We chose to do our project over F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. This short story drags readers through Fitzgerald’s all-consuming breakdown and the processes that took place along this journey. Our group decided to encompass the entire breakdown documented in this piece instead of choosing a shorter, more specific portion of the work; because we chose to include the entirety of the work, we had to choose the main highlights from the work that best described Fitzgerald’s progression to the final, recluse-like state of his being.
Our team knew that it would be the easiest to mirror each portion of the project after the one prior if we did the four parts of the project in a specific order; our process would have been the easiest if we had written the script we wanted to follow first, then created a video portraying that script which included audio, drawing the audio out of the video to stand alone as a soundscape perfectly depicting the video created, and finally we would take screen-grabs from the video to present as our still images. This process would ensure that all of our parts of the project would be cohesive and perfectly describe the same story. On the other hand, our team likes a challenge and were all exhilarated to put our talents to the test by executing a completely reverse process than the simple one presented above.
Our process began with a compelling photo montage that chronologically portrayed the milestones Fitzgerald endured throughout his breakdown, or as he coined it, “His crack-up”. The photographs were created to represent specific quotes from the piece that quite literally feature vivid imagery he composes. We then took those focal points and decided to emphasize the one particular portion of the project that perfectly went hand in hand with the author himself. Fitzgerald had the soul of a writer, so like any good writer would, he wrote himself out of his first spout of depression. We maximized that vital process by creating a text section that mirrored the plethora of lists he wrote to distract his mind from the upsetting; the text section of our project will show these lists that Fitzgerald continuously wrote and threw away. To finalize the hardest part of our project, we created a soundscape that mirrored the photo montage by using symbolic sounds to portray those life-altering moments. The only portion left after the audio was to create a video that fit seamlessly with the sounds that was already created. Although this backwards order of our project proved to be challenging and take a lot more creativity and innovative thinking than it would’ve taken to do it the easier route, we all were extremely proud of the plan, execution, and finished product we made together.
To start our process we began with the still image section. We wanted to create a photo essay, featuring snapshots at different points of both the essay, and Fitzgerald’s emotional rollercoaster of a life that he reflects upon in his prose. Fitzgerald starts his essay nostalgically at best, and by the end he has lost all his values and dismisses the facets of his life that he had previously enjoyed. Within the essay, Fitzgerald documents his struggle to accept his current status in life and the mental breakdown that he experiences in doing so, evoking such images as a cracked plate breaking, his transformation into a heartless beast, and his wife’s intrigue with the vastness of the Grand Canyon. We attempted to reflect Fitzgerald’s struggle and the imagery he evokes through our photo essay, breathing a digital life into this work that was merely text previously.
First, we selected quotes, which we thought were the core of the piece—those emphasizing the times Fitzgerald reflected on his current self and his continuing metaphor of a plate shattering upon reality, straying away from the parts of the essay that focused on atmosphere and describing past memories. Then, we edited and combined a mix of photos from our daily lives (dogs, memory boxes, garbage) and a creative commons database. These sources helped us expand our reach beyond our daily lives and incorporate the global culture (reflected in photos such as The Thinker and the Grand Canyon) upon which Fitzgerald’s writings surely had an impact upon in our project. On the website we displayed the images in a carousel with corresponding quotes, to allow the reader to experience one image at a time and to never have an “ending,” as such with many mental illnesses like depression.
Some of our classmate’s feedback included dropping some of the weaker images and focusing more on our stronger pieces and displaying them in a slideshow format. Some of the weaker pieces included photographs that did not flow with the other aesthetically or photographs portraying parts of the story that we decided against using in our final order. We ended up polishing up our final images and changed how they were displayed—from all next to each other on the page to the carousel on the final draft. We also debated on keeping everything black and white only which helped us reflect the time period of this piece and the somberness that loomed over the story. We also decided on keeping the vast Grand Canyon in Fitzgerald’s mind the only element of the work in color, enjoying the symbolism that the viewers get to infer.
Next in order was the text portion of the project and since the original work was already in text format, we wanted to do something different. We created our text portion of the project to reflect a more specific part of Fitzgerald’s breakdown; this also happened to be the moment that he finally found a way to make himself feel better. He wrote lists. He portrayed this experience as follows, “I made lists of cavalry leaders, football players, cities, popular tunes, pitchers, happy times, hobbies, houses I have lived in, suits since I left the army (not counting the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried for years without wearing because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted), women I like, times I was snubbed by people that were not my better in character...and then I was better.”
We took a few of these list ideas and did research on the trends and popular items that Fitzgerald would probably be familiar with in that era. For example, we researched the great football players during the time of the crackup and even the players that were in Fitzgerald’s hometown, the city he would probably root for. We took this research and wrote short poems in an early 1900’s freehand style; this style mostly rhymed and had no guidelines for length of the lines or use of devices. It seemed to us that he would write his lists in such a way that was playful and would naturally produce a better personal feeling overall after the process. We repeated this for a few of the lists he claimed to have written and presented them next to wads of paper. Fitzgerald wrote that he would write lists, crumple them up, and throw them away; he would repeat this process with all sorts of various lists as a tactic to relieve whatever was eating at him on the inside. We originally had one single piece of paper wadded on the home screen containing all the poem links to show this process more interactively. Upon revisions, we put each list next to an individual crumpled piece of paper and once you click each specific list, the paper will uncrumple, letters from the uncrumpled paper will scatter, and the poem will appear on the screen. We made this action as smooth and as visually satisfying as we could to portray the ease that these lists gave Fitzgerald.
