Thursday

Flash rationale.

Flash. Now. I could have really loved flash, it does things I like. Makes things sharp (sometimes) and interactive (sometimes, if you do parts of it right), and it makes websites. Flash I actually found quite easy and interesting to use the more I used it. Coding was the hard part for me, and also embedding of film and sound. I mean, most websites don't have film or sound and are still fully entertaining and we waste hours and hours and days and months of which we should be doing other things. No names, but it begins with an F and ends with a K.(yes I am fully aware that facebook doesn't use flash) So as far as I'm concerned, flash can just be about creating pretty, moving pictures, that don't have any sound or imagery. Personally I think I would have preferred to create a mock website rather than a quiz, but I know about 5% of what actually goes into a website so I won't start that. I found it hard to get a practitioner to base my work on for a start as there is only so much creativity you can put into a quiz. I looked at one which was all film and timing. (I think it was on pentagram) I looked at quizzes which where all text, which when done right I feel are the best, cause who does a quiz for fun, in reality? I finally decided to base my quiz on QI, televised quizzes are the only things question related I can really lend my attention span to, and so went on the search for random questions which had not so obvious answers, which I think for the majority of people between the ages of 18-25, lets say, this would be the case. I went through a few ideas for layouts and decided plainer the better, everytime I added more colour, a random background or whatever else I felt it looked tacky and took it out. I'm not gonna lie, my flash looks boring, and I could have done so much more with it but I wanted readability and consistancy so I just stuck with boring. When it came to embedding clips I had a horrific time. I had originally tried to embed clips in my visual essay and when this didn't work switched from flash to powerpoint, then when I came to my quiz I thought I might have learned a thing or two from my experiments in flash earlier on, this didn't happen and I found that clips wouldn't play, then would play with no sound, then sound would play. Long story short - it wasn't happening, and with a deadline and an essay looming I just wanted to get it over with, so rather than spend hours and hours pulling my hair out, I submitted what I feel was a substandard yet not overly bad looking flash project.

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