Pressure Project 3 – Marvel – Alec Reynolds

For the final pressure project, I enlisted the use of a franchise that has had a significant impact on my life. Marvel Studios has created a Global Phenomena that has not been matched before. The complexity of story telling and world building that the Marvel films achieve is nothing short of incredible.

The prompt for the third pressure project encouraged students to create a auditory narrative that discussed a piece of cultural importance in our lives. From this, I was able to attribute the influence that the films have had on me as a person. With the release of Iron Man in 2008, I fell in love with the character and the complexity of his suits. I would go so far to say that the character heavily motivated my passions for STEM and especially engineering.

Further, the Marvel films do an impressive job at tackling real world issues through the lens of a supernatural world. By giving characters that are literally God’s, flaws and grounded issues, generates a deeper sense of connection and reflection.

For my pressure project I wanted to create an auditory experience that created a sense of excitement and inspiration for the viewer. I begin the audio with a narration of how I view Marvel in the context of my culture. I have shared so many intimate moments with friends, family and strangers over the existence of these films. The next segment in the audio is a narrative story about the growth of the marvel cinematic universe up to the finale of the Infinity Saga, Endgame. The sounds in this story are designed to evoke excitement, inspiration and appreciation for the dynamic capacity of the films.

I chose to focus the visual aspect of the experience around the Marvel 10 Years promo, since this was an important time in the MCU where I really reflected on how big of a role these movies had on me. I think back to all the times that I was obsessing over these films at a very young age, and to see the passion stick with me all these years is so fascinating. The medium which I shared the image is through a 3D printed picture called a lithophane. These are 3D pictures that you can feel due to the contoured depth that they are printed with. I accessorized the experience with RGB LEDs to highlight specific moods in the audio.

If I had more time with this project I would love to print the banner in a much larger format and then create a lighting system that illuminates each character when they have a sound bite introduced in the audio. I also would have created an audio track that was 120 sec versus 180 sec.

Pressure Project 3 – The Story of Mulan – Min Liu

In this project, I retold the story of Mulan, a woman hero in Chinese history who disguised herself as a man and fought on the battlefield instead of his father. As a Chinese, I found it hard to tell a cultural story in English. The language itself affords meanings and I am not a good translator. That’s the main reason why I chose the story of Mulan. I knew there were several versions of movie about this story and two of them are in English, which could be good resources for me. I chose the Disney version. I reorganized the story to different parts (start, development, climax, end) based on the poem, the ballad of Mulan, an old poem that almost everyone can recite in China. Then I found audio resources (background sound, music, dialogues) for each part and tried to make the music transform smoothly between each session. As a totally new hand in compiling audio and video files, it’s not easy. Alex asked about the choice of the Disney version. I admitted that some of the scenarios and dialogues in the movie was funny and awkward. Actually, the short poem is more vivid and inspiring, and that’s why I added the poem in the video. I am learning to be a good storyteller of my culture. I am also happy that this project gave me an opportunity to learn about Au and Pr. I will incorporate audios in the following projects because sound is so powerful. Here is the final work:

Pressure Project 3 – Ashley

My pressure project 3 uses the Makey Makey to create an interactive auditory experience from one of my favorite novels. Our task was to share a story that was important to us and culturally relevant, so I decided to include an excerpt from author Akwaeke Emezi’s “Freshwater”.  Emezi is a queer, Nigerian and Tamil writer whose practice is rooted deeply in the footing of Black radical feminism and Igbo folklore.

This novel is an inspiration and was foundational to my research and art practice when I first entered graduate school. For a little bit of background, the book is what Emezi describes as “autobiographical fiction” in which they pull from parts of their own experience and mix it with fiction to create these fantastic moments of storytelling and truth.

For the interactive element, I knew that I wanted to include my copy of the book because it’s so important to me. I returned to using the conductive paint, where I made my own fingerprints as triggers on the pages to activate the sound. The sound is an excerpt of the book, read by Emezi themself. I also wanted to be intentional about where I placed the fingerprint marks, so that they would resemble to act of holding the book as you would naturally.

My Isadora setup was fairly simple. I made a patch that connected the sound player to a keyboard watcher that would trigger it to play. I also had background music that would play when you entered the scene.

