Pressure Project 1 (Nick)

With this first pressure project, I was mostly interested in playing around with Isadora and seeing what I could accomplish with the actors we’ve worked with so far and a few extra that I was able to research and play around with. I was inspired by some of the example projects we played with in the first or second week that had mesmerizing/repeating patterns.

I decided to create this sort of large “breathing” shape that would enter and exit the scene and be immediately followed by smaller versions of it that moved in a sort of orbiting fashion. Coming from a motion background, I wanted my movements to be a bit smoother than what the envelope generator offers by default. I used the curvature actors to play with the speed values the envelope generator was pumping out. To create my orbiting shapes, I created a user actor that would make one of them, and then inside there I found javascript that I could put into the javascript actor that would make them move in an elliptical motion. The user actors were built with several inputs to influence their facets (to mirror the big shape) and their motion (different values to feed into the javascript creating their circular paths). Those littler shapes were all on trigger delays to allow the mama shape to do its thing first. 20 or so seconds in, two “get stage image” actors start to capture the stage and make things even more mesmerizing. I used TT color bands and TT tv lines to create an “echo” of everything that was going on onstage and then the tv lines make it feel as if it’s sort of like a broadcast. That broadcast idea is pushed further a second “get stage image” that uses an edge detect plugged into a projector with a wave generator driving its horizontal positions, creating a sort of phasing effect. The end result is a mesmerizing, cosmic, and occasionally extraterrestrial set of visuals.