Pressure Project 1
Posted: February 4, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 1, my key strategy was to find a story and see if I could successfully shape abstract visuals to convey that story, or some semblance of a story line with a clear beginning, middle, and end (Figure 1). I recognize that I struggle to make art that doesn’t tell a story (and struggle even more, perhaps, to make up that story myself, being an artist who makes art that expresses stories created by other people), so initial attempts to create something visually interesting without a central framework around which to form it did not go very far for me. I was able to start to brainstorm ways I might alter the initial patch to at least create visual interest and then used those initial alterations to build other iterations. I ended up working from the center of my scenes outward, alternating working toward the beginning and then toward the end without a clear plan but rather as ideas came to me or I thought of ways to advance the visual story. Working in first one direction and then the other gave me something to work toward (I won’t say goal!) and allowed me to explore how to get from point B to points A and C respectively. I wanted to challenge myself to explore actors I hadn’t had a real opportunity to implement before, as well as try to get a stronger handle on how the ones in the initial patch were functioning. I think I only minorly succeeded in this endeavor, but I did feel that, overall, I was able to gain some amount of facility with the tools I was using.
Figure 1
I played a lot with the Wave Generators (Figure 2) and the User Actors, mostly trying to get a better handle on the latter. At one point, this somewhat inadvertently led to me recreating the initial patch from scratch with some alterations, but I’m chalking that up to valuable time spent playing and learning (Figures 3 and 4). I also tried out the Movie Player actor and started messing around with the Play Start and Play Length fields. I also dipped my toe into the effects, like Explode, and know that I have a lot more exploring to do there.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
The main challenge for me, I think, is just that I am very much a novice with this type of work and, as I said before, struggle to design if I don’t have a clear framework (i.e. a story) around which to base my work. I’m struggling, in general, to put the pieces together and remember how things work, but spending my time breaking and repairing some of the things in the initial patch helped with that a bit. This speaks less to this project in particular and more to a large issue, but it also took me a decent amount of time to find assets such as music and video to use, once I decided to use them, and I had to settle for watermarked material, which was fine if not a little annoying (Figure 5). Related to all this, at some point I had to just decide to use this as practice and try to play to my beginner-level strengths; my challenge here and moving forward will be to be satisfied with where I am, skills-wise, and to find ways to create things with those limited resources, for now, growing the resources as I can but also knowing that it’s ok to create within what you have.
While my project went a wildly different direction than those of my classmates, I think it was relatively well-received. Where after staring at it over and over again I had become concerned with the pacing, based on feedback, it seemed like, while it was a little slow, the pace ultimately supported the arc of the project if you didn’t know how it was going to play out. That was my aim, but it had become hard to discern whether or not that was being achieved after watching it over and over again for the last hour or so of my time spent on the project. I appreciate, too, that I have a ways to go in terms of presentation and how to do it in a way that looks more finished; I had no idea that you could make the window bigger and block out the scenes! Additionally, while I did finally figure out how to make a video of my presentation (below), I cannot figure out how to also make it have sound. I assume there is a way, but maybe there isn’t… something to explore, I suppose!
All-in-all, I was pleased with how my project turned out. I think I set attainable aims for myself and achieved those, so I’m also quite pleased with myself for being able to realistically assess my abilities/resources. I think that will serve me quite well as we continue through the semester.
Figure 5