Pressure Project 3 (Sara)

I plucked out the story I wanted to tell and the accompanying audio I wanted to use within half an hour of beginning.  If only the remaining eight and a half hours spent on Pressure Project 3 had progressed as fluidly.  Oh, well, Lawrence Halprin tells us “one of the gravest dangers we experience is the danger of becoming goal-oriented;” I don’t think anyone would accuse me of forgoing the process in favor of a goal over the course of this meandering rumination on how I’ve grappled with 3/11 in the ten years since the disaster.

First, the parts of the assignment that flowed easily:

Alex told us the deadline was Thursday, March 11.  3/11 marks the tenth anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that in turn led to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster.  I was completing an undergraduate study abroad program in Shiga Prefecture at the time.  As the earthquake struck and the tsunami was thundering towards the shore, I was shopping for a pencil case at a mall near Minami-Hikone Station.  I was utterly oblivious to the devastation until I walked into my host family’s living room and saw a wave sweeping across airport runways.

So, yes, when Alex told us the deadline for this project was March 11, I knew there was only one “story of significant cultural relevance” I could tell.

After my study abroad program was summarily canceled, and we were forced to scramble for airfare back to the States, I spent a good deal of time adrift.  Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to get in my car and head west.  So I did.  I drove west for a week, making it as far as the Badlands of South Dakota before turning around.  Sometime later, I took a creative nonfiction course and wrote a piece about grappling with memories, grief, and coming unmoored.  The writing was selected for my university’s literary journal, and so the audio you hear is my voice from all those years ago.

Now, onto process:

The piece was more than five minutes long, so I dumped the file into Audition and pruned it to meet Alex’s 3.5-minute requirement.  Ensuring that the work still told a cohesive story after excising large swaths of it took half an hour.

After that is where things became tricky.  We were told we didn’t have to use Isadora.  I’ve been interested in dabbling with Godot for our upcoming Cycles project, so I was tempted to get a headstart and move directly into using the software.  I jotted down the following notes:

“User plays with water while listening to audio?”

“3D water?”

Alex graciously explored GLSL shader options in Isadora with me.  Unfortunately, I was 1.) stubborn and interested in Godot, and 2.) felt personally removed and emotionally remote from the visual experience.  The waves were lovely, but I didn’t mold them myself.  I wanted to dig my hands in the electronic clay.

I started watching Intro to Godot videos and quieted any voices in my head wondering if I was falling too far into the weeds.  Four hours and fifteen minutes later, I had an amorphous blob of nothing.  I wrote the following note:

“Do I press forward with Godot?  Do I return to Isadora?  Do I crawl back to my roots and make an animatic?”

A few months ago, I had dabbled in 3D panoramas in Photoshop using equirectangular projections.  I thought that perhaps that might be a way to bring the audience closer to the story without the kitsch of “splash around in fake water with your Leap Motion while listening to young, lost Sara.”  I didn’t want to Google “3/11 Triple Disaster” and sift through the wreckage like a disaster tourist, so I instead looked up photos of Lake Biwa.  The school where I studied squatted right on its shore.  The Google results felt inert, so I then cracked open my defunct Facebook and went back to the albums I haven’t looked at in years.  I found a photo of the entryway at my homestay strewn with boxes, luggage, and shoes.  The caption read: “The morning I moved out of my homestay.”

Even after all this time, it hit me like a punch to the gut.  I immediately started sketching it.  I didn’t know what I was actually going to do with it, but drawing was a visceral, physical relief.

After making a messy sketch, I played with palettes.  Eventually, I settled on the Japanese national red as the mid-tone and bumped the lights and darks around from there.  I got even messier.  I wanted the colors to sort of hurt the eyes; I wanted the whole thing to feel smudgy.

All right.

I had an audio clip.

I had an illustration.

Now what?

I found more old photos.  I sketched more.  I emailed my host family.  I cried.  Eventually, I found myself with half an hour to go and disparate, disconnected images and sounds.  Finally, I listened to the wind outside the trees, thought about how it sounded like waves along the shore, and jumped into Premiere to make an audio-visual composition.

