Introduction

One of the things I found most difficult about this assignment was deciding on a theme. At the time this assignment was set, myself and some friends were getting set to buy tickets for Glastonbury, so an initial thought to create a flash interface for the Glastonbury festival website crossed my mind, though after some searching I found that I would not be able to source enough material for it, in terms of video footage, and photographs.

Then I started to experiment with Macromedia Flash 8 Professional, which happened to be the version of Flash that I have. Having never used this program before I found the task a bit daunting to begin with, but once I had familiarised myself with the Flash interface, and gained knowledge of how to do some basic tasks I already began enjoying creating animations and scripts in Flash.

After some more research, I decided to create this introduction and flash interface for the film, Requiem For A Dream which is one of my favourite films. After some quick searching, I started collecting images which I thought I could recycle by cutting out parts I could use, and then putting them together in a collage to create the main interface.

Some of the images I found are shown here, some of which weren't used in the end.

Some of these images were used in part, such as the DVD cover which I sliced up using PaintShop Pro 9, as well as the image of the syringes which I originally intended to use as a volume level indicator, where the longer syringes mean louder volume, and smaller syringes mean quiet volume. This was never implemented, and replaced with a Mute / Unmute button.

I also began thinking about the other media which would feature in the Flash animation, such as audio and video. I had a copy of the soundtrack (the score of which was written by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet), and after listening to it found a suitable song. I used Adobe Audition to find a suitable clip of the song which I then trimmed out from the original, and set up as a loop which would repeat cleanly, for an infinite amount of time, so long as the user stays on the page, or until he or she mutes the audio using the button in the bottom right.

The video which I used in the flash animation originated from a trailer which I downloaded from the Artisan Entertainment website, then edited in Sony Vegas 7.0, rearranging and chopping the video to create a different style of trailer to the original. I also removed the original soundtrack, and replaced it with other sounds, and music which I synchronised to the video.