ggeisler
commented
3 years ago Yesterday the team discussed using the same approach for the oral history home screen as we've done for the slideshow home screen. It's going to be a bit trickier for the oral histories:
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I tried working with the square aspect ratio thumbnails I previously created for inclusion on the cards, but that doesn't seem workable, since capturing a square version of the theme cards ("What drew you to Silicon Valley") is not very feasible, and having a mix of different sized images in the grid would be complicated, I think?
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Given the above, just capturing a still image of each theme and interviewee, at full size, would seem to be more workable (and I think including the closed caption text might be useful in conveying what the experience will be like). However, the interviewee clips were filmed with different video aspect ratios so some are letterboxed and some have black pillars, which means two images with different video source aspect ratios can look a bit weird side-by-side (e.g. cells 8 and 9 in the mockup below).
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3 theme cards and 7 interviewees = 10 images, but we only have 9 slots in a 3x3 grid
Despite the above, I think this could work. Here's a mockup of how we might arrange the images and end up with something decent, maybe?
If someone wants to tackle this, here are some suggestions:
- Source images are in this Google Drive directory
- In the mockup I left out image
silicon-genesis-00010.pngbecause someone needs left out to get us down to 9 images and this one features the person very close to the camera, so it seems like the biggest outlier - In the slideshow version, we use a max opacity of
0.5which might not work too well with at least the theme card images in this set, so we might want to use a higher value, at least for the theme card images
It might end up feeling too busy with all the text (between the theme cards and the captions in the interviewee images). If so I can go back and re-extract images of the interviewees at the same size but at spots where there is no visible caption.
Or we can create the image timings much more deliberately, so that only a couple of images are ever close to max opacity at any one time. It would produce a slightly different effect than the slideshow as currently implemented, but I think that could work (and maybe it would it be a good thing to be somewhat different from the slideshow version).
We need to display something in the content-area that is associated with the initial card, before the visitor starts the video:
The prototype example above was just for conveying the idea. We need to design a final plan for how this looks.
Ideally this might have some subtle animation going on, to better attract notice from passersby and suggest the screen is interactive. But implementation-wise, that might add a lot more complexity than a simple still image. We need to identify possibilities and evaluate the pros and cons of each.