project four: movie night!

At the end of the project, Denise requested that we somehow string together all six of our moments into one "thing." Then we all gathered in Burns Auditorium (conveniently located next to our studio space), and had a screening night. It looked like this, but without the illustrious Modern Dog in attendance, and the audience was approximately 90% smaller.


(Image of Burns Auditorium from AIGA Raleigh's Flickr stream; the photo was taken during a lecture by Modern Dog hosted by the chapter at NCSU.)

Denise brought popcorn and other snacks, and we had a wonderful time. Many of my classmates put together very humorous takes of their moments, and it was fascinating to see what before had been very isolated and disparate moments, put together in different ways.

Here is what I showed that night:

Six Moments: Interface Moments Compilation... from Liese Zahabi on Vimeo.

I structured my compilation to save the stronger two pieces for the end, and because we were viewing this as an audience, I wanted to use some music (lest we all sit there in silence as my moments rolled by). I chose these two pieces by Yann Tiersen from the film Amelie...they capture the mood of my moments.

And, here is the promised reflection on my last three moments. For the first three, I purposefully kept my visual language abstract, and instead of having an A-HA moment and then making that vision, I tried to keep my ideas loose and malleable. For the most part, as I crafted those three interfaces, I had no idea where the visuals were going to go...a lot of it was trial and error.

I was very enamored with the idea of using the motivation of playful, and spent a lot of time thinking about different attributes of experience I could pair with it. When it came time to start making, instead of following my own lead and keeping things abstract and loose, I stumbled upon the idea of using a paper doll, and just could not let that go. Wrapped up in making a little world (three times over within the three different modes of media), I put my head down and didn't come up for air until the critique session.

Worst of all, instead of crafting three concise little moments, I created three sprawling monstrosities...three very involved and convoluted worlds, which I could not even satisfactorily explain to myself.

However, as much as I feel I "flopped" (wah-waah) on the end of this project, the flop has been very illuminating for me, bringing to light several flaws in my process and form making. I am still digesting and ruminating...and probably will be for quite a while.