Lawson: Pressure Project 1
Posted: September 12, 2023 Filed under: Nico Lawson, Pressure Project I, Uncategorized | Tags: Isadora, Pressure Project, Pressure Project One Leave a comment »For pressure project one, I was inspired to create a narrative as opposed to an infinite loop. I have recently been interested in outerspace and interstellar processes and decided to create an animation of a supernova, albeit in a simple, geometric representation.
To create a sense of time and scale, I played with trigger delays, envelope generators, and the fade in/fade out aspects of the jump++ actor. Playing with the fade in and fade out aspects of the jump scene actor helped me to create the perception of a camera zooming out to show the entire solar system. Trigger delays and envelope generators allowed me to establish movement of particular elements and create a sense of passing time. Because I did not yet know about the spinner actor I used a wave generator to manipulate the planet shapes’ horizontal and vertical positions long an elliptical pathway. To prevent them from traveling together in a straight line, I gave each planet a different scale limit and used trigger delays to offset the initiation of the planets’ pathways. For this reason, the planets appear to move in a random pathway across the screen, rather than circular orbits.
To create the sun’s “explosion,” I used an envelope generator to increase it’s scale over 10 seconds. In the next scene I used the shimmer actor to disrupt the pointed red shape and the dots actor to disrupt the yellow circle. The seeming “fizzling” of the sun was achieved through the cross-fade between scenes.
If I was to improve this patch, I would want to first, reduce the load on the Isadora program and offset the limited power of my computer’s processor, and second, create an orbit for my planets using the spinner actor. I might also use the explode and particle actors to create a “real” explosion of the sun rather than the illusion that I created using the shimmer actor. Additionally, I think that I could use the layer functions and blend mode of the projector actors to allow the planets to disappear and reappear around the sun, rather than showing up as bright spots when the images overlap.
Upon further reflection…
From a storytelling and pacing standpoint, I wish that I had allowed the scene in which the planets appear to stay longer. For me, the scene jumps to quickly after the last planet appears, rushing the story rather than establishing the presence of a solar system. For similar reasons, I wish that I had used a similar strategy of trigger delays and envelope generators to allow the stars to appear at the end of the story. I think that the narrative would have had a more satisfactory ending had I allowed the stars to slowly establish themselves rather than appear all at once. It would have also been a more satisfying final image if I had used a particle generator to create a background of smaller stars- this would have created significantly more depth to the screen.
