A Joke
Coimbra, 2024
This project was created in collaboration with Alexandra Costa, João Marques and Maria Branco, as part of the Project 3 - Multimedia Applications subject, during our third year in the Bachelor's Degree program in Design and Multimedia at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra, under the guidance of professors Pedro Martins, Ana Boavida and Luís Pereira.
For this project, students were given a set of short stories to choose from. After making our choice, we had to adapt the tale into two different and unrelated objects: an editorial and a multimedia one. We choose Anton Chekhov's 1886 story "A Joke", as we became fascinated for its irony, youthful simplicity and naivety, and the use of the repeated expression "I love you, Nadia."
For the editorial object, we decided to explore the feeling of doubt and ambiguity the main character had every time they heard that expression. We designed a minimalistic yet elegant book (just like the story), using only black, white and red (the color of the sled the main characters rode throughout the plot). For each "I love you, Nadia." that appeared in the text, we dedicated a whole page, using a different dynamic every time, such as transparency, texture or cut-outs. The final result was a book that took advantage of different materials besides paper to achieve dynamic, playful and interactive storytelling.
Lastly, for the multimedia project, we developed an interactive website that used sound and moving images to achieve animation. As the user enters the website, they are presented with a narration of the story while the two main characters go infinitely down a snowy hill. In addition to that and a few other audiovisual elements, there are also eight sliders constantly present in the page, which the user can use to distort and control several elements of the website: speed, encryption of the text, narration, opacity, objects in the scene, background noises, snow and eye closure. With this, we created an audiovisual experience that can be fully controlled by the user, ranging from straightforward storytelling to incomprehensible noise.