I don’t really feel like I created this work so much as wrenched it loose.  Truthfully, I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Pressure Project 2 (Sara)

After opening the project file for the first time in a week, I was mystified by how to even “read” what I had created so far.  I found myself getting hot and panicky when I couldn’t get the Leap Motion to track my hand—it took me an embarrassingly long time to recall that I need to have the Leap Motion Visualizer program open at the same time while using the device.

As it turns out, I need to do a better job of documentation.  Currently, my “documentation” is a mess of contextless screenshots and notes scattered across two separate notebooks I also use for my TTRPG campaigns.  (Like with most things, this would not be the case Pre-Rona.  Your girl is a dutiful note-taker in classroom settings.  Alas.)

So, first things first, I went about bypassing, disconnecting, and reconnecting nodes to determine just what exactly everything does in my patch.  Then, I commented everything out.

I’m pretty satisfied with the results.  When the user twists their right wrist, lightning “shoots” out of the bottle when the angle of rotation is within established parameters.  I can totally see this functionality being expanded into a sort of gamified wrist stretching exercise.  “Hey, exhausted human who spends too much time at the computer!  Twist your wrists to shoot the balloons out of the sky!”  Perhaps that’ll be my final project if I can’t figure out how to develop a spooky Call of Cthulhu-esque Zoom UI?

Anyway, my biggest challenges with this scene entailed masking and image clipping.  As the lightning activates, a low-opacity background appears.  Additionally, the frame of the lightning clip is only so large, so the lightning cuts off before hitting the edge of the projector frame.  When I ran into a similar issue with the bottle PNG being too small to rotate without clipping, Alex helped me add a Scaler actor.  I thought the same method could both hide the sudden appearance of the background and scale out the lightning to the edge of the projector.  Unfortunately, it seemed to only warp the clip.  I managed to obscure the unwanted background with a dark gray square background, but I couldn’t find an answer to my lightning clipping issue.

I still had quite a number of hours to go to complete the 5-hour limit for this Pressure Project, and I was fresh out of ideas for what more to do with this Bottled Lightning patch for now.  I began reviewing the mishmash of screenshots I mentioned previously.  Lo and behold, I stumbled upon one I named “Leap Motion Clap Color Change.”  I remembered Alex and Maria puzzling through this practice patch in class, but I hadn’t yet tried it out for myself.  Apologies  if I totally ripped off your idea here, Maria, but I figured I had enough time to kill to try my own spin on it.

At first, I thought I’d try to do a “Clap On/Clap Off” lamp.  When the hands were in range (i.e., clapping), the scene would illuminate.  I even thought it might be neat to randomize the appearance of surprising/spooky/funny images.  

Clap on!

“Oh, it’s a cute lil’ Shy Guy!”  

Clap off!  

[The lights turn off.]

Clap on!

“Ah!  It’s the girl from The Ring!  Clap off!  Clap off!”

If you see the “TEST: Image Generator” scene in the file, you can see my attempts to sort out how to turn on and off Shy Guy.

I didn’t want to throw in the towel entirely, so I shifted to a “Clap On/Clap On” idea.  In Maria and Alex’s original patch, they randomized the color of a square through a Comparator > Random > Color Maker RGBA actor sequence.  Then, the same Comparator and Color Maker RGBA actors were plugged into a Gate actor that hooked up to the Shape actor.  Spinning off of that, I tried to put a street light “on the fritz.”  There was this unsettling path in the woods back in my William and Mary days where the lights would buzz, falter, and go out just as you happened to walk under them.  I plugged the Random actor just into the blue and alpha channels to simulate that change in saturation and strength.  Then, I dumped the whole thing into a shape actor, duplicated it, and scaled it down to make it look like a series of them.

In the Bottled Lightning scene, I was pleased with the Leap Motion functionality but a little vexed by the bare-bones appearance of the product.  With this scene, the reverse proved true.  It looked moody and evocative, but the clapping motion didn’t work as well as I would like.  I’m not certain why this is the case, but I think it may have something to do with the values I input for the Inside Range actors.

Truth be told, this project felt a bit like a “sophomore slump” for me.  My first project was a wacky, freeing, and free-wheeling exploration of what Isadora can do.  This time around, I felt a self-imposed pressure to deliver something bigger and better.  I’m still learning.  I’ll keep at it and try again next time.