Project 2: Self Assessment

For this project, I focused more specifically on the combination of imagery and sound to evoke a certain emotion of feeling from my audience. Specifically, I explored creating a feeling of tension, not quite branching into pure horror material but still making the viewer's heart beat just a little bit faster. I decided to explore this avenue of combination of media after my first project sounded better with sound added to it but it didn't really have a devoted music piece for it. I drew a lot of my inspiration from video game soundscapes, as in my opinion the sound design in my favorite game has really made the mood stick with me and this was a phenomenon I really wanted to try to emulate. Both the visual and auditory components of my project were meant to be reminiscent of a video game overworld or ambient environment, where not much is actually happening but the viewer is meant to soak in the setting itself as opposed to following a story that they are being told.

During the brainstorming process for this project, I had a few ideas. Aside from the indoor hallway scene I eventually settled on, which was inspired by the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I also consider some more apocalyptic style scenes drawing more along the lines of the Fallout series for inspiration. Ultimately I settled on the indoor hallway scene due to ease of design, though I would like to approach the other scene concepts another time. This may be an approach I take with my next project, if my other ideas fall through due to the constraints of the projection medium.

Like my previous project, I start this project in Adobe Illustrator, creating the line art I would use as a base. Because of the simple nature of this project's design, I spent no more than a few hours in Illustrator, focusing mostly on getting the perspective of the room accurately. Most of the time used in Illustrator that was not dedicated to perspective was devoted delicate line work, making sure the curves of the ceiling looked realistic and making sure all the lines connected properly so that the piece would not look disjointed in any way.

The majority of the work done for this project was done in Adobe Photoshop. Due to the lightly animated nature of this piece, two images were necessary. One was designed to look fairly normal, the other was designed with much lower, foreboding lighting and bloody coloration with literal blood smears on the walls and floor. A lot of time was put into the design of the textures of the piece. I designed my own brushes for the majority of the textures, taking existing brushes and manipulating them to better suit my needs. The bloody scratches on the walls were the most complex texture to create. Not only was a custom brush needed, but the brush strokes were smudges to create a directional appearance, sharpened to make them more jagged in appearance, then blurred a little bit in order to remove a pixelated appearance. Other brushes were more simple; the blood smear brush was a smudge-looking brush that was adapted to vary in shade and transparency in order to create a more realistic appearance of bloodstains. My color choices were fairly straight forward, with the base color scheme loosely taken from photos of church halls and the colors changed to red and brown tones for the bloody image.

A very important part of this piece that did not involve traditional programs used in this class was the design of the music piece I used alongside the art. The piece was created in the music program Logic Pro X. The piece was fairly simple in design, with a low rumble providing a tense base sound and various mysterious sounds playing at random intervals increasing the mood. A heartbeat track was added to the piece as well, drawing from my videogame inspiration where a heartbeat is often added to a stealth or horror scene to make the player subconsciously feel as if the heartbeat is their own and adding an immersive factor to the piece.

The two pictures and the music were combined in Adobe After Effects. Being my first time using the program, I had considerable setbacks using it, which ultimately resulted in several unproductive hours trying to get effects to work only to be forced to start over a few hours in. The animation was created by setting up a camera to zoom in on a focal point over the course of a minute. The two images flashed into each other, loosely corresponding to the music’s heartbeat and other sound effects but not quite syncing up in order to create a sense of dissonance. Some fade and an effect called burning paper were added towards the end to fully enhance the work.

My work habits were more effective than they were for my first project, working on the project for at least an hour at a time a few times a week outside of class. However, my time management was still not quite up to par, as I was left without time to finish every piece of the project that I had set out to do. Had I set a few more hours a week aside to work on this project, and perhaps worked on it more during spring break, I may have seen more desirable results at the end. However, I do believe my work habits were enough to achieve a solid product and I am not unhappy with how things turned out.

The final project seemed to achieve the goal I set out to achieve. When I showed the piece in class, the room went dead silent, the tension clear in the air. I was glad to receive positive remarks on the piece, and one classmate was able to identify the videogame from which I’d derived most of my inspiration, which makes me believe I was successful in achieving my goal. While I was happy with the combination of music and image as well as with the coloration of the piece, the design of the hallway itself was very simple, and in the future I hope to create more complex images of a similar type. Also, due to my only getting to the point where I was ready to use After Effects at the last minute, I was unable to finish every aspect of the project I wanted to include, resulting in a piece that, while effective, was much simpler than I had intended it to be. If I were to elaborate on this project, I would definitely go back and try to add some more complex imagery as was originally planned. On the side of the message of the piece, however, I feel that I was very successful in what I set out to do, both in terms of my own opinions on my piece and judging from the reactions of my classmates.

Had I achieved every goal I set out to meet with this project, I might think I deserved an A for it. However, since some adjustments were done last minute which resulted in time constraints being stricter than anticipated, my goals were not all realized. Due to this being in part the result of work habits, I give myself a B+ for this project, as while I was unable to get everything I wanted to do accomplished I still believe I managed to achieve the overall result I was striving for.