Integrating images--the big questions

While meditating today, I got some ideas for integrating photos into this movie. Although I think I want to submit it somewhere without photos, I’d like to continue working on integrating the photos we took at the time we were writing these poem and making the sound.

There are several possibilities:

1. The photos could appear in simple slide shows between the poems
2. The photos could appear in a slide show during the animation of the text
3. The photos could be activated by clicking on key words (we might alert viewers to this in an intro or on title page)
4. The photos could be animated during the text animation

At any rate, I could create a master movie in which the photo animation appears concurrently next to the text animation in a larger window (esp for #2 above). Or, the slide shows could be linked to the text animations within a master movie if they ran sequentially. However, I really like the idea of combining both #3 and one of the other options because it would make the piece more interactive and allow us to utilize more of the photos we took.

In the meantime, I should ask Mindy to convert all the photos we used in the Art Show slide show to PNG files (I think). Check on that.

Oh, that reminds me—I promised to host the next House Art Show, so I better get on that—we should hold it on the anniversary of that last in my house.

Knowing Nathan, he’ll ask me how this animation or the principles I’m using to animate the poem, relate to Tulsa or the project as a whole. One of the justifications has to be, especially for Dig and Death, that when first writing these poems using “musical chairs” and four computers, we often drew upon the words and images from the passage written before ours. In a sense, we were recombining words much like I am doing in my animations. The animations just make that method visible and explicitly part of the text. In this way, the animations act as meta-commentary on the process that produced the poems.

To go over it again: The questions we are asking again and again in this project are

How do you put text into time like sound?

How do you represent music as an image?

How do you convert sound into text?

How does an image become musical?

How do you blend text and image?

How is an image translated into words?

Of course, the last one is how can all three—text, image, sound—work together seamlessly?

Don’t forget movies: Fantastic Tulsa Films, Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Outsiders, etc. and stock images from Tulsa (check the library website for pictures of campus as well as of the Tula riots).