Cycle 2 – Unknown Creators
Posted: May 5, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For this cycle I decided that I wanted to take feedback from the previous cycle and try and incorporate it into this next one.
For starters, Jiara had mentioned that the wrinkle and material of the fabric felt meaningful. I hadn’t thought about this but I think she’s right, and I wanted to use these ideas. I wasn’t going to change the material, but I did end up making the backsides of the panels more wrinkly and the front more clean. The clean side would be the side with Todd and the messy backside would be the unknown people. I felt this worked really nicely because not only was it conveying metaphorically that these are people who are behind the veil, that they typically deal with messiness that we don’t see, but also it made the images and text harder to see, which I think was in line with my message about how hard it is to find these people.
I also went into premiere pro and edited the footage. I needed the footage of the unknown developers to be arranged so that there were two different people that I could put on the panels. I also added names job titles under all the developers, which I would use within the project. I wanted to express who these people are more directly while still allowing for ambiguity. I remapped the projections, putting the people on their respective panels. I also took Todd’s name and stretched it along the ground to better emphasize the perspective puzzle.
The final thing I did was inspired by talking with my mentor, Scott Swearingen. As I described the project to him he thought it would be interesting if the unknown people were hard to hear in the some way, the maybe the footage was jumbled or disjointed. I liked this idea, but I didn’t want to manually splice the footage. I figured I could have the video jump to random positions while playing, but I didn’t want it to be completely random, and I was trying to figure out how long I wanted footage to play for. I remembered something that Afure and others had said about how it felt like the two pieces of footage were talking to each other, like one was the interviewer and the other was the interviewee. As I was thinking about this, I thought it could be interesting to use the audio data from Todd’s clip and use it to jumble the other footage.
At first I thought I could just get the audio frequency bands from the Movie Player actor, but for some reason I couldn’t do that. I’m not entirely sure why and I tried looking into it (main forum post: https://community.troikatronix.com/topic/6262/answered-using-frequency-monitoring-in-isadora-3-movie-player), it seemed like it wasn’t possible within the Movie Player in this version of Isadora. After talking with Alex though I really just needed to route the audio through Blackhole on the motion lab mac and then use live capture to get the audio data. We created a custom audio configuration that would play to both Blackhole and the motion lab speakers, and after getting the data I simply compared the bands with a threshold. If the band values went above that threshold, the unknown creator footage would jump to a random position.
In terms of setup, everything stayed mostly the same, the only difference this time was the inclusion of a bench on the side of the unknown creators. I wanted people to linger in this area, and I hoped that providing seating would accommodate this (it didn’t but it was worth a shot).
Here is the final video:
After everyone saw it they noticed the things that I had changed and it seemed that I was moving in the right direction. The changes this time were small, but even those small changes seemed to make a difference. The piece felt a little more cohesive, which is good, and the most validating thing for me was Nathan’s reaction. He hadn’t seen the first version of this project and within the span of around 2 or 3 minutes I heard him say “Oh I get it”. He caught that you could only hear the audio from the unknown people when Todd stopped talking and immediately got what the project was about, and I was really happy to hear this. He knew who these people are so it seems that people with prior knowledge could potentially get ahold of the intended message. Still, people without prior knowledge are left alienated, and I wanted to address this going forward.