The following is a list of major projects ("presentation-level" work) that you will do in Art for New Media. This list is subject to change and details will be added, so check back often!
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"Choose Your Own Adventure" Website
When you were young, you may have read books from the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. Basically, the books were written so that "you" are the main character and the idea was that at the bottom of each page, there were choices that you would make that would result in different outcomes. In the books, there would be a page number that you would jump to for each choice.
In this project, you will demonstrate your creative-writing skills (and editing/proofreading skills!) as you create a short story with multiple endings depending on the path the user chooses. Instead of page numbers that the reader will jump to, each choice will be a hyperlink that the user can follow.
You will demonstrate your organizational skills and technical skills in making a website where the pages link correctly and logically together (this is easiest if you create a new folder named "cyoa" for this project and put ALL the html, gif, and jpeg files for the project in your "cyoa" folder). Remember also that all your links within your site need to be relative links, all file and folder names need to be all lower case with no spaces and no special characters except - or _ (dash or underscore).
You will demonstrate your art skills in creating aesthetically-pleasing layouts, legible text, and correct use of color. You can also add graphics and/or photographs as long as copyright law is followed. Finally, you will publish your Choose Your Own Adventure website to the world wide web and present it to the class.
Your Choose Your Own Adventure Website must have at least 11 total pages with at least 5 moments of decision and each moment of decision must lead the reader down one of at least 2 paths. There is no requirement for how many words of text or how many images need to be on each page, but each page needs to tell a little bit of the total story and the whole story should be creative and interesting.
"Choose Your Own Adventure" Website DUE at the beginning of class on: Friday, March 11.
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Choose Your Own Adventure Projects from last year.
Art History Online Gallery
You will be assigned a historical artist, from one of many different cultures, that has made a major contribution to Art History. You will create an aesthetically-pleasing and functional website about that historical artist and the culture and time in art history from which he or she came. Visually, the layout, colors, typefaces, etc. used in the website should try to echo the historical artist's style as much as possible, or at least not detract from the artist's work and the content of the site.
This website will include a biography (written in your OWN words), a gallery of the artist's work with small images that link to bigger versions (with Copyright Law followed, look up the section on "Educational Fair Use"), an explanation as to why the artist is considered significant in Art History, and a page where you highlight your favorite piece by the artist and talk about why it is your favorite. The website must, therefore, have at least 4 pages (biography, gallery, significance, and personal connection). You must create all your own aesthetically-pleasing graphical layout, navigation, rollovers, animations, etc. in ImageReady and Dreamweaver.
You will demonstrate your organizational skills and technical skills in making a website where the pages link correctly and logically together, with an aesthetically-pleasing, functional, and intuitive navigation scheme.
You will demonstrate your art skills in creating aesthetically-pleasing layouts, legible text, and correct use of color.
You will publish this gallery website on the world wide web and present it to the class, learning from and critiquing each other's sites.
Note: Make sure you research your artist and plan your website before you start the layout in ImageReady! It's very hard to go back and edit your layout or add "buttons" after you've started working on your actual pages. A good place to start your research is at Webmuseum.
"Art History Online Gallery" Website DUE at the beginning of class on: Thursday, March 31.
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Art History Online Gallery Projects from last year.
Art Concept Lesson Website
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William Arthur Ward
For this project, you will become the teacher. You will create a website that teaches about an art concept and/or digital art concept that you have chosen (such as form, line, shape, value, texture, color, space, rhythm, movement, balance, proportion, variety, emphasis, harmony, typography, resolution, file formats, color systems, specific digital art techniques, etc.). You must create all your own aesthetically-pleasing graphical layout, navigation, rollovers, animations, etc. in ImageReady and Dreamweaver. You will publish this website lesson on the world wide web and present it to the class, learning from and critiquing each other's sites.
The best thing to do would be to create your own works of art to illustrate your lesson, but it might also be appropriate to use famous works of art to illustrate your lesson, if you are sure you follow Copyright Law (look up the section on "Educational Fair Use").
Note: Make sure to use what you learned from the last project! For example, make sure you research your topic and plan your website before you start the layout in ImageReady. As you know, it's very hard to go back and edit your layout or add "buttons" after you've started working on your actual pages.
"Art Concept Lesson Website" Project DUE at the beginning of class on: Wednesday, April 20.
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Art Concept Lesson Website Projects from last year.
