Cycle 2
Posted: December 11, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Several key take aways from cycle 1 defined my approach to cycle 2:
- Projection mapping is going to be a lot harder than I expected.
- Find a way out of the complexity. The decision to project onto a structure under active development means that I have no stability in projection mapping. I need to either find a faster way to build the castle and/or a more flexible approach to projection mapping.
- Go all in on immersion. Front facing projection is going to be inadequate. The contrast between an animated forward face and the dead sides destroys the immersion on the experience. Conversely, participants in the experience wanted to interact with it. Providing pathways to interact with the castle could be a big win for immersion.
- The little things are the big things. There is a lot of potential delight in thoughtfully-placed, well-executed micro-animations.
The key to all of this is in my ability to improve my approach to projection mapping. As suggested during the feedback session, I decided to pursue an approach where I could fix my projection mapping once.
There were a number of options available to me. The easiest way to decrease my risk and create a positive experience would be to nix the castle and project onto something that was rigid, static, and reproducible; however in terms of the RSVP cycle, the castle was a major part of my valuation and was therefore non-negotiable.
The next option to consider was to expedite development on the castle. This was appealing, but only to a point. Castle construction involved the use of power tools. While there’s an upper limit to how fast it is advisable to move when working with a blade spinning at 3500 RPM, increasing the efficiency of my techniques for building the castle (score) without sacrificing safety was a good idea.
My plans for the castle included several hexagonal and several cylindrical towers. With no lathe available (resources) to create dowels, I relied on a process to build my cylindrical towers that included using a hole saw to cut out sections of the tower that I could later stack. This approach allowed me precise control over the tapering at the top and bottoms of the towers. I directly adapted this approach to create my hexagonal towers, by using the radii of the circle to mark out the vertices of the hexagon, then using a bandsaw to cut down to the edges.
To make this process more efficient, I can use a table saw with the blade set to 30º to do 2 rip cuts down the length of a board to dramatically decrease the time cost for building a hexagonal tower with a manageable increase to safety risk.
Beyond improving my building techniques, I was able to decide decrease the complexity of my castle design. I reduced the overall number of towers in my plan and I altered my approach to building rooftops. This reduced the overall risk to my project, but the castle remained a significant risk. Mistakes in the digital space can be undone with a keystroke. Mistakes in woodworking (of the non-digit removing variety) come with a much larger time cost.
For the digital side of the Cycle 2, I devised several new approaches to handle my projection mapping. My initial concept was simple enough. Scene 1 would Get Stage Image from Virtual Stages and feed those through pre-mapped projectors for the specific image.
The top of this page outlines some of the ideas I had for projecting. The bottom half outlines my concept for simplifying my projection mapping.
The execution went a little off the rails. I chose to build this approach by projecting onto a cube instead of the castle with the expectation that I could build the scaffolding with a simple use case and easily scale up my approach with a more complex target surface. Looking back at my initial concept, it seems manageable, but during the execution I got lost in the weeds and couldn’t fully understand what was going on in Isadora. During cycle 2 I had a basic grasp of how to work the Motion Lab media controls, but was not completely fluent. I also struggled to fully understand how a virtual stage actually works. In the end I built a user actor to accept media assets as inputs and tweak the parameters of the target projection.
This approach was more simple than my initial concept early on, but quickly became more complex and unwieldy as I needed to expand the User Actor to adapt to my use cases. I was ultimately able to get this approach to work, but it did not yield a dramatic improvement in efficiency over my Cycle 1 projection mapping approach.
For the Cycle 2 performance, I elected to drop the background projection and focus on the Castle projections. I kept the forward facing projector for simplicity’s sake, electing to add the necessary complexity after tackling the mapping challenges. I changed the castle texture to a style that more accurately captured my intent. I added some delightful micro-animations like flags that illuminated and a fire that flickered in the entry hallway. I stripped the music to allow my castle to stand on its own (though I had full intention of bringing music back during Cycle 3).
