Infivia :: communication visuelle - Montreal, Quebec - CANADA
Twenty Voices
www.twentyvoices.com

DESCRIPTION: This project aims to bring knowledge of the events of 1915 to the general public through an interactive journey that is different from the currently available sources of information that are more text-based and statistics-based. Artinian Productions wanted to bring the 20 interviews that were shot in the past 4 years to the web as an interactive documentary.

Bandwidth issues were considered when the target audience and various worldwide locations where this site might used in academic settings were evaluated. The video part of these interviews was put aside in order to bring forward the "voices", the accounts of the events. Sound compression algorithms and compression options were carefully selected to keep every detail in the voices of these survivors while keeping a safe download time so that the experience did not suffer for slower connection visitors.

A complex back-end sound mixer was programmed so that while sound was loading, the general theme would play, then automatically crossfade to the regional music while the audio interview loads, then slowly fade down to bring the voice commentary in. All this is done automatically through preloaders and such, while still giving the user total control over each event through the \"Sound\" pane. Careful transitions were created to always keep the atmosphere and experience at the same level, bringing people away from their online experience and into a personnal experience. Extensive ActionScripting brought our developers to believe that this programming language has been created for such complex online applications in a perfect way. Simple yet powerful object-oriented programming is possible, all such well linked to the visual parts of each element.