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Tommy CDROM thoughts



Folks:

Last night I spent about 3 hours going through the 
Tommy CDROM. 
For those of you who hate long messages:
Overall, it's a nice piece of work, but it has one major shortcoming:
the video and audio clips are way too short.

As for the content:
most of you hardcore fans won't learn anything new
really about Tommy and its evolution.
A lot of the video is repurposed from other sources
already available. And the interviews that _are_ unqiue
to this CDROM don't shed much light, save for the
new Pete interview segments, and even those
suffer from the "fast-cut" nature of this piece.
What I mean by that is Pete starts talking about
something and right when you're getting interested,
"bam!" that's it...on to the next slice.

The interface is clean and easy to understand
_and_ use. That's an important point that
a lot of CDROM designers overlook. 

A bit more perspective if you're interested:

The company that put this together should have looked
at the "For All Mankind" CDROM by Voyager Co. (it's
a digitized version of Al Reinert's 1989 documentary
about the Apollo moon missions with supplemental
interviews, photos etc.).

That's a prime example for how to present audio/video
information on CDROM that gives the user the choice
of skipping around or staying in one place to take in
as much info. as needed (e.g., the interviews are long but
offer Quicktime controllers to skip through boring stuff, as 
well as navigation icons to go to other sections of the
CDROM).

The one major dissappointment I have is that  the interviews 
on the Tommy CDROM are so short in a William Burrough's 
"cut-up-and-paste" style. Non-linearity is a strength 
of CDROM  as a medium, but not many people are applying it correctly.
IMHO, that's the case here.

As for the three sections of the  Tommy CDROM:

The "Experimental" section: aesthetically, this
is really nicely done. The look really suits the music.
You hear about the first 3 minutes of a song from the original
LP. As it plays an animated sequence plays that illustrates
the song. A couple letters on screeen are clickable that bring you to different
areas, or trigger a little QuickTime movie somewhere on screen.
For you multimedia tech heads, it looks like they did this in
Macromedia Director, exported as QuickTime and then reimported
the QuickTime movie (yes, at 640x480 or thereabouts!) and are using the
movieTime to control
navigation and triggering the music etc. 
I was really impressed with this section (can you tell I do this stuff
for a living?)

If you click on a letter, you get a screen with audio samples
of the same song from the LP, the movie soundtrack and the Broadway
production.To the right are the song's lyrics.
Some, but not all, of the screens have a "P" that you can click 
on to hear Pete say something about the song. Some are interesting,
but again, they're too short to add substantially to the user's understanding
of the work as a whole.

The Documentary:
Again, aesthetically, really well done. I like how the screens
transition from year to year (technically, this is easy to do--that
transition is built right into Director, the software used to create
the piece).

Each screen of this section  covers a year or decade from 1969 up to "The 90s".
Basically, this is a section that allows you to access all the QuickTime
movies contained on the CDROM. You click on different images to activate
screens where QuickTime movies start playing.

Most of the QuickTIme is repurposed from the Tommy film, 
the Broadway show (I suppose this will be nice for
those folks who haven't seen it--I saw it twice though at the
St. James), "The Kids Are Alright" etc. But even this stuff is
kinda interesting as there are interview snippets in them
from Entwhistle, some music critics (Ira Robbins thinks
the Tommy movie is a "lame piece of filmmaking" while
the other guy on the same screen thinks it was brilliant! ha!)
and Ken Russell.

Overall, this was probably my favorite section of the whole CDROM.

Pete's Archives:
What's cool about this is that they digitized old scraps of Pete's
notebooks with original lyrics, running song lists (there are about
4 of them--in the original track lists "Young Man Blues" and
"Shakin' All Over" are included--you can ponder how that might
have changed the overall tone of the original LP).
There's also a copy of the Spiritual Chart Pete wrote out for
the protagonist...it's large and I haven't looked at the whole thing.
Most of the personal photos were published in Richard Barnes's
"The Who:Maximum R&B"...I was hoping for more obscure stuff.

Bottomline: the look is really nice...the Experimental portion
is a nice impressionistic interpretation of some of the songs
from the LP, the Documentary section offers a few unique
insights into Tommy's various incarnations, and Pete's
Archives contain some documents of interest
to hardcore fans....but if the creators of this CDROM are
hoping that users will walk away with an understading of
Tommy and the "how" and the "why"  behind  it, I think
they've failed on that account. I'll balance that out by
saying there's a nice supplemental 72-page  booklet that
accompanies the  CDROM with a good "Recommended
Reading" page....and that's really how people are going
to learn about Tommy anyways aside from listening
to the original LP.

And the thing actually runs out of the box! 
A major plus of course... ;-)

-B







=====================================================
                                    Brendon Macaraeg
               http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~brendonm 
    Finger macaragb@acf2.nyu.edu for my PGP Public Key