I also created fireworks using the 3D particles actor that I did not display until a classmate specifically recommended it. The fireworks were time-consuming to produce in Isadora and the effect was shabby at best. Still, my ultimate plan was to make them an interactive component of the final presentation, so I persisted. The ultimate effect was underwhelming.
During the feedback session for cycle 2, a classmate pointed out that the light bleed on the main projector screen made for a cool effect. I hadn’t noticed this prior to it being pointed out, but I agreed and took note.
Another piece of feedback centered around the sizing of the stones on the facade. It took a lot of effort to bring them in and map them out, but they were turning out to present more trouble than the value they provided.
Cycle 1
Posted: December 10, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Resources
An open face box made of Southern Yellow Pine and pre-primed wood paneling.
A big white box
A roll of paper
Some trash from the Motion Lab
Several boxes to form makeshift parapets
Giant white sheets
Isadora
Blackhole
Youtube
Score
The audience is staged in the Motion Lab entry way. They are invited in to see a large projection of a winter landscape behind a bunch of junk on a table. The junk transforms into a castle when hit by the projection. I used an image of a stone wall projection mapped across the front of the facade to achieve this effect. After a period of acclimation, the second scene is triggered and a freezing sound plays over the Motion lab speaker system. A distorted white bar raises across the facade of the castle dragging a blue video with a morphing snowflake along with it. Let it Go begins to play over the speakers.
The first scene defines all of my interactions. I would later pull these into a user actor that I could easily trigger within my Castle Project scene.
This scene outlines my basic conditions. Each section corresponds to a different piece of the castle. One section projects onto the roof, one handles the stone on the facade. Another projects the door, and yet another is projecting the windows onto the tower with a comment “Why did I do this?” When I finally got it working I felt like it was a minor detail that no one would even notice.
This is the user actor that defines my freeze behavior. When I hit the trigger the castle freezes over and the Frozen music is played.
I was actually pretty proud of this. I used gaussian blur on a white rectangle to make the base of the freezing line. Next I warped this image using projection mapping to give it a more organic appearance. The effect in action was really very cool (but I forgot to record it due to nerves, so it lives on only in memory).
Valuation
I love the projection shows at Walt Disney World. Harmonious at EPCOT was the first show that I ever saw. The tight integration of audio with projection with fireworks and water displays… the mere fact that they’re projecting movie scenes onto water. The whole experience changed me at some deep level. It changed what I assumed was possible. It changed my perspective on fireworks shows, which I had always found to be rather boring displays that I would sometimes feel social pressure to pretend to enjoy. It solidified my desire to become a Disney Imagineer.
For my cycle projects I wanted to do something that Disney does better than anyone. Blend multi-sensory stimuli to create a meaningful, impactful shared experience.
For cycle 1, my plan was to get into the Motion Lab and see what was available to me. I started off with projection mapping. Our first exposure, mapping onto a tilted white cube was quick and fun. How hard can projection mapping be?
As it turns out… Really. Effing. Hard.
After hours of effort I was able to map textures onto the castle and towers reasonably well. This experience shaped my approach to cycle 2.
Performance
This felt like cheating. The performance was well received and both transitions elicited audible reactions from the audience, but I used a beloved song (“Let It Go” from the movie Frozen). I felt people were largely reacting to their love of the song rather than the experience that was put together. Yes, the song is part of the experience, but it did too much of the lifting for me and I didn’t feel like the experience itself was standing on its own merit.
The feedback was really helpful. Classmates noted that they were immersed in the illusion and felt like they could go inside the doorway to the castle (side note – in hindsight I’m really surprised that the projector was able to output black so well).
I received notes about how I could use minor details to create light ambiance and make the experience more engaging. I could create footprints in the snow as audience members walk about. I could build slight animations into the facade of the castle, maybe vines grow over the castle. I could put candles in the portholes on the tower (yes, they were in fact noticed).
