Secret Life of Ang Mo Kio – Zine [Final]

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February 21, 2017April 20, 2017

Evocative Objects – Sound Design Preliminary Ideas

Evocative Objects

Project Brief

A new project which revolves around the creation of a sound artwork which couples with a physical everyday object found around school.

Idea

Creating a myriad of sound that plays / fills in the quietness from the moment a person puts a coin into a vending machine and when it dispenses out the item.

Imagine when you press a button to call for that delicious beef burger you really want… the sound of a mooing cow is silenced suddenly by a sharp “Zing!” of a sharp metal knife… Your beef burger then drops to the dispensing tray.

For this sound piece, i would like to emphasis on the problems of animal cruelty and global warming that we face globally.

http://www.peta.org/features/10-shocking-peta-videos/

The link above brings you to a page in which shows how animals are treated cruelly and inhumanely in production factories. I believe that we consumers should at least have some knowledge and insight into where and how we are getting our food.

Presentation

As this project is not something that i can achieve technically, I would like to head in the direction of interactive media. I intend on illustrating a vending machine similar to the above picture and then maybe annotating buttons onto the machine so that when the user interacts with it, a sound will play alongside with the food dispensed. As this is something new, i am excited about how it’ll turn out.

Inspirational Artworks

The Happiness Factory – Coca Cola Commercial 2007

An old but gold commercial which features the journey of how a coca cola bottle gets dispensed in a vending machine. At first, i was planning on using this similar idea – creating a soundtrack that conveys a journey of the coke can. However, i believe that this is too expansive and that the sound has to relate to the object directly.

Wintergatan – Marble Machine

“if you had a machine like this in 1500… You would called a god of music or a wizard… ” – random Youtube comment

This video gives me this sort of magical and awestruck sensation every time i watch it. I was amazed by the fact that someone had the engineering capabilities to create such a product masterpiece and the fact that it produced such beautiful sounds with only the use of hand held rotor and marbles just seals the deal for me. This is a true inspiration so please check him out,

Dato Duo

As a fan of electro dance music, i love the sound of synthesizers. One thing that really inspired me from this product is the ease and simplicity of sound creation. Just a few pushes of the buttons and tweaking with the knobs, there you go. A really clean and solid soundtrack is produced. Kudos to the inventors.

February 8, 2017March 14, 2017

Motions – Singapore Short Story

MOTIONS

A short documentary about the life of my dad and the unique insights into his perspective of a society that is going through the motions.

(Please turn on subtitles/CC for a better viewing experience)

Challenges & Reflections

For this project, i wanted to convey my dad’s story through a short documentary film. This is because i believe that he has many interesting stories he has when he was a kid and he would never fail to tell them to me over dinner. I chose film as the appropriate medium as the visual and audio narration encourages viewer retention through the story and flow of the film.

At the start, i really had difficulties in coming up with the concept of the documentary. Sure it was about the childhood stories of my dad but that was too general. My mental block lasted quite long until the second consultation with Michael. The project was then narrowed down and encouraged that a learning point or perspective was to be like a take-away from the video. That was when i started to go on the right track.

Sometimes when you have really no clue on what to do, the best thing to do is to start doing something. Anything. Some inspiration is bound to strike you when you are doing something. This happened to be while interviewing my dad. Before the interview, i wasn’t sure of how it was going to turn out. Unexpectedly, during the interview, i slowly started to see the flow of the film coming together. I was amazed that my dad managed to talk for 30 minutes without stopping! That was the turning point of the project.

I chose to make the film slightly longer as i wanted the audience to be engrossed in it. I wanted a slow and steady flow for the video with my dad telling his stories at the start and then followed by his perspectives on the change of quality of life at the back.

Research

I stumbled across cinemagraphs – still image with several moving elements
It has this really atmospheric and subtle vibe