Getting Started
Originally, in my static concrete poem, the words created the shape of a drawer (I don’t know how well it comes across, but such were my intentions) and the image was not very effective. In making the poem dynamic, I wanted to incorporate an actual chest of drawers. The obvious move would have been animating drawers opening and closing, releasing words whenever opened. However, I wanted to find a more subtle way to connect the text to the image without literally connecting them. This poem is very personal, and conveys thoughts running through one’s mind on the subject of hiding dark feelings from the world, and I wasn’t sure how to animate the text to parallel the constant craze of the kinds of thoughts I had in mind when writing the poem.
I started by looking for images of drawers, and came across this beautiful handpainted one here. It’s perfect because the outside is colorful and patterned, with hearts made out of flower silhouettes on the drawers themselves. It will help convey what my poem is getting across – sometimes what is beautiful and happy on the outside is secretly dark and chaotic on the inside. Since drawers are literally dark on the inside, and since this set of drawers has the appropriate imagery conventionally associated with positive feelings and happiness (flowers and hearts), I feel like the text and image will work well together as they convey the same message in complementary ways.
First Idea
My Flash skills are limited, but I have sought help from a friend to help me work with ActionScript. What I want to do is make the drawers interactive – when you roll over a drawer in the chest, the colors will fade and become grim (as opposed to red the color will fade to greys and blacks and become opaque) and text will appear along the wall elsewhere in the image. I haven’t decided how I want the text to animate, if at all. I also haven’t decided if I want the text to remain once appeared, or to only appear if the user’s mouse is hovering over the drawer. In addition, this perfect hand painted drawer comes at a cost as far as the writing goes, as there are only three drawers rather than four (and each stanza in my poem is four lines. So I’ll need to change the text a bit to make it work.)
For example, rolling over the top drawer will cause that drawer to fade and the text “shuffled feelings that I don’t have to feel anymore” (or some variation of that, since I’ll be tinkering with the poem anyway) will appear across the top. Is animation necessary? The idea I am trying to convey is that you have this unique, beautiful drawer that is hiding darkness that cannot be seen from outside. But what about the surrounding text? What shape should it make? I thought possibly of having the text create a circle-and-line image like the red no-smoking icon, to imply the negativity of hiding feelings away instead of dealing with them.
Text
I want the typeface used to relate to the flowers on the drawer as well as the thinness of the flower-hearts around the drawers’ knobs. Apple Chancery could be appropriate, with the curved edges of letters and sleek appearance. Or Goudy Old Style, with simplicity like Helvetica and straightness like the lines between the flowers on the drawers. Or to go with a font that goes nicely with the lines that box the flowers on the drawer, this Mona Lisa Solid could be effective, as the height variation in letters is accented in a way that emphasizes line. Orator Std. is also a good potential font – the kerning of the letters offer a kind of tension that I like.
Beyond these four fonts, I did not find any fonts that I felt resonated particularly well with the poem.
The lines of text are the same color as the blue between the yellow flowers on the drawer, and each verse (i.e. two lines) contains an element that is a reddish brown shade taken from the drawers’ color. I considered our class readings often when reflecting on each word's shape/size.
This is definitely what I spent the most time creating for this assignment, and I'm very happy with the final result. I put a lot of thought into each detail and spent hours perfecting it such that the text's shape, color, and spacing incorporated what the words affected were saying.
Rewriting the poem
Since the image I found had only three drawers and not four, I decided to reduce the poem from two verses of four lines to three verses of two lines.
Original:
Shuffled feelings in a drawer
Don’t have to feel them anymore
Locked away, like lingerie
The day they’re felt won’t be today
In the back beneath the socks
Avoiding dark and twisty talks
Maybe tomorrow they’ll have a say
The feelings are hiding today
Revised:
Shuffled feelings far away
Secrets kept, like lingerie
In the back beneath the socks
Staying hidden, avoiding talks
Perhaps tomorrow hear one say
A dark feeling, ignored today
Execution
What ended up happening was that I spent a lot of time on creating the verses in Photoshop and I stopped feeling the need to physically connect them to the drawers some how (like the red-no-smoking-circle idea). In early steps of playing with Flash, at one point each pair of lines of text were continuously switching from one to the other and I realized that that would be a perfect way to convey the chaotic thought-process I was originally hoping to portray. Rather than have the drawers fade or change colors, hovering your mouse over a drawer halts the animation of the poem at the respective verse (so the top drawer stops at the first two lines, middle drawer stops at third and fourth lines, bottom drawer stop at fifth and sixth lines). I would have liked to have the drawers themselves do something as well, but I appreciated the subtlety of having to figure out what happens when you roll over each drawer, and the fact that you can read the poem in any order beyond the original. If you don’t investigate and look further for an interactive opportunity, you won’t be able to read the poem and it will just be a jumble of fast text that you can’t read. I like how this parallels the reality of a friend who is not as happy as everyone thinks – you don’t know until you investigate further.