The little castle that could. This is the scene that the class walked into. Allowing the audience to see this first gave the second scene greater effect. This scene is a little chaotic, pretty messy, and not almost a little sad. The next scene, however…
Not so shabby… The castle with textures projected onto the face. Note the bleed around the main projector screen. I was certain that I had done away with this before the performance. I didn’t notice these artifacts until they were pointed out to me.
Note here that the bleed artifacts have changed. I did not recognize this until posting. The reason for this – the motion lab floor. The floor gives as people walk across it, and this can cause projections to move slightly in response to foot traffic.
This is all that was captured during the initial performance of cycle 1. On the castle you can see the semi-transparent snowflake video projected onto the front of the castle.
Initial sketches of the castle concept and notes from feedback session of Cycle 1
Pressure Project 3
Posted: December 10, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Assignment – Use audio to tell a story that is important to your culture (broadly defined)
I actually did this project twice. I got a request to not share my first project online for privacy reasons, so I chose a new story and re-did the project.
The story posted here is arguably among the most important stories worldwide over the last 30 years. Maybe I’m being provocative. Maybe not.
Resources
Blackhole
Youtube
DTMF generator from venea.net
Logic Pro
QRS Reverb
Channel EQ
Score
The six failed connections with variable wait times between dial and busy signal
The successful connection on the event attempt
The agonizing wait
The welcome
The first contact
Spindown
Valuation
I want to provide a realistic experience through sound of logging on to the Internet in the early days. I captured the sounds of that might have been in my household as I was connecting on a Friday night.
I wanted to convey the frustration of trying to dial into a crowded phone line and the uncertainty of never knowing whether the next attempt would hit, the ambiance of sitting at a stationary machine where you were at the mercy of the nearest phone line, the excitement of finally establishing a successful connection, and most of all, just how slow it all was (within the confines of my time limit — it was actually much slower to sign onto CompuServe in 1996).
I also included hard drive sounds because 1996 computers were loud.
I think this is an important story (though I hesitate to say whether it’s an important story to tell) because in the modern world we are perpetually connected to the Internet. You probably encounter it within the first few minutes of each day and within the last hour before falling asleep. In the early days there was a delayed gratification. “Going online” was an event. You couldn’t take for granted that your friends would be there at the same time as you. And what you sacrificed to go online was in some ways more clear. Your time. Your phone line (unless you were lucky enough to be a two-line family… we were not). The opportunity to be in other locations doing different things. Today the friction to go “eyes on” is so low that we aren’t even necessarily conscious of it. But we must be certain that the sacrifices are still there.
Performance
This was never performed in public. It is an online exclusive.
cycle 3
Posted: December 10, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For the third iteration of my project, I added in additional elements of a contact mic tracking my heart beat and a large scale projection of my blinking eye. I stood in front of the large eye projection and performed my movements with the smaller face projection trained on my face at all times.
The performance was a 7 minute duration, but in the future I could see it being much longer–potentially 30-45. The movements that are the score of the piece are my slow, measured blinkings that sync in and out with the blinking done by the image projected onto my face and the large eye projection, as well as the deliberate and slow movements of my head turning from left to right. My movements are slow to the point that it takes 7 minutes to turn from center to the right, back to center, and then to the left.
The addition of the contact mic picking up my heartbeat felt vital to the piece. With the help of Michael at MOLA, I was able to narrow in on the low frequencies of my heart beating and had that play for the duration of the performance. It felt crucial to be a live sound, as it was really evident how much it would change according to what was happening. For instance, it was quite fast at the beginning and then gradually slowed throughout, or it would speed up if someone moved around in the audience. The feedback I got was that it felt clear that it wasn’t pre-recorded because of how it felt tied to my physical presence in the room as audience members could see me breathe.
