Sound Effects for Major Studio
61 sound effects / collages were created during the process.
Tools: Reason and Pro Tools.
click here to download
Sound Clips
AS 3.0 and XML Integration
The AS 3.0 code written for XML integration.
Pulling the data for Water Time Line by clicking each year.
Click here to take a look at the SWF file.
Click here to download the original files
The individual role for the Screen group
1. Initial Group Proposal
Research
Researched the general environmental issues, and narrowed it down to the specific problems, identified the long-term / short-terms goals for the project.
Visualization
Produced the graphic visuals to showcase the ideas and the approaches for the presentation.
Presentation
Outlined key points and the concept.
2. Research on IAC business
Research
Researched on Media & Advertising section of IAC businesses: Ask.com, Citysearch, Evite, Insider Pages, Bloglines, iwon, Excite, My Way, Smiley Central and Zwinky. Observed their background information, pros & cons, and possible database for the website.
3. Group Meetings
Ideation / Finalizing the concept
Briefly participated on conceptualizing the project.
4. Visualization of the Project
Motion Graphics
Created motion graphics video to convey the look & feel of the project for the first final presentation.
5. Final Presentation
Motion Graphics
Created / edited motion graphics video based on the new concept after the first critique, and the video shows the steps of interaction between the wall and its visitor.
Week 07 - IAC business, Media & Advertising
Ask.com
Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday natural language. Ask.com was the first commercial question-answering search engine for the World Wide Web. On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character was disassociated with Ask.com. Since the name change, the site resembles the
Ask.com companies
Within Ask.com, the company owns country specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask For Kids.
Traffic
The combined traffic to these web sites places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US.
AskEraser
It allows users to opt-out from tracking of search queries, IP and cookie values. They also vowed to erase this data after 18 months if the AskEraser option is not set.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
RSS feeds
Citysearch
Citysearch is a local online search service, providing information on businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and other professional services in cities throughout the United States. Visitors to Citysearch's local city guides will find contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews for the businesses listed.
In 1999, Citysearch acquired the competing Sidewalk.com website from Microsoft, and merged the two sites together.
Citysearch has been recently criticized for their alleged tampering of user submitted ratings and reviews.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews
Evite
Evite is a social-planning website for creating, sending, and managing online invitations. It was launched in 1998. The website is a free, advertisement-supported service.
Party planning tools
Party Budget Estimator, Party Checklist, Drink Calculator, Party Menus + Recipes
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
User interactive party planning tools
Insider Pages
Insider Pages is an online local search company that aggregates consumer reviews on neighborhood merchants. The company has over 600,000 reviews of local merchants around the country.
In press coverage, the company has distanced itself from other social networking companies that target the "YouTube generation" by arguing that it serves a very different demographic: young and middle-aged families who own homes in urban and suburban areas.
After laying off 2/3 of their total staff in January 2007, they were later acquired by CitySearch in March 2007.
Best known features
Multiple reviews per business, "Best of" lists, "Insider Advice", Mapping capabilities, "Helpful" / "Not Helpful" / "Must Read" markings
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
reviews, lists, maps
Bloglines
Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator.
Features
On July 23, 2007, Bloglines released an iPhone version of their site.
It offers an application programming interface that can be used to write software that can read feeds, search its database of feed entries, and ping the service when a blog has been updated. beta site more on features
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
RSS feeds, mobile connectivity
iwon
iwon is a free casual game site and web portal that offers the chance to win cash and prizes through online games and ad links.
Activities on the website earn entries into daily, weekly, monthly cash sweepstakes and other giveaways. For example, performing an internet search earns 30 coins and clicking a link earns five. Entries earned are automatic and are limited to 100 per day. The site is most known for awarding one prize of $1 million annually.
In October 2007, they announced that they had given out $70,320,450 in prizes to more than 275,976 winners.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
Games
Excite
Excite is an Internet portal, and as one of the "dotcoms" of the 1990s.
It resembles other search engines, but it offers customizable menus according to the user's needs.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
RSS Feed
My Way
My Way is a web portal offering a number of news, shopping, e-mail and web services.
It has partnered with the Internet's leading search providers - Google, Ask.com, Yahoo! and LookSmart - to feature the world's best search engine along with our full portal offering...all without banners, pop-ups, video ads, direct marketing and privacy concerns.
Customizable user interface resembles Excite.com. It offers browser tool bar which is considered as a spyware.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
RSS Feed
Smiley Central
Smiley Central is a website which offers free-add-on program to a web browser - which allows users to input smiley faces emoticon on IMs, Emails & Blogs.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
Image archives of smiley faces
Zwinky
Zwinkies are customizable social avatars that are part of the MyWeb Searchbar on computers running Windows. A user creates a non-animated cardboard-like character (a Zwinky) to represent himself or herself in any networking site or blog that supports Zwinkies. When users change the appearance of said Zwinkies, all sites in which that avatar is currently displayed will update accordingly.