Here is documentation of the interaction:

Pressure Project 3 – Yujie

The pressure project 3 asks us to use audio to tell a story that is related to our cultural origin. This is a broad prompt. I’m a Chinese who live in the United States and I feel cultural differences in the daily bases. But when it comes to tell a significant story, I still feel like no way to start. So, I just spent a few days for brainstorming. Even though I didn’t do anything in the first few days, I became very sensitive to culture related elements. I was preparing my presentation for one of my research papers that studies a Chinese queer dancer. So, it just came to me that I can just tell a story based on my research. One of the dancer’s pieces has historical and contemporary references to a Chinese female legend, Yu Ji. Her story has been told in numerous cultural works of literature, film, opera, and performance. She would be a perfect example for telling the changing gender and sexual ideals and norms in Chinese history.

I decided to use visual clips along with the audio because I try combine four diverse sources from distinct historical period. The videos will help the audiences grasp a rather complicated story. I downloaded videos and sounds from the internet and record my own written script that tells a combined story. 

Here is the screen shots of my voice-recording:

Here is the final video-audio project:

Jenna Ko_Audio Assignment

Pressure Project 3

For this project, I decided to narrate my cultural background, specifically in terms of Korean politics. Although there are no politicians in my family, I can say I grew up in a politically active family. We have veterans buried in National Cemetery, and I grew up witnessing my parents and grandparents holding candlelight vigils in Gwanghwamun Square whenever the nation was in crisis. In fact, Koreans in general love to congregate whenever the nation is in crisis. I remember my parents volunteering with millions of other Koreans to clean the coast when we had a huge oil spill. With great passion and strong beliefs, we also have various kinds of social conflicts. With the presidential election coming up, I thought this is the perfect time to share my cultural experience.

The challenge that I encountered was that most of my audience did not speak Korean. Originally, I wanted to gather news clips in English, but there were limited resources. Therefore, I decided to narrate the content by myself with a representative folksong, Arirang, in the background. I imported appropriate images in Premiere with the audio files.

Pressure Project 3, Gabe Carpenter

My audio pressure project tells the history behind the Russian Nesting Doll or the Matryoshka. I recorded all of the original audio on my Samson C01U microphone and edited all of the audio in audacity. The script that was read during the presentation was created by myself but was based heavily on an article online, linked here. I chose this story because I was born in Vladivostok, Russia, and had a very similar version of the doll displayed in the video on my nightstand. Being adopted from Russia is a huge part of my life and my family’s life. The events currently unfolding between Russia and Ukraine in the year 2022 are very saddening, and I do not condone Russia’s actions in any way by this project.

I created the Isadora network using a sequential trigger, which paused and unpaused a premade rendering of the tape recorder combined with the audio.

The rendering for the project was done in Maya 2022, along with all of the texturing and modeling work.

The final interactive portion of the assignment comes from a system based on a breadboard. A button is placed in the center and bridges together two alligator clips connected to ground and the up arrow on a Makey-Makey. When the button is pressed, the circuit is completed and the trigger is sent to Isadora to play the next part of the video.

The following is the full unsliced video containing all of the audio.

Pressure Project 2 – Personality Test – Min Liu

This project asked us to real a mystery using Isadora and Makey Makey. I wished that the building steps to the secret could have strong connections to the final mystery itself, so I thought of the personality test. Different people may have different feelings about the same sound due to their characters, and their answers reveal the personality mystery. I set up three questions and four personality types. Each question has two answer options. Testers put the alligator of the corresponding color into the bottle to choose an option. This can be a fun interaction way than just pressing the keys.

The most difficult part of this project was deciding the mathematical logic behind the personality test and setting it in Isadora. For now, I didn’t know how to feed data from one scene to another. I set a different key to each answer option. And I built a separate scene to deal with the logic. Actually, it is interesting but kind of strange to calculate a personality. I also tried to interpret different sounds with abstract elements like lines and dots. I am going to learn more about video effect actors and tools for transmitting data in Isodora. This is the Isadora patch for calculating personalities:

I was a proud of the final outcome. But I also met some issues in the test in class. First, the first scene about game instructions is too easy to be triggered by movement… so many testers missed this scene. Second, in one test, two alligators twisted together and trigger a scene unexpectedly, which disrupted the experience. So, it’s important to sort out circuits. This is the test video at home:

Pressure Project @ – Patrick Park

Reveal your secret! What is a secret and how could I reveal it to the people (our classmates). I started by revisiting past week materials and recordings on what we have learnt on isadora. Flipping through the old recordings, my thoughts about “revealing a secret” changed from literal secret to “if a certain condition is achieved by the audience then certain action will happen”.

