SM: Sound

Final Thoughts:

Music, Voice and sound effects bring a whole other meaning to the communicative channels, either enforcing the visual or subverting the visual depending on the sound.  For instance in music, things with lyrics can either enforce the idea with content specifically about the subject matter, or subvert meaning through maybe an instrumental that has emotion and drama to it maybe turn something positive into negative.  In my project I wanted to let the viewer themselves from maybe previous experience or history create their own narrative with these sounds including different visuals to spark meaning to them.  I left it open to the viewer to choose to be able to move the videos or picture around on the screen to make them feel more interactive with it, maybe setting up different scenes by arrangement, interacting with other elements of the piece.  But I also left some stuff that they could not drag around so that the stage would not get too messy and confusing.  Overall I kind of wanted it to be sort of odd looking with the juxtaposition of a healthy mouth with black lungs, and chemical products that appear at the bottom etc.

Above is a list of songs that I considered for my music choice, and also is a script that I wrote of my voiceover, done in a studio with three different voices, hince the three diff. colors.


Above are some preliminary sketches of some layout ideas, basically some ruffs before I got into the computer part.
Here is the final layout, I added a vectored mouth to the top connecting to the lungs, and when pressed it plays my coughing sfx, I also added a matchbox to go with the zippo, when the mouse goes over the match box it plays my other sfx of a match lighting.  The chemicals are still at the bottom but are alpha 0% so when you roll over them they are visible.  The cigarette butts to the left are actually attached to videos and a picture that opens up and plays with two songs, 1 song for each video.
These are some more sound buttons that play my sfx and voiceover.
After meeting with Tyler I was reconsidering the handles so I decided to vector a cigarette for the handles of the videos and picture.  I thought that it maybe the lungs could be an ashtray, in which those cigarette butts could be placed.  I also wanted to bring in some of the same ideas from my previous projects dealing with smoking, and the bad effects of it.  So I researched some of the chemicals that are found in cigarette smoke and picked five that were common.  I thought that this added a twist to the theme, emphasizing again the negative effects on smoking.  These are actually buttons that are transparent until you drag your mouse over them, then when you click and hold the molecular structure of the chemical is shown along with the chemical name.
At this point I decided to go with a plain background with a vectored lungs in the center where I can attach my buttons and add meaning to my voiceover, the three different ways of saying that you are going to have a cigarette. I also tried a gradient on the zippo to give it an aluminum finish to it, but it deffinately was not working.
Here is the second version where I added an image that I photographed from the inside of an ashtray.  I was also starting to mess around with buttons and inserting my different sound into those to play when you click. I eventually get rid of the background because it is too noisy and you can't tell what to click, some of the objects blending into the background.  Again adding new video and image, working with scaling up and down, while playing the video.
Here is the very first version, basically just trying to figure out how to add new video and such.  he black bar looking thing is supposed to be a zippo and when clicked it plays my soundmark of a zippo opening and closing, with the zippo opening and closing at the same time.