Posts Tagged ‘application’

Progress at last

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Quite a lot has gone on since I last posted. I wrote and handed in my dissertation proposal, I doodled a lot and spilt ideas into my sketchbook, went through several more concepts, and then finally landed on something that I think could be pretty unique.

For a while I had this urge to produce some big illustrations based directly on information. LastFM have an API that I thought I could use to gather user details and produce some pretty complex diagrams on, based on their interactions with each other and music recommendations. However, I soon discovered that it was really only designed to be used for applications, and therefore I could only gather information on individuals, rather than groups of people. That was the end of that idea.

Following this I stayed with the ‘Information Visualisation’ theme and began thinking back to a piece of work that I completed last year. I attempted to illustrate a song, in quite an abstract form, where I created graphics based on the lyrics, the story behind the song, and also peoples’ opinions and emotions relating to the music. What if I take this concept and almost turn it on it’s head? What if I create illustrative diagrams based directly on the notation of an album – assigning a coordinate to each note in a song and plotting these on some sort of graph? This would surely create some very interesting visuals and maybe some correlation would be seen between the complexity of the diagrams and the mood/tempo/style of each song…but again, this idea didn’t last long…

The idea that I have decided to run with is off on a complete tangent from my dissertation subject, only linking by a thread…but I’m getting quite excited about it…

I am going to create an artistic viral comedy series. There will be no set and no props, it will be shot entirely on green-screen, and each episode will only be approximately 5 minutes long. The sets will be still images inserted behind the actors and the props will be superimposed onto the characters. In my head this looks good, however some testing will have to be conducted to determine the final ‘look’.

I am drafting in all sorts of help in terms of script writers and actors and I will become a project manager/editor, but also have input into all the other aspects of filming such as storyboarding and music production.

Better get going!

MySpace Music filtering – Beaten to it!

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

The Digital Music Report 2008 (DMR2008) states that:

“There are more than 1.2 million rock acts and 1.7 million R&B acts alone clamouring for attention on MySpace. This overwhelming number of new bands and music available to consumers also highlights one of the key roles for record companies in the digital space. The need for filtering, selection, marketing and recommendation is greater than ever.”

So I think, ‘Great!’ let’s make an application, or even better a website that taps into that problem and utilises it to make discovering new music easy. No one has the time these days to be searching around with no clear direction. We want things quick and easy, no fuss. Then I remember that MySpace has just launched a new music player, and come to agreements with three of the top labels to promote their music by letting users create playlists (similar to LastFM I think), and purchase tracks too.

My head is still spinning with crazy ideas of what my new website could do, pull band information, categorise them, pick up on influences and keywords, link through to the music player, and have easy ‘Add as friend’ buttons. But as a Facebook user, I am a little out of touch with all the new features that MySpace are implementing, and due to my inner celebrations about how I’ve finally landed on something that could possibly be a solid project, I totally overlook the glaringly obvious ‘Filter Results’ box on the Search page. Damn.

Is there still something that they aren’t doing quite as well as they should be? I don’t know…

Back to square one.