Cycle 3
Posted: December 8, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For cycle 3, I continued on with my projects from cycles 1 and 2 to make a completed piece. At the end of cycle 2, I left off with most of the models done and compiled into a scene that people could look around. For cycle 3, I finished making the rest of the models, textured everything, animated it, added lighting, and then did some sound design.
For the models, at the end of cycle 2, I had most of the big furniture pieces done, but now I had to go through and make the smaller props that were going to be animated and tell the story. These props included playing cards, paper clips, a mug, a stuffed bear, a lawn mower, and the tic tac toe board. These are all things that carry significant memories for me about my grandmother and represent some of the things I remember interacting with the most in her house. They are all pretty generic and without the content of the house, background story, or additional things added to the scene, they would seem like ordinary objects without much significance. But that’s sort of the magical thing about memories connected to material things so I wanted to refrain from adding too much explicit narrative.
When making the textures for everything in the scene, I tried to balance what they looked like in real life and a more simplistic stylized version through the use of color and simple patterns. This abstraction was meant to make the space more applicable to more peoples memories while also staying connected to my own.
The animations were relatively simple. I wanted to add life and movement to the objects in my scene to show them being used and then that use fading away at the end. Playing a game with the playing cards, drawing tic tac toe in the fluffy carpet, getting a drink in my special mug, making paper clip necklaces, and hearing the riding lawn mower outside.
While the objects told the story of the space when used, I really wanted the lights to tell the story of the house over time. Everything starts out in golden hour with warm colors, then fades to blue as my time spent there dwindled, and then fades to gray at the end.
I also went for a more abstraction in the sound design as well. At first I had originally wanted to use some voicemails that I have of my grandmother and some other sound recordings that I had, but when I put them in the scene, I felt like it was too jarring hearing a person’s voice and it disrupted the serenity of the scene. I tried going a different route and adding written words to fade in and out of the scene as well, but I felt the same way about those. I thought both options added too much direct narration to what was happening and I wanted to leave it more open. Some of this might have been from the strength of these things in my memory, but I wasn’t able to distinguish what my personal feelings were toward it from the effect of the piece for other people so I thought it best not to include it in general. Regardless, I added in some ambient sound and the sound of some things in the room to fill up the space and round it out.
Overall I really enjoyed this creative experience. I really liked getting to divide out my work into three different cycles and push through different phases of the project as I went. The smaller chunks made the work feel more manageable and I was able to work through different ideas without worrying about the end product all of the time. This project turned out pretty similarly to what I was envisioning in the beginning visually, but in concept, turned out much more abstract than I had originally intended. One of the things that I wanted to explore when I started this all the way back in cycle 1 was making projects and telling stories that had personal significance to me. I think that the abstraction and lean away from direct narrative in part came from a hesitance to share. It’s one thing to talk about these stories in a classroom setting, and another to create a world and put a visualization of your thoughts, feelings, and memories on screen for everything to look at and dissect. In the end though, I thought that this was a great first trial run of telling this type of story and I definitely feel more comfortable doing so now than I did when this first started.
Feedback:
One of the biggest pieces of feedback I got was a desire for more of the original stories I had proposed to be incorporated into the work. There was a desire for a more emotional work and to lean further into those previous ideas. I really agree with this feedback and if I could go back and do a fourth cycle of this, that would probably be what I focused on. I struggled in this project to figure out how to balance my own memories with the meaning I was instilling into the objects and how much of that I wanted to show explicitly.
There was also still a strong desire for the project to be more interactive and to be able to move around the space (possibly in VR). Putting this space in a more interactable environment is totally possible and would add a lot of interesting elements, but I chose the medium I did because I wanted to explore something I didn’t see often in media. While it isn’t as advanced or interactive as VR would be, the underlying language and storytelling abilities of a 360 video medium was something I hadn’t seen a lot of before and was excited about. It would be interesting to compare the experience I made with the same thing but in VR and see how people react to the space.
I was happy to hear that people enjoyed watching it and went about watching it multiple times to try and catch all the different little things that were happening in the scene. The intention came through!