Pressure Project 1: Bouncing Idle Screen

Posted: October 15, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

The idea for this pressure project came to me based on the “achievements” that Alex gave us to work towards. At first I was concerned about how I could possibly keep an audience engaged for over 30 seconds with something non-interactive. But then I thought about something completely noninteractive that does keep people engaged, and that’s the DVD bouncing idle screen. I specifically remember doing this myself whenever I saw it, but I knew other people liked doing it too from seeing it in internet memes or referenced in pop culture. This idea seemed perfect as it could definitely be done within Isadora.

The only issue was that it didn’t feel like it would be enough work for 5 hours. I then decided that because this idle screen plays on a TV, I could simulate someone changing channels. My first thoughts for other channels were full static and the color bars as obviously I can’t animate anything too complex (although maybe a live feed camera could have worked…). This was when I started creating the project in Isadora.

The first thing I made was the TV. I wanted an actual TV to be visible instead of just using the edges of the stage because it looks nicer but also because it just makes it feel more authentic. I also wanted it to be in the classic 4:3 resolution that old CRT TVs had. Another aspect of these older TVs that I wanted to emulate was the curved corners of the screen (technically the entire screen is bulging out but this is a 2D representation). With that plan in mind, I created the first TV with two boxes: the outer TV casing and the screen. I made the outer casing a darkish grey hue and the screen was a sort of dark grey/green thing that I associate with turned-off TVs of this type (the screen also has a thick black border so the entire thing doesn’t go from outer casing to the screen). The first issue came with adding the curved corners of the screen. The best way I could figure out how to do this was to use a shape with odd insets as that was the closest thing to a negative space curve. The issue with this however, was that it couldn’t be layered under border while on top of the screen, as those were both being represented by a single square. See below:

To solve this, I recreated the border casing as 4 individual rectangles so that the layering would allow the corner shape to be on top of the screen and under the border. The also allowed the entire TV itself to have softer edges as the rectangles ended up not perfectly flush. The TV was also made into a user actor where the color of the screen was controllable. The completed turned-off TV is below:

Next was to make the main attraction: the bouncing idle screen. The first thing I did was create a default white square. I used two wave generators for its vertical and horizontal position, with the wave generators in triangle mode as the movements should constant the entire time. To my surprise, this immediately worked in making the square bounce around the screen exactly as I wanted, the only exception is that it was bouncing around the borders of the entire stage. After some scaling and position subtracting (mostly done through trial and error) the square correctly bounced within the TV.

Now that I have something bouncing, it’s time to make that thing change colors every time it hits as edge. I did this by using an inside range actor connected to the wave generators. Every time the wave generators left the range of 0.5 – 99.5 it sent out a signal. This perfectly corresponds to when the shape bounces off a wall. I then connecting this signal to three random actors and connected those to a color maker RGBA actor’s red, green, and blue values to generator a random color for the shape. Now every time the square bounces off a wall, it also changes color.

The final thing I needed to do was replace the default square shape with something else. I didn’t want to recreate the original exactly, so I replaced the “DVD” text with “ACCAD” and just put a small empty oval underneath it similar to the original. I turned this into a user actor to simplify the views and after a few more operations it looked great. See below:

I was extremely happy with how this turned out, but I still needed a bit more to complete the project. The next thing I created was the static screen. At first I wanted it to be as accurate as possible by having a large number of shapes act as pixels, but this quickly showed to be not possible. At one point I had over a hundred little “pixels” that would get a random black and white color and position in the screen but the lag this caused was too great to continue. Not to mention the fact that it looked horrible! I then briefly thought about using several images of static screen and cycling between them, but I couldn’t remember how to display and swap images and this seemed like the easy approach any way. I ended up using a couple dozen large “pixels” to simulate a sort of static. By coincidence, they ended up in a similar pattern to how the color bars looked and so I was satisfied enough. The squares simply get a random black and white color in a pretty fast frequency. See below:

The last screen I made was the color bars. This was very simple as it was just static colors, although getting the exact correct positions was a little annoying sometimes.

Finally, I decided to simulate the TV turning off as it felt like a pretty iconic old TV action and a satisfying conclusion. For this animation, I used two wave generators set to sawtooth and to only play once. One wave generator squishes a big white square vertically into a line, and then the other squishes it horizontally until it’s gone. The end result was surprisingly satisfying! See below for the color screen into turning off:

Now that I had all the scenes complete, I needed to link them together. For the idle screen, I decided to start a counter for the number of times it bounces off the top or bottom wall. After 20 bounces it switches to static. For both static and the color bars I simply had a pulse generator activating a counter to switch after an amount of pulses. There was probably a better way to do this, but I was running out of time and there was one more thing I wanted to do.

The very last thing I added was channel text to the corners of the static and color bar scenes. This would further signify that this was a TV the viewer was looking at. Ideally, this would be solid and then slowly fade away, but given the time crunch it was just a very slow constant fade. Because these scenes only play briefly, it isn’t too noticeable.

The complete (although slightly shortened) result can be seen below:

The feedback I received on this project was amazing! I seemed like everyone made at least some noise while it was playing. One person said they were getting physically engaged in the idle bounces. Some people didn’t realize it was a TV until it changed channels which actually surprised me as it seemed obvious given the context of the idle bouncing. I hadn’t thought about how someone who wasn’t completely familiar with it wouldn’t know what was happening or what the border was supposed to represent. I was extremely happy when someone pointed out the curved corners of the screen as I thought nobody would even notice or care about it. There were also feelings of nostalgia and anticipation among the viewers as well.

This pressure project was a ton of fun! Isadora is just a blast to create things with and pushing its capabilities is something I loved exploring. If I had more time, I definitely could have done a lot more with this project, but I’m looking forward to creating more interactive experiences in future projects!