Aiwen and I are collaborating on the After Effect animation. It’s based on the lyrics of this song she brought to our group meeting and the idea that spun out of that. I drew the world’s crappiest storyboard in my notebook:
The basic idea is that a tapestry hanging on the wall in the museum depicts a moment in history where a battle destroyed a town and the animation is tied to the song lyrics. I think we have something really rich to work with and it should be really cool. Here’s to hoping that we have luck with After Effects.
An assignment for the Crafting With Data class that has been stumping me is how to build the quincunx. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage at this class: I kinda suck at programming and haven’t yet taking PComp, so finding my way around those sort of assignments in a way that won’t have me tearing my hair out usually involves me doing…another survey.
This time around though I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone a bit and use the quincunx dilemma as my ICM final. At this rate, I can make the pegs, falling balls, and pile at the bottom of the screen (sorta) seemlessly in Processing, but the hard part for me is the collision factor. I’m also hoping that I can actually mimic the random bell curve — which technically should be a given if the construction is correct. Three more weeks until my (hopeful) success!
An example of a quincunx in real life: the Plinko board on The Price is Right (flash example via Drawlogic).
I have finally gotten to a place where I can reverse my “Worst Program Ever!” label on Final Cut. During the editing process, I finally became a lot more comfortable with it. And though I’m still not a whiz (by far), finally knowing enough to sorta get by was a nice battle to win. Though I still have no idea how to insert titles on slugs. I guess I’ll figure that out some time before next semester if I’m lucky.
I felt pretty lucky to have such a great group. Everyone pitched in during the production and the editing process. I definitely felt my voice was well represented through it all (even though the resulting co-writer credit was a bit of a surprise) and everyone was easy-going and full of ideas, so that the whole long slog was fun and creatively-rewarding. And for once, I don’t even have anything I wanted to change. All success.
Special thanks to our volunteers, Tamar and Sofy, who played the students encountering “Dano.
I sent out my survey to The List and got about a 9% response (19 out of just over 200). Not very surprisingly there were a fair amount of ex-high school writers, theater kids, and musicians, but I was surprised to see that 8/17 responders played sports. Perhaps a bit of bias on my part.
It would’ve been interesting to see if certain patterns would’ve emerged with more responses. This sample was too small to be very conclusive. Results in chart forms below.
My movie group decided last week that we were making an ITP takeoff of Being John Malkovich with our (unwitting) subject of Dan O’Sullivan. We spent some time debating if it was worth it to actually get him involved and I wrote the shooting script treatment as if he was.
We shot on Sunday and got about 95% of what we wanted to done. I’m definitely looking forward to editing and post-production. Some pics and a behind the scenes video below:
I had this really grand idea for my midterm originally. It was called “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” inspired by the sirens’ call in mythology and the occasionally dispiriting street interactions I’ve endured. It was going to be a program that had a disembodied voice loudly in some conversation until a person entered the frame of the camera. Then, it would call out to the person detected and encourage them to come closer to the camera. The face moving towards the camera and filling the frame would trigger the voice to get softer. Once the face was completely in the frame, the voice would say something lewd/mean to provoke a reaction. The likeliest would probably be the person jumping back, which would start the siren call again. I had the information architecture all figured out, but the damned programming logistics made me scrap the whole idea. I realized in searching for code and talking with Zannah the resident that my skills in Processing weren’t really where I needed it to be in order to do it, so I scrapped it (maybe for the final) and went with Plan B.
That was a snow globe. It was a great exercise to help me finally figure out functions and arrays which I’d spent some weeks being super fuzzy on. I still had problems at the end, mostly related to wanted to do a globe-like overlay in Processing and not quite getting the grasp of how the blend function work.
