Process

The process for creating the VIOLENCE Project involved a number of steps. We had to begin by surveying a number of people. We did this by posting a survey online and send the link out to everyone on our contact lists. These people are predominantly between the ages of 18-25. The people that we surveyed did not know what the final outcome would look like, but were asked only to answer honestly in our multiple choice survey.

From there we picked the top 5 themes indicated in the survey and we went about finding clips from major Hollywood films that would correspond with the themes. The clips were taken from videos available online at youtube.com

We then edited the clips together with straight text of the answers to the questions. The text with a video clip behind it represents the word that was most commonly inserted in the multiple choice survey. For example “fear” was the most chosen word in the survey.

Once the clips were cut, we added them to the website. We used Wordpress as our CMS, and turned the blog into a package for our project. Each movie is a blog post, categorized by each Violence word. For example, if you click the word “FEAR”, it selects only the posts that are under the category of “Fear”. The issue with this, was the it would show all the videos in the category at once. We wanted only one video to play, and it needed to be random.  In order to get it to play randomly, we had to add a query to the archive.php file. [<?php query_posts($query_string . '&orderby=rand&showposts=1'); ?>] This line tells the category to call one blog post from random, from the category chosen.

Several weeks before presenting the final project online, we released a beta version of the site to test user experience and response.

BETA version:

http://chrisgruggen.com/class/mpm35/violence_beta/

Final Version:

http://chrisgruggen.com/class/mpm35/violence-project/

We are fairly happy with the way the project turned out. While the point is conveyed with the number of different video clips we have, we would have liked to have dozens more. However, time was constraint for The VIOLENCE Project and we ended up settling with the videos we had. We had hoped to incorporate a physical element into the project through recording the video clips to vhs and then digitizing them back. Again, due to time constraints, we had to let this plan go. Just as the majority of the people filling in the survey were 18-25, we expect the same of the users on our website. Views on violence are supposedly changing through mass exposure via the media. It’s a widespread belief that we, as a generation, are less sensitive to violence.