Besides increasing the duration of the piece, something I would consider changing in a future iteration would be providing subtle clues to the audience that they would be allowed to come closer to my body as I performed. Some clues I would consider would be a sign outside of the performance space that said something like “viewers are invited to look closely at the artist, but to not touch her,” or perhaps include a variety of seating at different viewing distances. Especially in the case of a longer durational piece, seating would become an invitation to stay and look. I was also appreciative of the monitor that was provided to me so I could “mark” my movements, and it made me remember that I had at one point considered having a live feed in the space that showed the performance in a different light; perhaps with a time delay? Alex pointed out that that could be a good idea, especially because there were many layers of mediation happening within the performance already.
I am really proud of this piece. It’s an idea that I had early on in the semester, and I’m really glad I stuck with it and spent the whole 3 cycles dedicated to broadening the performance.
Cycle Three
Posted: December 9, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For the third phase of my project, I refined the Max patch to improve its responsiveness and overall precision. This interactive setup enables the user to experiment with hand movements as a means of generating both real-time visual elements and synthesized audio. By integrating Mediapipe-based body tracking, the system captures detailed hand and body motion data, which are then used to drive three independent synthesizer voices and visual components. The result is an integrated multimedia environment where subtle gestures directly influence pitch, timbre, rhythmic patterns, colors, and shapes allowing for a fluid, intuitive exploration of sound and image.
Visual component:
Adaptive Visual Feedback:
A reactive visual system has been incorporated, one that responds to the performer’s hand movements. Rather than serving as mere decoration, these visuals translate the evolving soundscape into a synchronized visual narrative. The result is an immersive, unified audio-visual experience that makes both the musical and visual experience.
Sound component:
Left Hand – Harmonic Spectrum Shaping:
The left hand focuses on sculpting the harmonic spectrum. Through manipulation of partials and overtones, it introduces complexity and depth to the aural landscape. This control over the harmonic series allows for evolving textures that bring richness and variation to the overall sound.
Right Hand – Synthesizer Control:
The right hand interfaces with a dedicated synthesizer module. In this role, it manages a range of real-time sound production parameters, including oscillator waveforms, filter cutoff points, modulation rates, and envelope characteristics. By manipulating these elements on-the-fly, the performer can craft sounds lines and dynamically shape the signals.
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!
Cycle 2
Posted: November 20, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For cycle 2, it was important to me to begin looking at the projection in the Barnett Theatre and with my dancers and understand what I was working on from the “performance” aspect of the RSVP cycle. Something I had noticed from previous dance performances in the Barnett Theatre, that because the theater is arranged in-the-round, a lot of top-down projection felt quite flat due to the close proximity of the audience. As a result, I wanted to focus on creating some more dimension in my projections. Much of what I have been designing has been video projection that is constantly moving.
In cycle 1, I created a series of different scenes to try out in the Barnett and was able to discern that some of them did not read very well as a floor projection. I ended up staying with the projection that had a bit more of a “pinched effect.” Another difference in cycle 2 was moving away from depth sensors. Part of this was a resource issue—I was extremely limited on time. I was concerned that I would spend too much time finagling with the depth sensor and not enough on actually designing the projection that I am hoping to use for my MFA project in February. I was also limited by the amount of time I could spend working in the Barnett Theatre as it is a shared space within the dance dept. All of those factors led to me choosing to facilitate interaction through the use of a mouse watcher actor which has a similar effect as the depth sensor, but just without the use of a sensor that needed to be hung from the grid of the Barnett.
I ended up designing a projection that could track the movements of my dancers in the space. Below is a video of that exploration.
My dancers did share with me that the movement of the projection was a bit motion-sickness inducing for them as they are dancing and I heard similar feedback from audience members during our cycle 2 demonstration in class. That is one of my goals going forward, which is to adjust the speed at which everything is moving, so that it does not feel too overwhelming for both dancers and audiences. I’m discovering that there truly is a fine line in design. I am hoping that the projection and choreography read well together and that all design elements will coalesce into the world that I’m building. One of my biggest concerns is that audiences will only watch the projection and not any of the choreography. As all of these elements are being developed together, I know that I will have some more information by cycle 3 to know if I am overdesigning the video projection and thereby flattening the choreography or if the video projection does really help highlight some of the nuanced gestures and movements in the choreography.
