Uni Students Life
(2010)
makers: Erni Wijaya, Putri-Deanna Adnan, Wenjia Wu and Yue Jiang.
Opens with a credit film, which is often good because, well, in a multilinear project where do we find out who made it, and so on? Unfortunately it ends abruptly, pronounced by the sound mix (or lack), but it does include sound credits, which is excellent. Six thumbnails, in no particular structure in terms of interface design, that surround each side of the main video window. This work has problems. Some of the videos are probably 16:9 but presented as 4:3 and so they are just, well, poor looking. Each clip has text, but the text is very literal, descriptive and while each seems to begin with "Sometimes" it doesn't quite get past just being a list. The work becomes more like a catalogue, when ideally it could have been a series of stanzas (uni, home, inside, outside, day, night). Finally, when you view the work there is no information hierachy. This is where the size of something, and its location, indicates its importance or role. In writing for instance we understand that a heading will look bigger, and possibly more bold, than the body text. Here the thumbnails are quite large, they crowd the video, the banner is large and occupies as much attention for us as everything else. Why?