Once I was able to categorize my thought process as “whatever I make the audience do, that is the trigger. Now what do I want my trigger to do?” So naturally I started with the shape actor and started thinking about what could be manipulated in this actor. This thing that the audience is manipulating should be visually apparent enough that “oh! If I do this, this happens!” Since the easiest thing that one could recognize the change of is color I’ve decided that color would be what changes visually.

After I had decided that I was going to manipulate colors, it was a matter of setting up the system in isadora. To run the tests before connecting to the makey makey, I used the letter a, s, and d as a test trigger. The ‘a’ triggered the change in color of the inner square, ‘s’ triggered the outline of the square, and finally ‘d’ triggered the background color. I was able to achieve this by using a ‘sequential trigger’. Sequential trigger allows each trigger that this actor receives the output to be triggered sequentially (ei. Click ‘a’ and Output 1, output 2, output 3 is triggered with each press sequentially). From the sequential trigger I built a trigger value that plugged into a random actor. The random actor then goes into limit-scale value which will take any values that the random is giving and scale it to the numbers I have set. Each of these random values plugged into ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’ of color maker RGBA. This process was copied and pasted as the main function of my patch.

Since I have achieved basic function for each trigger (each button changes color in a specific area), I wanted the triggers to do something when a condition is met and when triggers were activated together at the same time. I made the condition of the trigger to be pressed for 3 seconds. I achieved this by putting together a keyboard watcher into a timer actor. When a trigger is pressed it will start to run the time, this output is connected into float to integer actor so the actors involving integer input can understand the time information. Float to integer actor is connected to Inside range actor which sends a trigger when a number you’ve set is inputted into this actor. This was then connected to the gate actor, which controls if the trigger is going to push through at the end.

When you press ‘a’ for three seconds the line size will change line size making the inner square small and bigger. When you press ‘d’ for three seconds the background will start to change automatically. 

Finally I wanted the secret to be revealed when all three triggers were to trigger at the same time. Since the color was changing the most dramatic thing to do in my mind was to move the squares. So using the simultaneity actor, I’ve set it up so if all three triggers are triggered within 0.5 seconds, then it will activate the pulgeneraters which are connected to the wave generator. Finally the wave generators are plugged into the vertical, horizontal, and rotational section of the shape actor. 

Things that I’ve noticed as learned: My particular patch doesn’t give the motivation to find the secret without the context of this assignment which I thought was interesting. The question I got the most during my presentation was “is this the secret?” 🤐 🤫 maybe designing how to make people want to look for a secret? and having a clear indication of “you have achieved it and came to the next part of the thing” is something to think about for the future projects.

Pressure project 2 – Yujie

This pressure project asks us to use Isadora and Makey Makey to reveal a secret. I was struggling for a long time about how to define a secret that can be connected to physical forms that conduct electricity. First, I was thinking about the things that are serious, epic, or hidden in daily lives. But those things are really hard to connect with daily objects that could animate Makey Makey. However, it hits me in the last class where Alec said that the secret can also be something that is delightful and small. These comments then reminded me of something I find delightful myself. I couldn’t stop watching the funny and silly videos where people use various materials and ideas to make Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot of the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics. Because of its surging popularity and unexpected shortage of supply, people can’t get the mascot even after waiting for long hours. So, they started to make all sorts of creative and personalized versions of Bing Dwen Dwen. I was so amazed by people’s creativity and exceptional skills. I think my class would be also fascinated by these grassroots creations. 

I first download and edit the news videos about how cute and popular Bing Dwen Dwen is to give some context for people who don’t really watch the Winter Olympics. Then I use text draw to give directions to the class that you can actually get one if you follow the process. By holding the “I” button with one hand and pressing one of the drawings with the other hand, the earth and output of the Makey Makey will be connected through the human body and the pencil graphite. Then different videos of Bing Dwen Dwen creation will be triggered to display. 

The four options are represented on a paper with pencil drawings. The four drawings have some elements related to the video so that they can trigger some imagination and lead people to reveal the secrets behind them. After one of them is revealed, the display will always go back to the selection scene for the next revelation. 

Here is the main Isadora scene of trigger connection between videos and drawings.

Picture of connection