Friday, December 5, 2008
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About Me
- Ian Tirone
- I have a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. This blog is to document my task of creating a single piece of contemporary art a day for an indefinite number of days. The purpose is TBD.
1 comment:
• overall concept - 8.
I know you entered the project with the intention of delivering what would be normally boring information humorously, and I think it's done tastefully here. The story is clearly a parody of Speed Racer, with three characters exposing the details of car emissions, and the climax of the story ultimately being the monkey telling Speed the horrible truth and him driving to his death.
• overall visual form/narrative quality - 9.
I think that the visual quality is nice-- the people are "cut out" without looking poorly done, and I like that the added drop shadow brings them forward from the foreground. I also think that the dimensionality of the people mixed with the 2D elements is a fun way of making it look "cartoonish". Overall, the bright colors, comic-bookish typography and silly mixes of mediums seem appropriate to the parody you were trying to achieve. Having the characters "annotated" with some additional text also helps the audio to be more understandable.
• rate overall use of duration - 7.
• I think for the most part that the use of duration is good-- it's a 'fast-paced' racing scene without being jarring. However, some of the speaking still felt like it was going by a bit too fast for me. (Especially trying to read the text and keep up with the dialog at the same time.) Particularly during Speed Racer's last words, I think that maybe it would at least benefit by breaking up the sentences with a "breath" so there are pausing points to absorb what's being said. The video doesn't come across as particularly long because everything seems so quick, so I think you could spare a few extra seconds to draw out the dialog a little bit more.
• rate overall use of motion - 8.
The motion is simple, but it does give the feeling of "racing (the way the car moves back and forth slightly) and I think that it becomes even more effective juxtaposed next to the moving background. I like that you panned the characters across the seem-- it seems like it could've easily become boring to panels of them simply frozen, but I think that addition activates the sort of panicked and fast-paced feel of the story.
• rate overall use of transition from - 8.
• Transitions mostly consist of simple, quick cut. The characters seem to drive off the screen quickly and allow another one to enter. I think that it's appropriate (I wouldn't really want to see a more gradual transition because maybe that'd seem too slow). I think the way the characters enter the screen is nicely varied (pops enters from the left, speed from the right, monkey from the bottom, etc). Maybe a little exploration would be nice, but I think I would still like it to happen in the same, fast-paced way in which you're doing it already.
• describe the hierarchy of communication channels (image, text, voice, music, sfx) and their relationships. what makes the mix of channels effective or ineffective?
Image and voice are relating directly to one another: since it's a narrative presented by characters that are actually appearing on screen, the character is being used to aid the audio so we know who's speaking. Text is secondary to all of this and "annotates" the images. I think it's effective, none of the channels are competing with one another. Like I had said before-- I think I still want the audio to be a little slower, or at least "broken up" in terms of a breath between sentences to make it more understandable.
• does this project attempt to break with convention in how it presents information?
I think it's successful in the sense that it delivers the information quickly and in an entertaining manner. Parody is of course, something fairly conventional, but I think the reason for this is that things that are humorous have the tendency to make things more memorable. I know that humor is something you were wanting to explore in the project, and it did make me laugh, so I think that it's a job well done. I think what I need in order to have a little more impact is just a little bit more time to absorb the information. Right now I think the dialog is a bit quick and I'm not remembering what is said after the video's over. Giving a bit of extra time would allow the viewer to be entertained, but also left with the impact of the information you're trying to deliver.
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