Pressure Project 1 (Sara)
Posted: January 31, 2021 Filed under: Assignments, Pressure Project I, Sara C Leave a comment »The Power—The Passion—The PATCH!
Intent
I used the time-based, “pressure” parameter of this project as permission to throw spaghetti at the wall, have fun, and get weird. After all, with a hard stop of only five hours to create something that wrests the audience’s attention for as long as possible, I figured a good metric of success would be if I could make myself laugh.
This project happened to coincide with my most recent Xena Warrior Princess rewatch, so I jotted the following ideas down in my notes:
- Xena criss-crosses landscapes
- Start with patches from class tutorials and get more outlandish
- Include audio?
- Make Greece wibbly-wobbly?
After finding a PNG of Xena in profile charging with her a raised sword, I started inserting it as a user actor in multiple scenes. I thought it would be strange and delightful for her to race across non sequitur landscapes in a bizarre imitation of a side-scrolling video game.
I sought to riff on ideas introduced in class in playful ways. Imagine Xena wading through a ball pit! That’d be a good use of the toying with the Shape actor. We created weird, pulsing effects with the Wave Generator—that sort of reminds me of ping-ponging through a wormhole! My goal was to tweak and adjust and keep Xena’s quest fresh with each subsequent scene.
Difficulties
I desperately wanted to include the Xena Warrior Princess Main Title theme to score this oddball project, but I ran out of time to hammer out the specifics. I watched an Isadora sound tutorial that was fairly straightforward, but I couldn’t for the life of me get the mp3 to import into the Sound Bin; despite my flailing efforts, it kept getting stuck in the Video Bin. As such, I couldn’t follow the tutorial’s advice for setting start and stop times since it was predicated on using the Sound Player actor. Perhaps there’s a way to lay a sound bed underneath every scene, but I wasn’t certain how to do it, and I didn’t have the time to individually fiddle and tweak individual Video Player actors to get the song to flow fluidly between scenes.
Additionally, the initial vertical and horizontal positions of some images had to be repeatedly tweaked and didn’t remain consistent upon repeated plays. Maybe the issue will crop up in the class critique. If it does, I’ll gladly point it out and request help resolving the matter!
Accomplishments
My proudest accomplishment with this project is establishing automation. Once the user hits the Start button, a network of Enter Scene Triggers, Trigger Delays, and Jump Actors will bob and weave the disparate scenes and elements together, one right after the other. Once the patch finishes, it hops all the way back to the beginning, and the user can hit the Start button again. Truthfully, that small trick is what brings me the most delight.