So here is just a quick recap of some of the things I have been getting up to with my assignments. Basically the past couple of weeks I have been concentrating on the essay. I'm am rather proud of it actually and I hate to say it but yes, Jason, you are right and I feel as though by doing it in the flash form I have become a little more confident with my flash abilities. This is not to say that I am now in any way advanced at it, but I feel more comfortable with navigating the layout of the program and I have been having fun with using simple keyframe animation elements in my essay.
My essay is a postmodern identity map. What this means is that I am using postmodern techniques to map out my identity, as I believe identity to be a rather postmodern thing in itself. After our discussion on creative non-fiction stories about people that I know, I have taken a few key people in my life and subtly told my own story through them. As we discussed, some of these people are very close to me (eg. my mother), other's used to be very close to me but now I no longer know (eg. ex boyfriend) and some are meant to be close to me but sort of aren't (eg. my sister) and also other strange combinations such as people who I don't know but am obsessed with (boyfriend's ex girlfriends) and people who just one tiny meeting made a huge impact on my life (highschool days). I hope that the stories show my close or distant relationships with these people, however this is not the only element to this essay as there is the element of it being a map of my identity. The image of the map is shown quite literally in many places within the imagery of the essay.
When i say that my identity is postmodern I mean this in terms of identity being a very non-linear, fluid and unfixed thing - it is quite difficult to describe ones own whole self, as there is just so much all connected together, this is why I chose to chanel it through something to make it easier to digest, such as mapping ones identity through the people around ones life, instead of just mapping ones identity as a whole, as that would just be a little over chaotic. Also, in keeping with this theme, the image of the 'web' is one seen more than once in my essay. In fact the main frame page looks like a web spanning outwards from the centre 'self' and people are connected to me via this web. The web also surfaces in the words themselves.
The stories aren't long and are not meant to 'tell' the viewer what my relationship is with the person but rather each story is an approximate ten minute slice of life that I shared with each of these people, this slice doesn't not even have to be a dramatic or life changing event in my life, but rather an ordinary event, as I believe the most important aspects of the relationship will be shown through these events. I am currently unaware of the word count of my identity however I think it is well over the minimum requirements. I have more than 20 html pages for this assignment. Don't worry, hopefully they will not be boring! I have tried to make them fun!
Considering I have little knowledge of flash, I tried to make the most of what I did know. I did not use any flash files souced from the net, and I know that is very naughty because you want us to 'mine' files, but I needed to keep within my own knowledge range to keep my sanity and to make sure I didn't break my files. Also I would argue that because of this, I did more work by creating everything from scratch. But that is the point of this essay, because when you look at it, everything has a hand-made quality to it and a lot of it is little animations that I could not have found anywhere else as it was just a matter of drawing them into each keyframe, this is done to make it look more like it is being drawn in front of your eyes (you will understand what I mean when you see the essay, I think).
Please remember to have speakers on when playing my essay. Music plays a big part in most of the main pages. All music was created by me either singing or on a keyboard (piano, not computer) which is pretty good considering I've never played piano in my life. None of the 'tunes' are plagiarised from anywhere, I just made them up in my head as I was going along. As I do not have swish programs I used the windows sound recorder to record these things using the free microphone that came with my webcam. This means there are limited effects on the sounds (except for one usage of 'reverse' woohoo!), also giving it a hand-made low-tech effect.
The same also goes for the jumping still image movies that are through out the essay. As you can tell I LOVE these things and they were created with windows movie maker and made to look 'old', so also very low tech.
The copyright thing also goes for pictures, these are all from my private collections. I did not take any of these pictures from the internet (with most pictures you can tell this because I am in the picture), and all the hand drawn pictures were drawn by me.
A lot of the pictures are photoshopped such as the picture on the 'mattmainpage' and on the 'danpage' where you can see red lines running over the faces. This is the result of scanned in road maps of where I live. I then traced along the roads in red and blue to make them look like veins and placed them over the other images using a series of effects. This takes the 'map' idea quite literally, but I believe is also sufficiently subtle as to not appear over-obvious.
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Because of all this, in a round about way, I am wanting to rethink my folio to make it even cooler with my new-found SKILLZ however I can't think of anything snazzy looking. I would like to use some of the sounds that I made in 'sound recorder' for my folio but I am worried because I have already used them in my essay...
In fact I just tried to put some pictures of my essay into this post but the html just WOULD NOT bloody well agree with blogger but it seems to have worked if it is put in it's own seperate thing (picky) so they are above and you have probably already seen that.