Zwinky is currently advertised on social networking sites such as MySpace, along with television shows and networks which target young audiences.
MyWeb Searchbar is considered as spyware.
Possible database / User interactivity for the wall:
Customizable avatar
Week 06 - Group Proposal
General Environmental Problems:
Reducing pollution
Preserving wilderness
Protecting endagered species
save the ocean
Global warming
Consumption of natural resources
Problems:
1. Endangered species
Distance between human and nature
Industrialized cities
Ex: Coral reefs effect the population of marine life.
Goal:
Educate
Appreciation of nature
Raise public awareness of preservation
Provide indirect experience
Long term goal:
Familiarize
Replenish the nature back to its optimal state
2. Farm raised animals / fish
Lack of knowledge
Issues with public health
Possible link to cancer
Goal:
Educate consumers / government
Alter the purchases
Long term goal:
Eventually, change health regulations on farm raised animals
3. Water pollution
Danger to public health (globally)
Danger to the species living underneath
Ex: issues with environment / promotion of algene water bottle
typhoid, respiratory, skin diseases
Goal:
Awareness
Long term goal:
Extinction of polluted water related diseases
Approach:
1. Data visualize the information (possiblity of using user input database)
2. Narrative to educate the public in an efficient way
3. Virtual environment to provide indirect experience of nature (Endangered species)
Week 06 - Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village".
Bibliography :
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951)
The "mosaic approach" to writing a book. Each essay begins with a newspaper or magazine article or an advertisement, followed by McLuhan's analysis. Aesthetic considerations as well as on the implications behind the imagery and text
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
A pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology.
Reveals how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization, which in turn has profound ramifications for social organization.
Movable Type :
The invention of movable type greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enabled cultural and cognitive changes that had already been taking place since the invention and implementation of the alphabet, by which McLuhan means phonemic orthography.
New technologies exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits, which in turn affects social interactions.
The Global Village :
Electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.
The visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. Humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base."
Understanding Media (1964)
A study in media ecology. A medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
"The medium is the message" :
The form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived, creating subtle change over time.
Media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study; he said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself.
Light bulb : "A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." It enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. The light bulb as a medium without any content.
All media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual's understanding of it.
Different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium.
A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.
This concentration on the medium itself is the focal point of "the medium is the message".
From "message" to "mass age", "mess age", and "massage"
The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Quentin Fiore was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new one which is said to have been a printing error.
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)
Adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium.
"The technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth [century]", brought on by the adoption of fixed points of view and perspective by typography, while "[t]he technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century", brought on by the bard abilities of radio, movies and television.
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)
Joyce's Wake is claimed to be a gigantic cryptogram which reveals a cyclic pattern for the whole history of man through its Ten Thunders.
Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.
Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. Last thunder = turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
From Cliché to Archetype (1970)
A collaboration with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson.
Explorations, with Edmund Carpenter (1950s)
Week 05 - Presentation from "Screen" group
BBCi and Steve Rogers
BBCi Vs. Google
1. Structure
BBCi : Google = publicly owned organization funded by government : business aiming to develop a product that will please individuals
2. Goal
BBCi : Google = tries to maintain a strong sense of local community and social reponsibility : strives to design for thebest reslts, while remaining politically and socially neutral
Steve Rogers and BBCi
He studied transportation design then moved into industrial design and got a job at Philips Electronics. At the height of dot-com boom in 2000, Razorfish offered him to lead product development team. But unfortunately, the crash of dot-com came too soon, he stayed with Razorfish for a year, then moved to BBCi.
BBCi's initial request to Steve Rogers
"Move from monologue to dialogue"
Moving from an old world broadcast environment, where you're talking at the audience, to a two-way dialogue with an audience.
(comments, email, live chats, message boards)
Steve's attempt in enabling interaction between people and BBCi
1. Understand the audience, for user centered design
2. Creating safe zone, fully moderated chat rooms for kids and self moderated chat rooms for adults
Major changes to the Homepage
1. Anchor point: a toolbar consistent throughout the site, as a browser or a widget. Sense of trust.
2. Graphical language: Trust worthy, professional, but engaging and intimate. Personal promotional images.
3. Digital patina: frequent visits pump up the intensity of colors, faded colors are used for the less visited sites. Personalized website.
Week 05 - Proposal
Problems / Needs:
The Root of the Problem:
1. People who have guns can kill people
Guns, guns,.. Lots of Guns. There are way too many guns out available to public. Guns kill people? People kill people?
Columbine, Virginia Tech.. 46 notable school shootings, from 1966 to February 2008.
There had been 5 shootings in 2008, as of now. More info
2. Media
Media ranging from movies, music, and games influence public to become indifferent about violence. Sometimes media glorifies violence, and it can have great impact on our youth.
