Final Project

After torturing myself for 2 days, I've finally made up my mind to make a website featuring on war.
I think it should be categorized as "Politics" or "Society". As we all know, war is probably the most terrible thing that mankind invented. Ever since there is human, wars have never stopped. Millions of people were killed; billions were wounded; trillions were homeless, and they still cannot learn the simple fact: wars don't solve problems, they only create hatred. My website will focus on how destructive wars can be, how cruel wars can be, how wars can tear countries down and break families apart. I wish my website can arouse people's anger towards war, people's compassion to countries in a war, and people's fear of war.
Technically, my website will include pictures (of warfare), (sad) songs, and maybe flashes. Something I am thinking about now is to put a map of the world on a webpage and put big warfares of different times on different places of the map. I might add flash to it showing statistics like how many people died in the war and etc.
But what I described above are just notions for now, they are subject to changes. I will definitely add new stuff, and may delete things that I cannot realize too.

Reflection on earlier works

The first project I did in this class was the Immersive Environment. For the project, I made three pictures with Photoshop and Google Sketch-up which reflected the immersive environment of the road. Since I was a small kid, I was always fascinated how immersive road was and I often lost myself in all the imaginations just by looking out of the window of a car. What I am proud of the most for this project is the idea that road is immersive. But maybe just because that this idea is too strange and others didn't think of the road that way, it might seem a little bit confusing to some. Technically, I learned a lot about Photoshop and Google Sketch-up and implemented many in my project.

The second project I did was the Sound Art project in which I used Garage Band. In this project, I used some Garage Band loops, but mainly sound I recorded myself which included voice, guitar, piano and some other sounds, to compact the whole life of a person into a less than 1 minute sound piece. The idea is to tell people that life is short, please don't waste your time. Comparing to others', what I am not satisfied with my project is that because I recorded most of my sounds, sometimes there is noise in the background. After finishing this project, sound art is no more mysterious to me. It just consists of sounds which were put in different tracks.

The third project was animation using Flash. By far, this project has been the one that took me the most time, yet the one I found most fulfilling. I was amazed and shocked on my first glance at stick fights, and decided that I would definitely make something like that later in my life. After learning Flash in class, I've got the tools to realize my dream since I was a small kid. But later I found out that to do that I would have to move the body parts of little stick people little by little, and 25 hours of work may end up with only 10 seconds of show. Though tired, I found accomplished after realizing a dream since childhood. What I can do more is to add sounds when a stick person gets hit, and add background to the fight scene because it may seem somewhat boring without one.

The last project I've done is the net art project, which I already reflected in my self evaluation form. So I won't talk about it here.

For the final project, I haven't got a great idea yet about what I am going to do. But for now, what on my mind is to integrate as much knowledge I've learnt in class as possible in my final project. Which should definitely involve the use of Photoshop, Flash and Garage Band.