Process: Non Linear Story

It began with sketches, as does everything here. My initial idea was to have the user be in a voyeuristic setting, looking around someone's desk and messing with their things. Some of my initial concepts were far too out of reach given my actionscript knowledge, but my final animation still retains a few of the same ideas and concepts. Overall, I learned that it's important to "dream big" so that the final product ends up being more dynamic than something that simply satisfies the constraints of the assignment.

My first iteration explored this idea of voyeurism, but in a very static and somewhat confusing way. The cursor is a pencil, and as it mouses over various parts of the environment, the respective videos play. On mouseout, these videos stop, so that the animation is at once static and dynamic - stills and moving image, depending on the user and how they interact with the piece. This fragments the story, and turns it into a series of images that transition on mouseover -- I think, adding to the stop-frame aesthetic of the initial animation. It was bizarre the way I added sounds, however. The idea was that as I moused-over more and more, the drawing sound with build, so that the amount of cursor play with the piece controlled how intense the sound got. Users don't understand how this works though, as I wasn't explaining to them where the sounds were coming from, or how they were being activated. This made it problematic and frustrating, as when most people played with it, it got to the "crazy" state with sounds getting extremely intense, and most just wanted to close it to shut it up. I thought this acoustic experimentation was interesting, but perhaps not right for the assignment.  I also added a rough version of a drawing function in actionscript that allowed the user to add their own commentary or images on top of the existing narrative. I didn't give users a way to erase this though, so it obscured videos they wanted to watch, and they had no way of ridding the screen of it. Also, there were some bugs in the interface, like how the cursor connected from where the last line was made to where a new one was being made, and also, how the lines appeared always in the top right first, not where the cursor was pointed.

So for my final, I tried to resolve these functionality issues, so that the sounds had more of a concrete basis for existing. The record serves as the controller for my music, and the pencil serves as the controller for my "drawing" sound effect. The eraser now allows the user to clear the canvas once they've filled it with drawings, and the envelope contains the videos, so the user can toggle them on and off. Overall, the goal was to make the environment more dynamic and more manageable for the user, so that they wont get frustrated as quickly. Hopefully it's working better!