Late Work Policy for Projects:

For each week late that a project is handed in, your grade is penalized by one letter. For instance, if your project is one week late, and would have been graded as a B+, it becomes a C+.

Revising Projects:

For any project, you may choose to revise or improve your work. If I am satisfied that substantial improvements have been made, your grade for that project will be raised at my discretion. However, you are still subject to late work penalities if you did not hand in the original version of your project on time.

Audio Mini-Project

For this project you will edit, effect, and remix sounds to form an audio composition. They should be about 2-3 minutes long. We will listen to them in class. Please burn a copy onto CD or bring an mp3 to transfer to Josh's computer. You have two options for this assignment:

1. Song Transformation. Take a song of your choosing. Decide what the dominant mood of the song is - is it seductive? Celebratory? Angry? Bragging? Nostalgic? Reconfigure the song so that it expresses a completely different sentiment from the original. You may edit, rearrange, add other sound material, etc. - this may end up as a musical song or as more of a sound collage. Bring the original song to class and be prepared to explain your transformation.
2. Audio Narrative. For this assignment, you will create a narrative piece that tells a (real or fictional) story from your life. It may be "realistic" or experimental in approach. Use any combination of sound effects, voice, or music.

You will be graded on your sucessful use of editing techniques and your creative use of sound material. I fully expect the pieces to be somewhat "experimental" in nature, since for many of you this is your first sound project.

Video Mini-Project

For this project, you will work with found video footage that you will rip from a DVD. The goal of this project will be to practice converting footage, importing into Avid Free, editing, and exporting video. Once again, you will have two possible approaches to completing this assignment. In either case, they should be about 2 minutes long. Export to Quicktime file and burn projects to CD to turn in.

1. Movie Trailer - create your own condensed version of the movie. Include titles if appropriate. It should make us want to see this movie!


2. Movie Remix - rearrange footage from the original film to tell a completely different story. You might even use material from more than film if needed.

First Project - Informational Kiosk

For this project, working in pairs, you will create an informational kiosk for a Chicago-area museum (or other public institution). You will combine images, sounds, animation, and possibly video together into a coherent piece of multimedia. Some factors we will consider include: Audience, Visual Layout, Usability, Navigation, Interface, Information Design, and Appeal. There will be multiple preproduction and production phases to this project. Preparation may include research, site visits, taking images/recording sounds/video at the place, and creating original animation and sound material. Each project will contain a minimum of 10 "pages" of content.

1. Proposal - Write a 1 page general desciption of your project. Describe your choice of institution, including the specific exhibit or section you will focus on. What kinds of material will you create to illustrate/explain/elaborate on/expand the offerings of your institution? Please also describe the target audience for this piece and what kinds of strategies or approaches might be appropriate to serving that audience. We'll discuss these in class.


2. Project Narrative - This written document will be a combined flow-chart and outline that expresses the main topics to be covered in the piece, and your system of organizing the information. Essentially this will be the script for your project. It should include one page that is a visual diagram of the main sections and how they are linked together, and one paragraph or more of information for each of these sections. The more you can flesh these topics out now, the easier it will ultimately be to put it all together. This portion of the project will definitely entail some research, so be prepared to visit the institution, website, and/or library!


3. Interface Design Mockup - This is a static (ie non-animated) graphics file that demonstrates your user interface and visual design. This page will serve as a template for your main content pages. Consider interface metaphors, navigation controls, color scheme, typography choices, hierarchy of information, and division of screen space. You may use any program to create this, although I recommend Photoshop.
4. Project draft - troubleshooting and feedback

Final Project - Interactive Web Game

For this project, you will create a basic - but fully functional - arcade game. You will base your code on one of the samples provided. You can download the sample files here. Depending on your programming skill level, you can customize these samples to a greater or lesser degree to make them your own. At a minimum, you must change all the graphics and animations, and add sounds to the game. What would be more challenging and interesting would be to keep the basic logic of one of the games, but transform it into something totally different, much the way the "apple catch" game is transformed into the "river kayak" game. This will involve modification of the sample code and the creation of your own funtions to make the game operate. There are some good suggestions within the game text to get you started. Try to make it as fun as possible! Engaging sound and graphics will help a lot, too.

Projects should be published on the web and turned in as URLs.