The third portion of our project was the audio and we decided to revert back to our main story presented in our photo montage. For our sound object, we wanted to represent the highlights of the story that we chose and the images created prior with a soundscape. We also wanted to allude to some of the major concepts presented within the articles as well. We portrayed the journey of hermit-like movement through the changing ambient noises as the sound of Fitzgerald’s steps go from a very lively social setting to a secluded environment. There is a breaking plate that represents the cracking mindset of a frail man who just received horrible news. It includes the fragile mind breaking like glass on a concrete floor and the confinement to loneliness through the buzzing of indoor noises amplified to make the listener feel closed-in and claustrophobic. The listener can hear the depression that sets in through his writing that is soon destroyed; listeners hear him ripping apart the list of things he once loved but no longer wants any part of. We hear the sound of a lock to represent the man’s closed heart that he no longer wishes to feel. We can hear him locking away his humanity, giving way to an animal instinct that is represented by the sound of a barking dog. The culmination of the sounds are brought together to create a man’s sorrowful journey.
To create the sound object, a variety of sounds were suggested by different group members. Almost all of the sounds were downloaded from FreeSound.org, except for one track that was recorded within the ATEC building. The sounds were then selected and imported into ProTools. Within ProTools, the sounds were filed as tracks within the main project screen and trimmed to fit into the soundscape. For the creaking sounds, pitch and time shift effects were applied to a track of balloon rubbing sounds. Afterwards, fading was applied to the tracks to aid with the transitions between the different sounds and movements of the soundscape journey of our main character. Some tracks were lowered in dB to help with blending the sounds together without creating sound distortion. The representation of the sound object within a digital space is done via Google Drive which hosts the sound object draft.
For the final sound object, a slightly sad piano melody is added in place of the footsteps to create more movement in the music’s rhythm which begins to slow in tempo as well as lower in key. A second piano music track is added towards the end of the soundscape after the paper is wadded up; this signifies the wall he is creating between himself and the world as he evolves to the state of a dog, animalistic in nature.
The format of the sound object that is hosted on the site is changed from Google Drive to SoundCloud’s embedded media player. The SoundCloud code was added to the post using the html editing option. A paragraph explaining our intentions with the sound object was also added underneath the SoundCloud player to give insight into the thoughts and ideas behind the soundscape created.
The last portion of our project was the moving image, or video. The video was taken by our group to mirror the sounds projected in our soundscape. The video begins with the feet of a man walking from a crowded space into a dark, quiet space of his own. The video then follows the character through the drunken, clumsy state of writing and hating his work, locking away what little bit of his life he has left, and finally becoming a canine-like human without a value or desire left to cherish. The video was taken on iPhone and Canon cameras. The footage was then uploaded onto iMovie and FinalCut programs where it was cut and edited to transition seamlessly with the audio. We decided to exclude the piano interludes in the video version of the project as we deemed it important to the move listeners through the transitions of the audio but was not necessary in the video where the visuals aided the transition enough. In the revision process we did, however, overlay the video with a black-and-white, era-appropriate filter and embedded it on top of an image of a theatre. These effects created aesthetics that fit the time period the piece was written and creates contrast between the foreground and background. Then, the component to display tweets was added. The idea was that the tweets would be pooled based on pre-determined keywords linked to the narrative of the video. Then, at predetermined moments during the video, tweets would be randomly chosen from specific pools and shown. The tweets would be recent and relevant, almost real-time, and load with the page. These tweets form a chorus of random voices narrating or reflecting the story. Every time the page is loaded, different tweets are used. The experience of watching the video will never be the same twice.
The process for creating Tweet feedback component was complex. Node-RED was used to interact with Twitter's API on a server separate from the Blogger hosting system. Node-RED is a powerful tool which brings the simplicity of a flow chart to the creation of server side processing of content.
For our project, Node-RED maintains a connection to the Twitter API, searching for a specific series of keywords. The results are stored in a database powered by mongoDB. The collection in the database is capped so that it never exceeds a fixed size. When this page loads, it dynamically queries the server running the Node-RED instance using a similar list of keywords. For each keyword, a pool of tweets is returned from the database. This means the tweets are only near real time, not actually in real time. A combination of a coded script with time based triggers tied into the Youtube API and some randomness combine to display the tweets sporadically in random locations over the seats in the image of the theatre. They are animated using simple CSS transitions. All of the client side javascript, including the coded script are embedded directly into this page. Only the Node-RED code is hidden away. Along the revision process for this portion, the coded script was altered to include more keywords and variety during the playing of the video and the visual aesthetics of the sources were perfected.
In conclusion, our 4-part project perfectly explained the progression of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s breakdown described in The Crack-Up. From his full and exciting life to his seclusion into value-less living, we presented 3 complete retellings of the story using different mediums and 1 beautifully written section of poetry that not only mirrored this time period, but also aided in the portrayal of the blissful ease to which the release of writing gives him. We completed our goal of retelling the story through different mediums in a way that projected the progression of Fitzgerald’s life in The Crack-up, from a lively man surrounded by love and adventure to a lonely, tired soul.