Animated Storytelling Mini-Project
You will be given a narrative (aka "story") written by a student in Mr. Fox's English class. You will create an artistic animation in Macromedia Flash that presents, illustrates, and enhances a paragraph from the narrative (you get to choose the paragraph of the narrative that you think is the most interesting and has the most potential to turn into an aesthetically pleasing and visually compelling animation).
It is much more important that the animation is elegant and sophisticated visually than technically. This is your first Flash animation; it is okay for it to be technically simple. Concentrate your efforts on showing the paragraph in an aesthetically-pleasing animation, with appropriate colors, fonts, photographs, graphics, etc. Be wary of the following pitfall: many students who first work in Flash tend to make silly, "cartoony" animations. Those are okay for practice work, but not okay for this project. This animation needs to be visually elegant and aesthetically-pleasing!
It is not necessary to publish your animation to the web for this mini-project. But you will save your .fla file into the Share folder and present it not only to our class, but to Mr. Fox's class as well, on the day of the critique. This project is worth half the points of a "regular" project.
Be sure you follow Copyright Law with any graphics, photographs, and music you choose to use in your animation and be sure to also proudly display both the author of the paragraph's name and your name as the creator of the animation.
"Animated Storytelling" Mini-Project DUE at the beginning of class on: Monday, May 2.
Here are some examples of animated writing (these are professional projects, so don't get too intimidated...):
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful Poetry Animation Mini-Projects from the past (last term we animated Haiku poems instead of narrative paragraphs, so the project was a little bit different).
"Worst Case Scenario" Project
Many of you have seen a series of books called "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks." These books describe in very serious and detailed language the processes you should follow to survive some unlikely situations, such as "How to Escape from Killer Bees," "How to Identify a Bomb," "How to Survive Adrift at Sea," "How to Escape from a Bear." Topics in the series range from the very serious to the very silly, such as "How to Retrieve a Candy Bar Stuck in the Lunchroom Vending Machine" and "How to Deal with Body Odor." According to Publishers Weekly, "The secret to Piven's and Borgenicht's [the authors] success seems to be in maintaining, at all costs, a dead-pan and practical approach to survival techniques in ever-wilder scenarios."
Your assignment is to choose a "how to" process to visually describe in a Flash movie. The process you choose can be serious or silly, but it must be school-appropriate. You can use a topic that has already been covered in one of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks," or you can make one up on your own (preferred).
Like the books this project is modeled after, even if the topic is silly, the process you describe must be accurate and have a serious, "dead-pan" tone, so do your research carefully! Unlike the books, your Flash movie will rely more on visuals and animation than on text to describe the steps in the process.
Although the information must be carefully researched, any text in your Flash movie must be written in your OWN words. Any images you use must be either created yourself (for example, images drawn in Flash, painted in Photoshop, or taken with a digital camera) or used with permission, following Copyright Law (look up the section on "Educational Fair Use").
You will demonstrate your organizational skills and technical skills in making a Flash movie that is informative and logical and free of technical errors. Your project must include simple buttons that walk the user through each step in the process and a button at the end that the user can click on to start the movie over.
You will demonstrate your art skills in creating aesthetically-pleasing layouts, legible text, and correct use of color.
You will present your project to the class, learning from and critiquing each other's projects.
Note: Make sure you research your topic and PLAN your project before you start the work in Flash. A storyboard with layouts for each step is VITAL!!!
"Worst Case Scenario" Project DUE at the beginning of class on: Monday, May 16.
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Worst Case Scenario Projects from the past.
Interactive Commercial for a Futuristic Product
Your project is to create an "interactive commercial" in Flash for a new futuristic (fictitious) product. Let your imagination run wild! Think of some really neat new invention that you think people would love to have. For example, if I were doing this project, I would make a personal luxury vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and call it the "Aviauto" (it's a flying car!).
In terms of technical specifications, your commercial needs to have at least 30 seconds of animation, so if you use the default 12 frames per second, you need to have at least 360 total frames of animation. You also need to have interactivity (buttons, etc.) in your commercial because it will be an interactive web-based commercial, not a television commercial. Also, make sure your Flash document size is at least 640 by 480 pixels.
The style of the art needs to be professional because you should be pretending that this is an actual product that you are actually trying to sell. Photographs often work the best in trying to keep the artwork professional. Obviously, you might have to do some creative editing in Photoshop or ImageReady to make a photograph of an existing item look like your futuristic product. Any images you use must be either created yourself (for example, images drawn in Flash, painted in Photoshop or ImageReady, or taken with a digital camera and edited in Photoshop or ImageReady) or used with permission, following Copyright Law (look up the section on "Educational Fair Use").
