all the equipment and entirely worked on the editing/post production of the video. I helped her in the final final tweaks such as the final shot, captions, and syncing sound that was out of sync with the video. Ben was responsible for recording sound with the mic on shooting day and he entirely designed and created the website. Tori was not able to be there on the shoot day, she attempted to edit half of the video for Suzan to work on later and finish, however, it wasn't really appealing for both me and Suzan or helpful for Suzan to take over, so she just started working from scratch. Honestly i feel like this is such a successful video, it was really funny for me even after watching it for so many times, and I believe it successfully portrayed the persona we were envisioning for Suzan's character. I think the website is as well perfectly made, in the sense that it is very user friendly and accommodating to those who want to specifically watch an interview with someone they like/care about. The color scheme also fit really well with the whole mood of the concert, and nothing felt like an extra element that was out of place. I think the outcome is essentially very rewarding.