Cycle 2
Posted: November 14, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »https://youtu.be/Ymn3bq0i1Y0?si=IvjfVNHiVMXmmv-6
For Cycle 2, I started building the 360 degree environment that I talk about in my cycle 1. I used some reference photos that I took of my grandmother’s house back in August and started modeling the big pieces of furniture that are in that room as those were the most important in setting the space. I then worked on building up the hallways and walls to make the room an actual living space rather than a bunch of furniture scattered around.
Something that was really challenging in this process was allowing myself to be okay with items not perfectly accurate to real life. A viewer would never be able to tell that the things I’m modeling aren’t one to one because there is no reference to the space other than what I’ve made, but I had a hard time looking at my project and not seeing the imperfections in it. I also realized that the rooms are filled with too many objects to be modeled for the scale of this project, so deciding what items are important and which can be left out were hard. I decided to stick with the larger furniture items and then only make the smaller objects that have to do with what I’m going to animate to lighten the load.
There was a lot of good feedback and ideas given in class after showing everyone my project. The first big takeaway was that people enjoyed – and I enjoyed watching people interact with – the video style format and looking around at the environment on individual screens. Quite a few people wished for more interaction and expressed a desire to move around the space so that is something to consider. I’m hoping that some of that desire will be satisfied once the full animation is in place, but I also like the idea of only being able to watch what’s happening and not be able to interact as you would a real memory.
I’ve also been having lots of personal debates about the route I want to go down with materials and what style I want to make the look of the project. There were some good notes about how the grayscale – which was originally left as a placeholder – could be used purposefully to create some additional meaning. The overall feel of the environment was described as “dreamworld”, “astral projection-like”, and “shadow realm”, and I enjoy those interpretations of the work.
Next steps are to finish the short film 🙂
Cycle 1
Posted: October 30, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Cycle 1
I went through a few different ideas for this project and had a hard time settling on something due to the amount of directions I thought this project could go in. After a few days and some research, I decided that I wanted to explore the medium of 360 degree animation. From a technical standpoint, I thought it would be interesting to learn and left a few different options open for interactivity as well. Then came the challenge of deciding what the animation was going to be about. In my thesis work, I’ve been battling with the idea that storytelling is what I really want to focus on, so this project needed to be more focused on storytelling as a medium than previous projects.
Initially, I started out by figuring out what the benefits of making a 360 degree animation were that a traditional film medium didn’t possess.
- The ability to move from one screen to another
- The immersiveness of the space – like you are really there
- The abundance of details simultaneously included
- Forcing people to move
And the limitations
- Lost details
- Not everyone gets the same exact story or experience
- What is most important to focus on
In this case, the limitations weren’t necessarily bad things, but both lists were things to consider and try to find ways to design stories around.
My first idea was to do a series of vignettes. The story would take place in a town square and would be focused on the lives of people around the town. It would show planes flying around and interacting in the air, people dancing, musicians playing music, people having a conversation, a booth selling food, ants stealing the food, etc.. The idea here was that of a story centered around capturing a location rather than any one particular person’s experience. I used these ideas in the final project idea, but they originated here in this form.
My second idea was centered around the idea of perspective and what it would mean to show two sides of the same story simultaneously. I thought it could be interesting to show the hero and a villain both working on their side of the same conflict at the same time. The idea here was that depending on who the audience watched more, their opinion on the conflict would be swayed. Due to time constraints and a variety of logistical reasons, I didn’t think this was very feasible in the amount of time left in the semester, so I opted for something else.
There was brief consideration of adapting this idea into a story about two paths crossing from different storylines. Each half of the room showed the life of a different person until they ended up crossing paths and bumping into each other. Then the story would continue on and show the aftermath of the meeting.
My next idea was centered around the idea of time. I thought it would be cool to utilize the immersive environment and showcase the shifting of time and how a space changes when in it. I did a couple of projects in my undergrad centered around lost things and I thought it could be cool to continue this thread. I also used ideas from this in the final idea that I settled on.
