Final Project
Posted: December 10, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For the final project I wanted to incorporated my costume design into media. I wanted to test painting designs onto fabric while a performer is moving around. For this project I brought in several skills and learned new skills while creating the experience.
Preparing for the final project.
I had to create a skirt that would also act as a media surface. I decided to go with a hoop skirt as that would provide a large space to project upon. I ended up drafting a pattern and sewing a skirt made out of taffeta. I purchased a white turtle neck shirt to allow for more surface to project upon.
I had to obtain the audio and visual aspects of the experience. When I first put together the project it was just a dress form in the middle of the space. After running it one time for the class and obtaining feedback as well as experiencing Andre’s multi-media experience, I knew that I was missing elements that finally came to mind. I needed more atmosphere. This is when I had to decide on a story and find audio and visual elements to go with it.
I wanted to utilize a Blue October song as their music themes had been weighing heavily on me lately. It was after finding one that I liked that I knew I needed to find some corresponding audio as well. After countless hours of searching on the internet I finally decided to pull audio from five sources. Those were One Republic’s Connection, Lovelytheband’s Broken, Blue October’s Daylight, a short film called Siren, and Lindsey Stirling’s First Light.
For visual I utilized top down images that were found randomly that included mandala’s and geometric shapes. This was projected onto the performer from the grid. I had two side scrims that I put images on that were very similar. The images included people in crowds where they did not interact, geometric shapes, a disco ball type lights as if you were inside the ball that were turning, a hillside looking down to the ocean, and then the northern lights. The disco ball lights moved in a direction going towards the center screen. The hillsides were similar but different in that they both went downward towards the middle screen. The center screen started with a man who kept going through a crowd of people where he was not able to interact with anyone, then we moved to an eye that had digital images on the iris, the next video was two videos overlapped with the visual of rain falling on a window with words that corresponded to lyrics that showed up. The lyrics were recorded in a PowerPoint slide show, the next video was where you were underwater looking at the surface, followed by videos of ink being injected into water.
Before this project I had not done any audio or video editing. I ended up finding a program online called Video Pad Video Editor. I was able to get down to the single frame to be able to edit the different images to change at the same time. I first edited the middle video to the audio that was my starting point. It was definitely an eye opener as to what video editors go through which I now have a new appreciation for.
I used Isadora to create the framework for the videos to push through the projectors. I also utilized the Kinnect to follow the performer. I connected the Kinnect to Isadora through the program Vuo. Everything had tested well and worked on the last class period and when I got into the motion lab the day of performance the Kinnect was no longer in the same spot. I even tested the top down projector and it seemed to work. Between then and when I was able to set up again for the actual performance there were changes to the projector in Isadora which caused the projections on the performer not to work the way it had previously. Luckily Alex was there to create a new projector for the video to go through correctly.
It looked like the audience enjoyed the experience. After the performance I was able to get another video for archival purposes. After that there were three faculty members from ACCAD, Design and Theatre and I was able to run it one more time. After reflecting on the conversation that happened afterwards, I realized that I have grown. I was able to describe what was technically going on fairly easily. At the beginning of the semester there is not a way that I could have done that. Overall, I am very happy with the way everything turned out.
Isadora Set-Up
Isadora Play Scene
Final Schematic
Posted: November 6, 2018 Filed under: Final Project Leave a comment »My schematic for the final project is in the link.
Final Proposed Planning
Posted: November 6, 2018 Filed under: Final Project Leave a comment »Proposed Planning
11/8 – Work in Drake
11/13 – Work in ACCAD
11/15 – Work in Motion Lab 4-5:20pm
11/20 – Projector Hang/Focus – Critique
11/27 – Determined by outcome of 11/20 – Work in Motion Lab
11/29 – Split Motion Lab time
12/4 – Last Minute Problem Solving
12/6 or 12/7 Perform Final TBD
Pressure Project 3
Posted: November 6, 2018 Filed under: Pressure Project 3 Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 3 I decided to bring in some of my childhood enjoyments to this project. Knowing that I had to have a project that did not involve the keyboard yet had some level of technology involved I had to figure out what to do. I remember enjoying decoding things and figuring out puzzles. The technology that was involved was the Makey Makey and using a website called Scratch. The experience was where someone was to receive a piece of paper. On the paper you had four pictures with a piece of duct tape on top and three dashes below the pictures. There were two tables. One table had a group of red cups that were turned over. The other table had a computer and a Ritz cracker box with silver items protruding up from the inside of the box. When someone received their paper, they were to use the color of the duct tape at the top of the paper to correspond with the color duct tape on the cup that had a letter written on it. Then using those cups, they then had it narrowed down to a smaller number of letter choices. Then looking at the pictures they had to figure out the word and the three dashes let them know that it was a three-letter word. Once they figured out the word they were to figure out that you had to turn the cup right side up to reveal a number inside the cup. Then using the numbers, they were to go to the computer and Ritz box. On the Ritz box there were ten silver protruding sets of foil. There were three rows of three foils and one foil in the center bottom that had the message hold me written around it. The experiencer then was to hold the tenth foil and then touch the other ones in order of the numbers. Once the code was cracked they heard a cheering noise from the computer. There was also a message for the user to click the green flag when they heard their noise.
