last night's expeditions

Well it is the morning before class. seems like ages since we last had class so I’m not quite sure what to expect, will we be doing speeches etc. if we are, I plan to be unplanned anyway. if we do end up doing oral presentations of our essays I want to challenge myself to get up there and talk without a script as I have NEVER done that before, but in this case I am hoping that I have enough to say and have learnt enough to talk without a script, however it's been a couple of weeks since I last looked at my essay so I’ve forgotten all the names of the artists I studied and everything... hah... hmmm...

Moving right along, last night I made a little flash poem and I would like to explain my process here. First I started with making a small movie clip of me with my webcam. I wanted the clip to concentrate on the body and look like I was isolating the arm, so I was swinging my arm around and trying to keep the rest of me as neutral and still as possible (by neutral I mean to almost disappear into the background). I then imported it to flash and turned the alpha down really low to in the 20's. I then strapped myself up with the earpiece off the webcam and turned on windows sound recorder (the only recording device that I have). Getting inspiration from the moving arm, I began to just talk a stream of slow audio, stopping the recorder after every time to give me a second to think of the next one. In this way, it was very very unplanned and 'natural' I suppose. I started to talk about art and digital culture and wondered how my body related to this. I intended for it to sound like a poem in an almost narrator'ish voice (the computer narrator that is). I then imported this over the flash piece, and as expected the audio was a bit longer than the movie clip and I did not want it to start to loop over itself, but it did, and I noticed that it was actually a lot cooler that way, and there is even a part where, because I say the word 'fruit' twice in the audio, a part where the word practically overlaps itself. The timing is just really good and the overlap sounds really nice and fitting and now I couldn't imagine it being any other way.

I wanted to have a text element on the page but wasn't sure how to do it. With the overlapping of the audio I realised I needed to have the words somewhere else on the page so if it wasn't totally understandable in the audio, it could be read. So as the audio is quite slow, I put the lines of the text in at a kind of corresponding level of words per line equal to words that I way before I take a break, if that makes sense... Having these small bunches of words all separate to each other (not on separate layers but a different green box would appear around them... ARGH I can't explain myself properly) this meant I could fiddle with them all individually. So I turned them all into buttons and removed the over states so you cannot see them. I then changed the colours of them all to either red or a variation between white and dark grey. Look out for the one that is both grey AND red ooh! so when you move your mouse around the outsides of the film clip (I was a bit waring of sticking stuff over the clip as I’m sure doing that has completely stuffed up things that I have done in the past - I am not that expert yet, but I might dabble with something like this soon) you will pick up on fractions of the poem.

I then realised it at least needed some other element because it looked rather blaa when you weren't looking for the poem, so I made some tiny little film clips where I just made a mark with the brush then moved it around for a few keyframes so that they looked like they were jiggling around. Some of them turned out looking really interesting, and I only wanted colour in one of them so I switched it from grey to red very briefly to just add a shock of colour. I think they make the page look a lot better than how it was standard.

This page has no links to other pages, I thought about it then realised I wanted it to just stand alone. I might make other poems and link them to this one at a later date... think I should???

I had initially wanted to use this awesome mined file that I had which would have allowed the viewer to control the film clip of my arm with a toggle bar, and be able to move it backwards and forwards, however I have the swf file for it but seem to have delete the fla file for it NOOOOOOOOO beyond that, if I go and find it and download it again I will never figure out how to work it again because the fla file had already been put into one of my own files for me so that I could figure out how to use it. Argh it would have made this piece look so cool :(

This turned out to be quite a big file due to the film clip and long audio elements. The swf is 194kbs, and I don't want to put a preloader on it because I don't want to stuff it up as I have done in the past with preloaders. BASICALLY I am very much a beginner at flash so I know how CRAZY it is of me to intend to use it as my main medium for everything for this class but hey at least I am challenging myself all over the shop. I plan to upload it to the server when I get to class today.