I am just beginning the long journey to bring my artistic ability fully into the interactive realm. I have learned that the creation of the composite as a whole is significantly more difficult than making the individual parts that make up the piece. For the Geometric Abstraction, this difficulty presented itself through getting the correct frame blending between the layers so that the objects felt “alive” rather than just purely responding to the music. Adding a slow pulse in both object size and the background color further added to the desired affect. Composition is extremely important in the video overlays in the interactive picture project. The Puppet Warp and Content Aware Fill tools in Adobe Photoshop CC really helped with creating a realistic interaction between the picture, the animation and the resulting sound.
I think that for the first project, you could have enlarged the geometric shapes to fill up more of the canvas. Either changing the aspect ratio of their positions – so basically stretching it more horizontally, or changing the canvas size itself. This was, I think it would have made more of an impact due to an increased amount of content on the screen.
I really liked the abstract patch and how it is times to music – specifically the colors and the effects – the overall transformation blur looks really nice and does not make the changes in size and position as jagged.
For the Interactive Picture, it looks like there was some trouble lining up the individual animations over the base image, unless it’s a video error. If not, I would suggest next time to keep every individual animation within the same Photoshop doc and render out each change (animation) to the picture separately without cropping the original image’s sizes. Even though it might have tons of empty space around it, it helps ensure the placement is exact since it won’t have moved from the desired spot based on the base image.