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Assignment 3: Multimedia Narrative

Examples | How to Begin | Working in Flash | Details/Requirements | Documentation | Grading Criteria

Description: Use elements of sound, motion, and basic interactivity to tell a story in less than one minute. This is a creative assignment that can be a poem (your own or someone else's), a short story, prose, a fairytale or fable, a memory, a dream, a cartoon or animated comic strip, a description of a historical event, a piece of journalism, or a commercial piece that involves a narrative. The object is to use graphical elements, buttons, and sound to help tell your story. These details should not be merely decorative, but essential elements in your narrative.

What is a "narrative": Story in this case means a causally or thematically related series of events told or shown from a particular point of view. There are many ways that you can make this assignment fit with your individual interests. By "narrative" I mean a set of events taking place in time and space that involves the telling of some story, sequence of events, or depiction of character. Here are some different ways you might choose to interpret this:

(Note: the links are all taken from the Required Viewing List for this assignment)

1. A poem that you wrote, or a well known poem by someone else (See Car Wash; Can of Beans ; Genius; His Father in the Exhaust of Engines; Murmuring Insects)
   
   
2. Prose or very short fiction (see Xdude vs. The Banking System; and The Muse in New York)
   
   
3. A sequence of events that tell a story or a joke (see Writers Block)
   
   
4. A visual animated cartoon that involves characters or narrative (see The Lines of the Hand, which is based on the short story by Julio Cortazar and documents the adventures of a piece of writing as it escapes the page. Through stark and expressive animation we follow the line through a romp in the city toward its macabre destination.) See also: Teetering, The Mean Ugly Cat ; The Old Lady and the Fly
   
   
5. A piece of journalism, retelling a news story or historical account in multimedia format. (this can be something major and significant like Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Little Big Horn, or the events of September 11th-- or it can be something small and insignificant, a little blurb in the paper that made you laugh.)
   
   
6. A commercial. Many commercials involve narrative, but not all of them do. Think about ads by Volkswagon or Fed Ex-- they tell a story that revolves around products. A narrative is not a plea to buy something.
   
   
7. A children's story, a fable, a fairytale...or a reinterpretation of a children's tale for adults. (See Reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales)
   
   
8. A myth (Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Native American, African, etc.) Go to the library and check out a book on myths and legends. You can also re-write or reinterpret a myth, see Persiphone
   
   
9. The dream you had last night

Make sure you view each link in the Multimedia Narratives Required Viewing, this will give you a sense of the possibilities and also help get you started thinking about ideas.

How to Begin: First, decide what kind of story you want to tell and then address these conceptual issues: Should you rely on one medium more than the other(s) to tell your story? (i.e. does sound, bitmaps, graphics, interactivity, motion, or text carry the story?) Which element ought to dominate? Is there a way to distribute the narrative across media? What kind of story lends itself to this treatment? What sort of story can you tell in a very limited time frame?

Second, create a series of thumbnail sketches that depict how you envision the entire narrative. Once you begin working in Flash, you must have a clear vision of what you are creating. Do not expect to play around in Flash and come up with something. (See REQUIRED VIEWING before creating your thumbnail sketches for ideas and inspirtation.)

Third, find any images or sounds that you plan on including your project and download them on to your disk. You will need to have these files already selected for your proposal.

Fourth, write a 2-3 page proposal that addresses the following questions:

• Give a brief description of the story you are using. If this is work that I might not be familiar with, attach a copy of the text you will be using. How will you re-tell the story using interactive multimedia?
  
  
• How do you picture the emotional feel, or the mood of the piece? How will you use motion to achieve this?
  
  
• How will you use sound? What sound(s) have you chosen to use in this project? (Describe the sound. Be specific, this should be a file that you have saved on your disk, not a sound that you are looking for.)
  
  
• How will you use images? Will you use graphics, photographs, both, neither? (Describe the specific images that have chosen to use. These can be your own images scanned or taken with a digital camera or images you found on the Internet, but again, make sure you have chosen the images you will use.)
  
  
• How will you use interactivity? The assignment calls for the use of at least 3 actions. If you want to create a cinematic piece that is not interactive, then you can fulfill this requirement by creating a preloader and start and replay buttons.

Finally, open Flash and import any files you plan on using (sound effects you found, music loops, and GIF, JPEG, or PNG images from Photoshop). You do not need to begin working in the timeline at this stage, just import your assets so that they appear in the Library, and then save the file for class on March 10th.

Working In Flash

Once you imported all of your assets, you are ready to begin building your project in Flash. Your thumbnail sketches are important at this stage, don't expect to start working in Flash without this pre-planning.

Some basic tutorials to help you with technical details:

How to Import a Bitmap (a GIF, JPG, or PNG image from Photoshop or the Web)

Using Sound, how to import sound and adjust properties

Introduction to Actions, frame based actions and button actions

Basic Actions: click a button to jump to different parts in the timeline or open a Web page (stop, go to, get URL)

How to Create a Preloader: you must create a preloader for your movie. This forces the entire movie to load before playing so that it doesn't pause halfway through waiting for the rest of the file to load.

Some more advanced stuff:

Load Movie and Unload Movie

Sound and Interactivity: how to create an interactive jukebox in Flash

Advanced Interactivity

How to create drag and drop images in Flash

See the Full Index of Flash Tutorials on this Site

When you are finished building your project, test your movie and export your file as a swf and embed it in a Web page. Link to it in your portfolio section of your course web sites.

Details/Requirements: Your narrative must include the following elements:

• some sound, sound effects or music (look for sounds to download)
• some images, photographs, or graphics
• at least 2 actions (at the very least these can be start and replay buttons)
• a preloader script at the beginning

Also, your narrative should be:

• Between 30 seconds and one minute
• Less than 700k (this should give you plenty of room to use sound and photographs)
• You can make the dimensions of your movie any size you like
• On the date this assignment is due, you should have your Flash movie posted online and link to it from your portfolio

Creative Brief Documentation:

You will turn a 1-2 page documentation that describes your concept, the story you are telling, and how you employ multimedia to accomplish this? How are text, sound, motion, color, interactivity and graphics used to inform the narrative? Include a storyboard with thumbnail sketches that illustrate the progression of your story. (Remember that storyboard sketches are part of your final grade.)

Due Date: 3/24/03

This assignment is worth 20% of your final grade.

assignment: 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 .