Movies:
Guns, Lots of guns.
Video games:
3. NRA
The National Rifle Association, or NRA, is a non-profit group for the promotion of firearm ownership rights, marksmanship, firearm safety, and the protection of hunting and self-defense in the United States, established in New York in 1871 as the American Rifle Association.
The NRA sponsors firearm training courses and events featuring shooting skills and sports.
Also the NRA is sometimes said to be the single most powerful non-profit organization in the United States. It bases its political activity on the principle that gun ownership is a civil liberty protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and claims to be the oldest continuously operating civil liberties organization in the United States. According to its website, the NRA has "more than four million members."
Laws to limit individual handgun sales to one a month: Blocked by NRA
Laws to ban semi-automatic weapons that can be converted to automatic fire: Blocked by NRA
Observation:
Between 1994 and 1999, there were 220 school associated violent events resulting in 253 deaths - - 74.5% of these involved firearms. Handguns caused almost 60% of these deaths.
In 1998-99 academic year, 3,523 students were expelled for bringing a firearm to school. This is a decrease from the 5,724 students expelled in 1996-97 for bringing a firearm to school.
The National School Boards Association estimates that more than 135,000 guns are brought into U.S. schools each day.
America is losing too many children to gun violence. Between 1979 and 2001, gunfire killed 90,000 children and teens in America.
In one year, more children and teens died from gunfire than from cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, and HIV/AIDS combined.
American kids are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined.
Every day, more than 80 Americans die from gun violence.
Goal:
We need to create a campaign for awareness [1] to effectively persuade the public away from guns, [2] to educate the youth while media's corrupting their brain with guns and violence, and [3] to expose deeds of NRA and laws preventing abolishment of guns.
User:
1. Younger generation who is easily influenced with media
2. The Parents
3. Public who is not aware of the issue
4. Gun advocates / NRA
Solution:
1. Educate public with visuals (easy enough to understand),
2. Emphasize the negative effects and fatal incidents,
3. More accessible information (interactive online websites),
4. Public display / Art installations
5. Campaign videos (like truth videos)
6. Chris Rock's suggestion
“Everybody is talking about gun control. Got to control the guns. Fuck, that…. No, I think we need some bullet control. I think every bullet should cost five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars for a bullet. Know why? Cos if a bullet cost five thousand dollars, there’d be no more innocent by-standers. That’d be it. Some guy’d be shot, you’d be all ‘Damn, he must’ve done something, he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass!’ And people’d think before they shot someone ‘Man I will blow your fucking head off, if I could afford it. I’m gonna get me a second job, start saving up, and you a dead man. You’d better hope I don’t get no bullets on lay-away!’ And even if you get shot you wouldn’t need to go to the emergency room. Whoever shot you’d take their bullet back. ‘I believe you got my property?’ That’s right.”
Interface:
1. Online video campaign
2. Interactive websites with visuals diagrams, polls, information, and links
3. Public display / Art installation
Precedents:
1. http://www.thetruth.com/
An effective method to create public awareness against corporations
Alpay's proposal
Week 04 - Reflection of Reading: Protocol
Chapter 2: Form
"Protocols are an entire formal apparatus."
Repressive use of media vs. Emacipatoy use of media
A special relationship between computers and the human brain. It is a logical step to replace organic sense organs with computerized ones.
"Cybernetic system['s] virtues are balance, self-regulation, circularity and control."
"Memex, a nonhierarchical, associative machine for inputting and outputting information."
"Web seems to mirror several of the key characteristics o the rhisome: the ability o any node to be connected to any other node, the rule of multiplicity, the ability to splinter off or graft on any point, the rejection of a "deep structure," and so forth."
"The Net is not narrative-based, or time-based. The answer [to its magnetic power] is in the form."
continuity
"Internet is able to use the application layer to create a compelling, intuitive experience for the user. This is the secret f continuity."
"Continuity creates this pleasurable, fluid experience for the user."
Techniques of continuity
Conceal the source
Eliminate dead links
Green means go
True identity
Remove barriers
Continuity between media types
Prohibition against low resolution
Highest speed possible
Prohibition on crashes
Prohibition on dead media
Eliminate mediation
Feedback loops
Anonymous but descriptive
Record: it has its roots in the ability of physical objects to store informaton.
Object: it is the digital economy's basic unit. it exists only upon use
Protocol: it is a set of rules that defines a technical standard. it is a type of object. it is a universal description language for objects it is a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms.
"The Internet is a delicate dance between control and freedom."
Browser
HTML: it is the Net's universal graphic design protocol since 1990. it designates the arangement of objects in a browser.
Fonts
"All unnecessary barriers beteen the user and the cotent must be removed. All content must be placed as close to the front door as possible. Often this means that the tree-like hierarchy of computer operating ystems mustbe subverted, in favor of a more flat interface."
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