In this project, in order to receive a good grade, you will need to demonstrate your creativity in imagining a futuristic product, naming it, and figuring out how to sell it in an interactive commercial. In addition, you will demonstrate your organizational skills and technical skills in making an interactive Flash movie that is logical and free of technical errors. You will also demonstrate your marketing skills in creating an interactive commercial that keeps in mind the target audience and really sells the product to them. You will demonstrate your art skills in creating aesthetically-pleasing layouts, legible text, and correct use of color.
You will present your project to the class, learning from and critiquing each other's projects.
Note: Make sure you PLAN your commercial before you start the work in Flash. A storyboard with layouts for each "scene" is VITAL!!!
Interactive Commercial Project DUE at the beginning of class on: Tuesday, May 31.
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Interactive Commercial Projects from last year.
Final Project: Create Your Own Art for New Media Project
You will have 9 classroom hours (1.5 hours per day for 6 class days) to use what you have learned in this class to WOW us with your creativity, artistic skills, and technical prowess. Your grade will be determined by how well you use the 9 hours to create a website and/or Flash animation that incorporates all the artistic and technical skills you have learned in this class.
This project is purposefully open-ended because I want you to use your imagination and creativity. The only requirements are that the final piece be useful and/or entertaining, school-appropriate, and free of errors. And, of course, as always, you must follow Copyright Law with ALL your content.
Synesthetic Visual-Musical Art Project DUE at the beginning of class on: Friday, June 10.
Synesthetic Visual-Musical Art Project
Synesthesia is a rare neurological condition "in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color." (American Heritage Dictionary) Some famous musical composers, such as Franz Liszt, are thought to have been synesthetes. In addition, Wassily Kandinsky, one of the fathers of abstract art, is thought to have been a synesthete. In fact, Kandinsky said, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." And he even claimed that when he saw color he heard music (WebMuseum), a common trait for people with his type of synesthesia.
For your final project in Art for New Media, you will try to imagine what it must be like to be a synesthete and create a work of visual-musical art in Macromedia Flash. Your final piece will allow people to interactively experience what you think it is like to have synesthesia. You could think of the final piece as a type of musical painting that the viewer can "play" like a keyboard.
This project is purposefully open-ended because I want you to use your imagination and creativity. The only technical requirements are that the final piece be interactive, aesthetically pleasing, and have a musical component and be at least 640 x 480 pixels in size. And, of course, as always, you must follow Copyright Law with ALL your content.
Synesthetic Visual-Musical Art Project DUE at the beginning of class on: TBA.
Real-Life Website for Not-For-Profit Organization
You will be working with an adult contact (your client) to produce a real-life website for a not-for-profit organization either on campus or in the community. Some examples of organizations that you can work for are:
- A school sports team
- A school club
- A teacher (for his or her teacher pages on the TPHS website)
- A school counselor (for his or her counselor pages on the TPHS website)
- A department on campus
- A community sports team
- Any community non-profit organization
You and your client will work together to figure out exactly how to use your talents, the over 23 hours of class time available for this project, and the needs of the organization to create a professional, functional, and aesthetically-pleasing website.
Your grade will be based on how effectively you use the 23+ hours of class time allocated for this project, how well you satisfy the needs of your client, and how well you have used what you have learned in Art for New Media this year.
It is imperative that you are organized, dependable, professional and responsive to your client. To help you with your organizational skills, I will require that you keep all information pertaining to this project in your school binder (or in a folder if you do not use a binder) that you will need to bring to class every day. I have a supply of folders if you need to borrow one for the duration of the project.
There are many due-dates along the way to help you to stay on track:
- TBA: Contract Due (Filled out and Signed by you and client)—10 points (all of the point values associated with this project are "Presentation Work" points)
- TBA: Proposal, Site Map, Page Layouts, and Flash Storyboard Due—20 points
- TBA: Client Feedback Form #1 Due—10 points
- TBA: Client Feedback Form #2 Due—10 points
- TBA: Client Feedback Form #3 Due—10 points
- TBA: Final Project Due for 5 points extra credit
- TBA: Final Project Due—60 points
Go to the gallery page to view examples of wonderful student Final Projects from last year.
New Project Ideas
There is a strong possibility that we will add or change projects as class interests dictate. Please email me if you have an idea for a project that you think would be interesting and educational.