The biggest challenge I’ve been facing for the past couple of years is figuring out what kind of storyteller I want to be and the kind of stories that I want to tell. I need to start doing a better job at exploring what is important to me and finding ways to reflect that in my work. With that in mind, I moved onto my final idea for this project.
My grandmother started getting sick right after Thanksgiving last year. After her passing in August, we visited her house to do some housekeeping things and saw that all of her Christmas decorations from the previous year were still up in her house, despite the fact that we didn’t get a chance to actually celebrate Christmas there due to her being in the hospital. It was a super surreal and haunting moment walking into that house. I took pictures of everything and documented the way she left everything the best I could so that I could look back on the memories. Recently, we started clearing out the house and sorting out her affairs. I’ve received a lot of things back that I had originally given to her as gifts and also a lot of things that I loved playing with and looking at when I visited. It’s made me think a lot about both the strength of memories that can be tied to physical things and the fleetingness of physical assets. There’s nothing quite like receiving back a bear that I gave my grandmother twenty years ago with my voice memo telling her I love her in it.
This parallel of objects containing memory is one of the biggest things I want to explore and capture. For myself, I’d like to recreate my grandmother’s living room (with some potential abstractness in the design to better fit the theme) and showcase these fading memories and the past.
Project idea:
- Time capsule of my grandmother’s living room/house.
- The concept of living memory, living ghosts, and nostalgia.
Memories to include:
- Playing and drawing on the carpet. (child’s drawings, tic-tac-toe, etc.)
- Playing on the piano
- Sweeping the fireplace broom
- Dinner at the dining room table
- Riding lawn mower outside window
- Making paperclip necklaces
- Playing board games
Other features:
I want to make a story without people/actors and focus only on the memories living on through objects in the house.
In the beginning, all of the different objects moving around the house and memories being showcased will be present. As the animation goes on, different things will fade away. At the end, there will only be the still, silent house (set up for Christmas) that has been left behind in her wake.
Intentionally, due to the 360 degree design of the animation, not everyone will see every memory or focus on every detail that is happening in the space. This is meant to symbolize the uniqueness of memory and the loss of it as time goes on. The idea is that everyone’s experiences in the space will be slightly different and unique but still represent a holistic experience of memory. Collectively, everyone may be able to talk about what they witnessed and remember, but alone, they are unable to capture everything.
I also spent some time learning about the technical side of things for cycle one. I explored how to use animation software to make a 360 degree animation as I had only ever seen them made with live action 360 cameras before. The process wasn’t nearly as difficult as I was anticipating and was able to do so with a few careful setting changes.
Here is a link to a test I made with a few assets I had lying around from another project.
Pressure Project 3
Posted: October 22, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For pressure project 3, I tried to think of something centered around sound that was really important to me growing up that I would able to find resources for or representation sounds for. Something that really stood out in my memory — and what I eventually settled on — was my time in my highschool marching band. I spent all of my free time and really grew up in band, so it seemed like a good topic for an assignment about sound and culture.
I realized when doing this project that I don’t have nearly as many videos and sound recordings of my life as I would like. My photos app on my phone, social media channels, drives, and physical storage are filled to the brim with pictures capturing my life, but there are barely any videos of anything. In the current age of technology, I’m so saddened by this. It’s so easy to press record on my phone and capture things and yet there’s not a lot from this time in my life and others to work with.
With this in mind — and determined to not switch ideas or give up — I contacted some old friends and asked for anything they had, as well as scoured the internet for things that other people in the community had posted openly around eight years ago. I was able to scrounge up a fair amount of videos, so then it was a matter of making meaning out of them.
My intention with the project was to capture the feeling of being in marching band and the community that went on behind it. Most of what anyone ever see’s with performance groups is the final stage piece — polished and clean for public consumption. The final performace is a bit part of it since it’s what we work toward for months at a time, but it’s not everything. It doesn’t really capture the people that make up the performace, how we interact with one another, and the work that goes into the end vision.
