Rage Against the Machine

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Rage Against the Machine

View more presentations from Mark.

For the PowerPoint assignment I was asked to make a short slideshow illustrating a band. I had The Ghost of Tom Joad stuck in my head that day so I decided to create a slideshow on Rage Against the Machine.

Going into the project I knew the slides had to reflect the attitude of the band so I selected two fonts, Prestige Elite Standard (headers) and American Typewriter (body text), which very closely resembled that font on their albums. Both fonts are very clear and hard, like their music, but vary enough from each other to not be bland to the reader.

Color scheme also had to reflect the band so I decided to go with a black background with white text, which is the inverse of the colors found on their first album cover. However, after the slide show was completed, the background was changed to a black with a grey center gradient which both livened up the appearance of the slides but also made the body text easier to read and less harsh on the eyes.

The music mix I created using Audacity uses to of Rage’s more famous songs, Killing in the Name of and Renegades of Funk. I chose the two songs because they are different enough to show the many varied sounds of the band, but are similar enough that they do not clash when played together.

I hit a snag in the project when I discovered I could not animate a table unless it was affect as a whole. So, I had to go back and redesign it. I accomplished this by creating all of the cubes individually, it was tedious but the result was worth the effort.

With the use of a stopwatch I was able to sync most the cubes in the table on slide 4 with the drumbeats in the song. I was also able to create text in all slides that entered on cue. If I had more time for the project, I would try to sync more of the elements with the music, but I am very proud of how close I was able to get everything to the music.

The single cubes of the table did make the PowerPoint a bit longer than most, but it allowed me to showcase the band more in the final element’s slideshow.

Photoshop was also used for minor adjustments to the images, but was not a major player in this project. The musical elements of this assignment I found to be what kept it from being humdrum, and I honestly never knew the animation side of PowerPoint.

Animated GIF

When animating the font poem it was tricky to decide how to display the words in both an aesthetically pleasing and a meaningful way. After some tinkering with the timing of the slides, I decided that I wanted to have all the words come in after the same interval, 0.5 seconds. I also decided to have the words the appeared stay on the scene to allow the reader to focus on the phrase as a whole, not just certain words. One change I did make after the animation stage was I increased the pause from 0.5 seconds to 1 second before the word ”but” directly following “life”. This pause allows the reader to reflect on the beginning part of the poem (what not to do) and encourages them to try to estimate what it is they should do. However, I felt the pause should not be too long to prevent the reader’s mind form drifting off topic. The whole animation ends with a 10 second pause before restarting so the reader can truly take in the collage at the end and reflect on the words in the font poem. There is also an added slide where both the front poem and an opaque version of the collage are visible. This effect encourages the viewer to take in both the collage and the poem together before seeing the collage itself.

For the collage portion I tried to use images of people and things associated with the enjoyment of life and the world at large. As a result I tried to create something humorous and happy. All the images were tweaked for opacity in order to help them blend together before I merged all the layers into one. Since they were all taken from Google image searches most of them went through the transformation tool so I could align them in order of importance and resize them to fit the appropriate canvas size. The average opacity for the images was around 75%. After aligning the photos correctly and setting the layers in the right order I used the “smudge” tool to eliminate most of the hard edges between images to help them all appear as one. The nun photo needed extra attention because I had to cut a title off the top of the image. For this I simply lassoed the part I disliked and cut it off the original before importing it into the collage file

The only image that went untouched was the image of the family at the bottom of the family. Family I felt was the most important image in the collage and an important element to enjoying life. Because of this I decided to help the image stand out a bit against the others by keeping it solid (100% opacity) and leaving the edges around it hard and distinguished from the others.

If I had more time to work on the project, I would add an extra slide to the beginning of the animation; particularly a slide that had only the background of the font poem sans the words. This would serve as a cleaner intro to the phrase when watching it more than once. After posting the animation and watching it repeat a few times I felt I needed a better transition from the end collage to the beginning slide, which was something I over looked when I put the animation together.