Pressure Project #1: The Self-Generating Patch
Posted: May 9, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »This project offered the opportunity to dive in deeper with the Isadora interphase. Certain constraints aided in the exploration, and all clumsiness notwithstanding, I am rather happy with the milestone of stretching myself within the five(ish)-hour time limit.
In truth, I am still getting accustomed to the node-based method of content creation. Much of my background up to grad school involved a layered or timeline-based mindset, such as video editing software or Photoshop. Isadora has cues that can be tapped forward along a sequence, but the arrangement is altogether patched together, and it’s easy to get lost in a spaghetti mess, so I played to my proclivities on this first pressure project with the aim to make sure the end result met its intended objective of retaining my audience’s attention and prompting amusement, perchance some laughter.
First step: assess your audience. I had gotten to know some of my cohorts well enough to note their interest in cats, dad jokes, and an appreciation for the weird (just my kind of people). So I went in for the cheapest route to the funny bone by collecting a series of clips online that at the very least amused me.
Here are a few examples from my smorgasbord:
I divided the sequence into three main parts/scenes, the first with a Counter actor connected to a movie player, which honestly didn’t end up being that essential besides being a placeholder before the actual start of the video montage.
I wanted this video to start with one specific GIF and audio clip, which would then jump to the next scene after a two second delay. Enter Scene Trigger actor with a Trigger Delay connected to Jump made it very straightforward.
This next patch for Scene 3 contains a User Actor for the actual montage of content while a movie player plays the background music. The inside of the User Actor is below:
All in all, the patch worked, people chuckled and smiled at the antics of my cats and sapiens, which I entitle “Cats & Monkey Business” (working title), which certainly retained attention of my bemused audience for over 30 seconds. This main objective informed how I would spend my limited timeframe within this pressure project, the result: I ran out of time to employ other resources into the patch, such as the Shapes Actor or Wave Generator. That said, I have to say this process ended up being more fun than I had anticipated, and I felt more confident in exploring the tools available in Isadora.
Okay, just one more sample from my content stack to close it off…