To do this, I tried to mix and match videos of performace with the band goofing off and bonding. I tried to keep away from any chronological order with my source videos and tried to balance putting silly stuff next to serious stuff. I also book ended the project with the ‘standard’ announcement that all bands here at a performace and the more personal send off that our band did at the end of every practice. This mix of universiality of personal memories was also important to me in this project.
One note I have from the project was I wish it didn’t rely so heavily on the visuals. For something so centered around music, it was hard to find audio that made sense without the context of the visual to go along with it. I suppose I could have centered the audio more around a feeling than events and people, and that might have made more sense in a solely audio context, but in the moment I couldn’t justify getting rid of visuals when the medium on marching band is also highly visual. If I were to go back and do it again, I would work more towards a piece independent of video though.
Regardless, I had a good time doing this project and living in my memories for a little bit. It’s always nice to look back and feel nostalgic for awhile. 🙂
Pressure Project 2
Posted: October 15, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »When I started out this project, I was really excited to get into the storytelling and create a mystery. I went through a few different ideas including a treasure map, a secret agent entering a vault door, and turning the door into a magic mirror with an evil spirit. These were all really cool, but I was having a hard time fitting them into the required resources, so after a lot of brainstorming and trying to make things fit, I switched approaches. I looked at the resources I had and figured out the best ways to use them and then built a story around that.
The end story I ended up with was a story about an adventurer going on a journey to rescue something and the pressure project being the adventurer finally getting to where they are going and having the final boss fight.
With the makey-makey I decided to make my own controller to cast magic spells. I used the webcam to make the evil spirit more angry (symbols changing on screen more frantically) when there is more movement in front of the camera. I used a stuffed unicorn (his name is Craig) as the final treasure that you find behind the door. Since I have an interest and focus in storytelling and animation, I tried to find ways to incorporate more narrative into the built system. This resulted in three different scenes. The first scene is the ‘villains monologue’ where we are introduced to the task at hand. The second scene is where the battle and interaction mainly takes place. The third scene was the indicator of success and telling people they can now open the door and receive their prize.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no idea how long things take to complete. I started out this project with really grand ideas and a big vision of what I wanted and thought “This is completely reasonable and doable in a ten hour time frame!”. I was very wrong. That being said, when I realized just how long certain things were taking me, I was able to scale down my ideas considerably to get to something that was more manageable.
There are two different mindsets that I’ve had professors try to instill in me over the past two years. The first one is to work in slices. The whole thing doesn’t need to be complete, but at the deadline, that section of the thing needs to be a complete and working thing. The second mindset I’ve been referring to is to look at the software and figure out what I can do with what I have, rather than trying to fit what I have into something I want to do – working from inward as opposed to outward in. In terms of scale, I try to remind myself of these things on every project I work on. I’m more successful on some occasions than others.
Obviously, my first attempt at presenting this didn’t go as planned. Apparently, the last time I worked on my project, none of the progress I made saved, causing the initial break in the system. Then when I tried to fix it, my laptop decided it had had enough and gave out on working for the rest of the day. Over the weekend, I was able to figure out the issue with the saving, and make the changes necessary so that it should work fine when I attempt to present next.
Other than that, there was a lot of iterating in the process and trial and error in trying to get things to work. I had a vision of what I wanted to make, but I ended up exploring different nodes and trying to find realistic ways to make things. I started with a small task of making the butterflies move, and figured out how to be creative with the other spells.
I really liked getting to work with physical materials in this project. A lot of the work I do usually exists only on the computer screen, so I liked getting to play around with the makey-makey, and doing arts and crafts to make my controller. I think if I were to go back and do it again, I would focus more on finding better ways to make the experience more immersive and using my environment to my advantage.
Pressure Project 1
Posted: September 9, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Pressure Project 1:
I want to start off by saying that this project had a few more complications than I was intending to run into. The biggest being the idea of spending an hour in a public place (and then sketching what was happening around me – especially when it involved people). I guess I didn’t really realize how few spaces actually exist in public where it isn’t weird or frowned upon to stand/sit there staring at people.
