Pressure Project 1
Posted: September 10, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Pressure Project, Self-Generating Patch Leave a comment »
For this pressure project I was thinking about what kinds of things interest an audience and bring the element of “mystery” into a piece. I started with a sound that I liked and kind of fashioned the mood of everything else to meet that which is what turned it into a oceanic journey. In the process I got very caught up in “what happens next” so in a way I was focusing on narrative and my thinking was very linear. It started with a series of scenes of the ocean from land, I threw the shapes in there just as a mood filter with the colors as well as a way to direct the audience’s eye to something more mobile with the stationary background images.
Then I just had the idea of going deeper into the ocean with the background and as I started changing the backgrounds I wanted to add a new element of surprise. That’s where I started bringing in the animals, I thought they were fun and connected to the story I was telling about the layers of the ocean. There were a lot of ideas I had for the animals that didn’t pan out. I wanted to find sounds for each of them so you would like hear a whale sound when the whale went by and a dolphin sound when the dolphin went by but I ran out of time.
I also wanted them to be on their own without the white boxes but I forgot about how alpha channels worked so I didn’t get that part down. The timing went well since I was able to trigger the changes of the background with given animals numbers so I was able to stay pretty true to the story I was telling and match the types of animal to their particular ocean environment.
One thing I really wanted was for the animals to be able to be layered on each other and entering from random sides of the stage and at random times. I think I could have gotten the layering with multiple picture players going at the same time and maybe staggering the pulse generator attached to them but I need to do some more exploring into actors to solve the issue of random entrances.
I think it was really cool to hear people’s responses to it and the ways that they interpreted my media. In my mind, the song inspired wonder and peace but for some people they said it felt kind of sad. I saw the moving circles as impressions of nostalgia and slow beauty but some people saw them as another character altogether. I imagined it as an experience akin to scuba diving that was more exploratory but other people saw a lot more narrative. While I feel like many of the experiences were within the same vein, it was interesting to hear the different permutations of the story. In many ways I feel it referenced back to our discussions about what experience is and how meaning is communicated.
My experience working on the project forced me to notice how important it is for me to plan first. I didn’t want to plan anything because I am a very hands on person, usually I just start digging in and making and things arise out of my activity and I find it difficult to think without doing. However, in this case that way of working proved detrimental. I got invested in the making process and did end up making a lot but it ended up very linear and I didn’t start thinking about a way to loop it until the last 30 minutes of my time and at that point there were so many interlocking parts that it wasn’t really possible. So I wish that I had set up a framework for myself at the beginning about the structure I wanted to come out with rather than just diving into the content. I also wish that I had taken more advantage of scenes which may have helped me figure out how to loop it better because it would have separated out the different sections. Another thing I want to incorporate more in my process is clearer decision-making so that I don’t end up running out of time and not completing things. One of the reasons I think I didn’t have time to make all the animal effects that I wanted to was because I was also trying to do new things with the scenes and effects with the circles and if I had just chosen one thing to work on I probably could have done it.
Overall, great learning experience with interesting results!