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
