jamin.org

I haven’t talked much about my Information Visualization course with Ben Fry and Golan Levin. They are quite an amusing pair, a mix of design and art and nerdery.

Today we had our first crit, which only involved select projects. Mine was not one of them. And thank goodness for that, because it was dreadful.

We had to create either a map or a time series. We could use processing or not. We had no limits on data, except we could not use the stock market or the weather.

I had a couple ideas, and tried using processing for both. But I got tripped up on syntax in both cases. I thought my ActionScript skills would translate to processing because processing is layered upon Java, and Java is similar to ActionScript. I was 90 percent correct.

With a looming deadline, I ditched processing and did something in AfterEffects (of all things), and I’m not really sure if it was a map or a time series. After some reflection, I think it was just me floundering.

At any rate, my peers produced some sweet stuff. Definitely inspiring.

Before class and seeing what others had done, I told Golan and Ben I would do mine over. Seeing my peers work provided further fodder for that. To add even more incentive, I commit to posting my redo here.

For our final grad studio class, we presented our visualizing information space projects again, with any edits we made. Editing was not required as we had another deliverable due as well. I did not have much time to make major changes, but I did work on syncing the music to the video some more.

Once again, my artifact was the book Else/Where Mapping.

The process book, which was due the previous week, was reason for yet another sleepless night. Though I felt the result was well worth it.

I was not happy with my previous process book for my data visualization poster. But seeing what my peers had done, and also gaining better knowledge of design through my typography class, provided a more informed direction for this process book.

From the last page:

Reflections

Although I have a lot of experience with Flash, and a basic knowledge of animation within that context, creating a time-based video for this project proved to be quite a challenge and an exploration into unfamiliar terrority. If I had to do it again, I would like look to another animation program because I found Flash’s ability to deal with animation and audio inadequate.

I would have liked to have synced the animation and the page turnings more closely to the music, which I believe played a very powerful role in the piece. However, the limitation of Flash made this very difficult.

I was very happy with the music piece and thought it fit very well with the movement. Sound is key for video. I think it was helpful to start thinking about sound early.

Even though I shot the photos of the spreads in the School of Design’s shooting studio using a copy stand and powerful digital camera, I was displeased with the variation in photo quality and lighting. Given more time, I would have sought to improve them.

After seeing the work of my peers, I got a new set of ideas. While I was generally happy with the result, I wondered what I could have done if I went with a more abstract representation rather than the physical photos.

Food for thought for future work…