Here it is. My glorious clay dream realized. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. If I could go back, I’d probably make clay figures with wider bases.
Oh well! I think the end result is pretty funny.
I’m doing a short claymation video for my Comm Lab animation class. It’s very fun, but also very tedious work. In my first session filming (four and a half hours!) I only ended up with eleven seconds of raw footage. That’s not even counting the hours I spent making figures. I’m going to have a long weekend filming my critters.
Here are some pictures of my characters.
The Media Controller project I worked on with my teammates, Bona Kim and Melissa Holtz, is complete. We created a backpack-mounted video projector and a pair of shoes that controlled the content of the video image. We used the serial port and library in Arduino and Processing to accomplish this.
We started by getting the programming to work, and figuring out how to wire the sensors we would need. We used our Arduino kits to help us.
Once we had the Processing sketch running the way we wanted it to, as detailed in my previous post on the Media Controller project, we went about fabricating the backpack and shoes. There were a lot of steps to this.
We had to wire pressure sensors into the right shoe…
And digital fabric switches into the left shoe…
Melissa had the inspired idea to bind up our Arduino and battery in an ankleband. It worked great.
The hardest part was aligning the projector so it aimed directly at the ground behind the user’s feet. Cramming an open laptop into the bag with the projector also proved difficult.
Our group hard at work.
Despite the challenges, I had a great time working with my group. I learned a lot about the ways hardware and software can interact. And the end result? It was pretty cool.
My goal for my final project is to integrate the interactive human interface of my midterm with video and a graphical interface that can be manipulated. I hope to use TUIO pad as my controller.
I want to make a paper dolls game with a live model. So as the user puts new articles of clothing on the video of the model, the model will react to different clothes and combinations of outfits.
Here’s a video that shows the style/tone of what I’m thinking. The fun starts at 0:41.