For example, I thought about looking at checkout lines at the grocery store, but couldn’t find a feasible way to explain why I was sitting there watching people pay for things without seeming sketchy. Then I thought about going to the library and looking at the book checkout system there, but thought I might get security called on me for being creepy for not reading or anything that I should have been doing in a library. It was too hot outside to feasibly sit outside and do this assignment, so I wanted to find a place indoors where it wouldn’t seem weird to spend long periods of time watching things and people.
That being said, for this pressure project, I chose to look at the laundry room and machines in the basement of my apartment building. These machines, while intended to be helpful, probably contain more flaws than working parts.
Each washer and dryer are different brands or models, which means that there are four different machine systems at any given time. Each washer and dryer has a handful of different options that you can choose from when wanting to clean your clothes. After washing my laundry myself and watching others in my building do so, I determined that the settings don’t really mean anything.
For example,
- Setting the dryer to low/medium heat, really means that there will be no heat applied at all and they will just tumble around in the dryer.
- Setting the timer option of the dryer also doesn’t work and actually calculates any time you set it at as three times longer than intended.
- The washing machines attempt to weigh the clothes and will run the cycle of cleaning them based on that weight. This, however, is a problem because none of the machines have time remaining on them. So it’s really a mystery when clothes will be finished.
I have watched half a dozen people come into the laundry room expecting their clothes to be finished only for the cycle to still be happening. Or the cycle will be complete but their clothes won’t be clean or will still be sopping wet. Or in retaliation against the machines taking an unknown amount of time, will leave their clothes in for hours after they are finished.
I watched people throw clothes onto the ground and place them in different places around the dark dingy basement. I also noted that there were clothes in a washer already finished being clean when I arrived. No one came to pick them up in the hour that I sat in the basement. The clothes were also still there in the machine when I came down later in the evening to get reference photos for my diagrams. I haven’t been back down there since this experience, so it is entirely possible that the clothes remain there to this day.
When doing my own laundry, I’d also like to note that the knob on the dryer I was using was possibly broken. It was connected to the machine, but it sort of seemed like the wrong knob was added onto the machine because it didn’t fit or turn right. After using another machine that required you to pull out the knob and press it in to start it, I repeated those steps on this machine and accidentally took off the knob. I don’t think it was supposed to do that. I put it back on but it didn’t really align right. I take no responsibility for what has happened here.
It should also be noted that I have only drawn the inhabited side of this creepy unfinished basement. The other half of the room doesn’t get any light to it and looks like something straight out of a horror film.
To me, the solutions to these problems seem easy. There are clear things that could be addressed to making the clothes cleaning process easier. But to be honest, addressing these things doesn’t sound fun in the slightest. I’m choosing to assume that since the landlords haven’t fixed these things, that there is a reason. I’m not a professional laundry room manager afterall; there must be a reason things are designed this way. So… in the name of understanding and empathy toward my landlords, I have chosen chaos.
- The first thing that obviously has to happen is some sort of pay system. Right now, it is free to use the machines. Clearly, that was an oversight on their part and needs to be remedied immediately.
- But why stop there? MICROTRANSACTION GAMIFICATION of the washing machines! It could be a pay to win system with loot boxes where you have to pay in order to spin a wheel, and whatever you land on gives you things like:
- Wash time?
- Water temperature?
- How many clothes are you allowed to put in?
- How clean are the clothes going to come out?
- Obviously, you have to keep spinning in order to get the options that you want and clearly, each spin will cost you additional money.
- But why stop there? MICROTRANSACTION GAMIFICATION of the washing machines! It could be a pay to win system with loot boxes where you have to pay in order to spin a wheel, and whatever you land on gives you things like:
- In order to counteract all of the broken knobs and buttons on the machines, I propose that we make the system fully digital in the basement with no wifi or reception.
