Site: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/809ZDk/:Vq9UNp.G:DaCTP$pW/inception-explained.com/

Monthly Review 2

For this month’s review, I found a really neat site on StumbleUpon that uses the same concept as what we were assigned for our folklore project. It is a scrolling webpage that visually explains (with light narration) the plot of the movie Inception.

It first, is a great concept because Inception could be a hard plot to follow for some people and this site explains it in a very basic way, with very basic shapes, colors, and movements. This keeps it as simple as it can be so that even the dumbest person who saw the movie could understand it after looking at this site. Or if someone did not see it, they would easily grasp the plot.

The first interesting thing is a very small constantly running clock in the upper right hand corner. Time is a very key element of the film and the further down the characters go in the dream state, the slower time passes and the clock in the corner of the web page also slows down as the plot explanation reaches further dream states. Clever.

As the page scrolls down further we are introduced to the characters represented by simple circles at the bottom of the screen, with the name of the character written inside. Each has a different hue and saturation so that no two are alike. As each character is emphasized at certain plot points of the film, as you scroll, that character’s circle raises itself slightly above the others to show the viewer who is in focus, along with saying it in the type.

As we enter various dream states, the circle of whoever’s dream it is becomes smaller and raises up to the middle of the page with lines connecting it to all the other circles to tell us which characters are together. Also the light background echoes where their dream is: street, hotel, hospital, and limbo (raw subconscious). Great composition and it’s very well organized so that everything has its own space and it isn’t hard to see any object.

The overall presentation is really solid. Objects’ sizes change and move around constantly, The colors work well together and the shapes and images are simple enough so that we still know what they are without being overly complicated. The flow is also nicely done; even though the page scrolls to reveal more of the story in that way, there is also movement by objects on the page so we don’t just scroll down static images, which would be duller. Also, the type is never in the same spot engaging the viewer’s eye. Overall there is a lot of movement between the characters, text, and scrolling making it a very fun and nicely designed web page, despite that it gives me a headache to imagine how much code went into it.