It seemed that everyone was enjoying the experience. One person said they enjoyed the tactile experience of the this project. It became one big group event and they even asked for more clues when they finished one. They eventually tried to find how to break the experience or to find out if there were any underlying similarities from the clues. They eventually found out that to make the cheering sound you had to hold the one silver prong and enter two numbers followed by the nine. If I was to do this again, I would work more triggers to where there were different sounds for series of numbers and for every last digit that was different, there was a different sound or a random sound.
As I was trying to determine how to put together this pressure project I did some research into other ideas. I ran across a video on how to use the Makey Makey and a book about different projects called 20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius. There are a lot of projects in the book that I would like to make happen yet I needed to narrow down to this specific project. The project I used was the lock box project. I did some tweaking from what the book has to make it my own. Overall, I feel that this was a successful project.
Pressure Project 2
Posted: September 29, 2018 Filed under: Pressure Project 2 Leave a comment »Pressure Project 2 was building a fortune telling machine. The time constraint was 9 hours. My goal was to have a machine that would provide a “knowledge nugget” that would be randomly produced when you pressed a key and then after a preset amount of time it would bring up the prompt to select a key again. I spent 3 hours trying to find the actor that would allow you to press a key and then it would produce a result. I finally reached out to Alex and found out how to do this. I wanted to feel like I used my nine hours productively and therefore I reset my time. In the end I used up all nine hours.
During the process of putting together the machine I found that I was unable to get it to produce a random video nor image. Then I went forward with assigning a letter a particular picture. I did overlay two images – the text and a background image. I attempted to get it to loop and was unsuccessful but was able to get it to go back to the first stage when the number 1 key was pressed.
Although I wasn’t able to get everything created that I wanted, I was able to get a machine to work. I wanted to make sure and stay within the nine hours and had to leave it as it was.
I was the first to present my fortune telling machine. It was quite refreshing to see a positive response after not having the most positive response with Pressure Project 1. People said it was cute and that my keyboard, which is multicolored, helped with the experience. One student did try to break the machine. I did find it interesting that although the prompt that you would need to press 1 when done was either forgotten or others would leave without pressing 1. Of course, this would have been eliminated if I was able to figure out how to get it to loop back to the first stage after a predetermined amount of time. It was determined that it needed to be a group setting and not an individual setting for it be successful for any future iterations.
Overall, I am happy with the response and the outcome of the experience. I felt successful as I did this completely in Isadora. If I was to have more time or revisit it, I would definitely have random ability and a timer that would end up looping back to stage 1. I also would like to have incorporated audio into the experience.
Attached are images of different stages I used in my Isadora PP2.
PP2 Image 1 PP2 Image 2 PP2 Image 3 PP2 Image 4
Pressure Project 1
Posted: September 19, 2018 Filed under: Pressure Project I Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 1 I chose to tell a story about the history of my ancestry. I was quite surprised to find out when I was a teenager that I actually am Wendish and not German. Most people have no idea who the Wendish are and to me that makes me feel unique in a way. I wanted to portray the feeling of where I am happy to know that I am actually Wendish but I have a sense of sadness knowing what the Wendish went through. When I created my Pressure Project I wanted to try to convey a disjointed feeling. I had upbeat music that had lyrics about having no roots and a visual that was showing a unpleasant beginning roots to who I am. I chose to use PowerPoint as I am familiar with this program and did not want to go over the five hours allotted.
When I presented my project I got a mixed reaction to what my classmates experienced. The disjointed feeling was what I was trying to get across and in that I did succeed in what I wanted to accomplish. My classmates were able to understand the story I was trying to convey but many, as I perceived their response, did not respond well to the experience.
In response, I wanted to revisit this project and in doing so I stayed strictly to audio and no visuals. Although I will not be presenting this in class I wanted to go ahead and post it here to allow anyone that would like to experience it to be able to. This was an eye opening exercise that now gets me thinking about how much time I really do spend working on projects.
Note: the link is to a PDF of what was presented in class with the top audio file being the music that played under the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint file is too large to post. The second audio file is my Response to Pressure Project 1.