Cycle Two
Posted: November 19, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »In the second phase of development, I dedicated my efforts to enhancing and tuning the main patch to elevate its functionality and the performer’s interactive experience. A major focus was the implementation of a dual-hand control system that enriches both the sonic and visual dimensions of the performance.
– Right Hand – Synthesizer Control: The right hand now commands a synthesizer module. This setup allows the performer to manipulate real-time sound generation parameters such as oscillators, filter frequencies, modulation depths, and envelope shapes. This direct control facilitates dynamic melodic creation and nuanced timbral shifts during performances.
– Left Hand – Harmonic Series Manipulation: The left hand is dedicated to controlling the harmonic series. By adjusting the overtones and harmonic content, the performer can explore sonic textures and add depth to the sound.
Integration of Visual Elements:
– Responsive Visuals: I’ve integrated a visual component that reacts dynamically to the movements of both hands. The visuals are not just an accompaniment but are designed to be a visual representation of the sonic elements, ensuring a cohesive audiovisual experience.
Parameter Mapping to X and Y Axes: Various parameters are mapped to the X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) axes of each hand’s movement.
The overarching goal is to evolve the patch into a more advanced system where the performer has comprehensive control over both auditory and visual components. By expanding the capabilities and refining the interaction mechanisms, the performer can craft a more engaging and immersive experience.
cycle 2
Posted: November 19, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For cycle 2, I played with some ideas for projecting behind my live performance. I made a few different patches with the goal that it could be projected on a large scale in the motion lab as an accompanying piece to my live performance
For the live performance, I have decided to have the projection of my dad’s face with the cut-out eyes fading in and out of opacity. I think that this addition could add to the visual confusion and legibility, and could potentially make the audience feel confusion as to what they were watching.
Because the performance is based around slow movement, there is a lot of subtlety to the piece. I want my movements to feel deliberate and have a score to them, so I will be doing some movement practices to work with that. Alisha gave me the feedback that it might be interesting to explore facial movements as the image that is projected is very placid. This idea terrifies me! I like it.
I also added a sound element to accompany the performance. I used an app called “Hear My Heart” that essentially is a very sensitive mic. The mic picks up your heart beat, but it also has a lot of wooshing. The feedback that I received was that the sound was difficult to decipher as being an actual heart, so I want to experiment with a stronger mic; one that doesn’t have as much interference. It was also unpleasant to have to hold my phone’s mic during the performance.
The patches that I designed on Isadora ultimately feel like they’re from a different world than the performance. I took a very close video of my eye blinking on the same beat as the stop-motion video/the live performance. The initial patches were mirrored and distorted to make the eye feel sort of terrifying, which doesn’t feel like it fits with the emotional feel of the performance. In class, we stripped away the effects and the video was then just an eye blinking. I will for the next cycle re-record this clip and try projecting it behind me.
Cycle 2 Project
Posted: November 17, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Naiya Dawson
For Cycle 2 I wanted to utilize the rest of the time left in the semester as well as the resources that we have in this class to create examples of concepts that I may use for my senior project. I am still going to use the live drawing aspect that I created in Cycle 1 but for Cycle 2 I wanted to play with a new idea that I had. For this Cycle I gathered videos that I had of my friend dancing and then also videos I had of different beaches and bodies of water. I used isadora to layer and combined the different videos that I want to later project in the motion lab. I created two different scenes and with in the two scenes there are videos on 3 stages. Each stage contains two or three videos that I layered together and I want to continue to play with video effects and new ways videos can be presented in isadora. I created 3 stages because I want to present each stage on three projectors in the motion lab. I attached videos of my isadora patches and video clips of the videos I used.
For Cycle 3 I want to work on moving this to the motion lab and added the concepts I created in Cycle 1. I also want to add music and research ways I can have an interactive part of my project. I am also thinking about actors in isadora that I might want to add the the videos.