Here is an animation that I’m very interested in right now;
I think this video is interesting because of the shape and size as well as the clear connection to the audio content. The edges of the video are also complimentary so this could be played in the round seamlessly. I’d love to do a quick set up with a piece of butcher paper and a small projector and reflect it off of a chrome light bulb just to get my head inside of it.
Here is my final for ComLab Web. The site is called FirstCall.com and it’s a website where users can sign up, enter in their emergency contact information. They will then be mailed a QR encoded card which should be kept in their wallet. If they end up in a car wreck and become incapacitated in any way, the police can scan the card which will bring up the user’s emergency contact list with phone numbers and other information that might be pertinent (allergies, blood type, etc.).
This website was the idea of Dr. Bill Frank (my father in law) who is a Medical Examiner for the state of Maine. He often arrives at scenes where people have died in car wrecks. The typical police protocol as I understand it, is to identify the victim by the contents of their wallet, then call their residence. The problem often is that no one is home – they’re busy dying on the side of the road. SO, Bill’s idea was to deliver the phone numbers of those would need to know this information the most (your emergency contacts) to the cops, so the victim need not sit in the morgue for four months while everyone independently puts the pieces together.
I would like to continue working on this project. There are easy features to add, like membership/password status for users, as well as email notification as to when and where their key was accessed.
I’ve been really fascinated with three things that I’m interested in exploring with this assignment. First is the style of animation that uses shot footage painted over, like in Linklater’s film Waking Life where the entire movie was shot on a camera, then animated over. What I like about this technique is that is maintains some really important elements of nature like scale and physics. But he goes further than just coloring frames by distorting some of the scale and physics slightly. It gives a great floating feel to the composition and we get to enjoy the subtle unrealness of background layers floating out of place and drifting back.
The second thing I’ve been interested in is home made space balloon videos, like what the Brooklyn Space Program did. They launched a home made balloon with a camera attached which rose to an altitude that allowed the camera to capture video of the curvature of the earth. I like this because I’m very interested in the concept of launching into space (which will be the subject of my midterm).
The third inspiration I have comes from Google Maps, Google Earth and the mega dense images of city and landscapes that allow you to zoom in to find greater detail within large scope pictures.
I’m not sure how to do it yet, but I would like to make an animation of a launch from New York City into space. There are certainly tricks I can use to deal with the massive scale changes that will occur (going through cloud cover, etc.). But I have failed before at creating a composition that does an extreme pull back using screen shots of detailed photos. Hopefully I can make something that is subtly stylized but still has enough realism to convey the grandeur of the journey.
I’m not happy with this but I can’t seem to figure out how to adjust the timing properly.
I would like to propose the game Ricochet Rangers. In Ricochet Rangers, the earth, having almost depleted its entire supply of fuel has recruited a team of Rangers to search for fuel rich planet resources in the universe. As a ranger, you will launch from Earth with a small amount of fuel and use the gravity of the planets and stars around you to slingshot your way through space. The further you go, the faster you travel and the bigger you become making travel across large distances easier. But, when entering a new solar system for exploration, you’ve got to slow down (and thusly shrink back down to normal size) to explore smaller areas of space. Along the way, you will find asteroids that you can grab onto which will increase your resources and your ability to explore. The faster and larger you become, the slower you will age. The slower you move and the smaller you become, the faster you will age. Each turn in the game is the life of a Ranger. Can you explore the vast expanse of the universe and become the savior Ranger for Earth?
Here is my Animation class’ first assignment – to use After Effects to create a 5 second movie where a shape enters then reveals a trait. The movie is actually 8 sec. long. Enjoy.
Interaction Design
Inspired by Rotozaza’s autoteatro master work Etiquette, I worked with Catherine McCurry and Stepan Botlin to create a 2 screen experiment for television and laptop. The work required the viewers to play parts in the television show from home. In this episode the audience played the parts of Data and Capt. Picard of the Starship Enterprise. They each had iPads whose browsers were pointed at a website that changed its content according to the timing of the tv show. So during the show, the audience/performers were given simple instructions to follow and lines to recite. This extended the passive experience of watching an action filled story into the environment of the audience. The episode lasted about 5 minutes and really came off well. The audience/performers enjoyed the experience (mucho thanks to Naliaka and Rhodes for being such good sports) and the class enjoyed watching them perform along side the television content.
I think this method of two screen interaction definitely has room to grow. By pulling the audience into the story, they are automatically required to invest their energy into the show giving them a more rewarding experience. By taking part in the interaction they also recast themselves, their home and even their iPad into something that it was not outside the show, imparting a bit of magic and creating a memorable and unique experience. I feel that extending the show into people’s homes in a performative way is a great concept and could certainly have a future in television, especially as an on-demand show. This way, you could allow the audience to organize themselves and prepare in any way they might want to (read: put on your sweet homemade Picard costume and chug a bit of pre-game buzz makers).
There was some warranted skepticism about how easy (or hard) it would be to get the audience to do what we wanted them to; follow the instructions and repeat lines. I had a good deal of confidence in this since Rotozaza’s work is so successful. I think that once the experience starts, it’s harder for the audience to NOT take part since the ball is rolling and not only is the rest of the audience relying on you to complete your charge but the TV show is as well since nothing would make sense unless you filled that space in the show with the information you are in charge of presenting.
One thing that I noticed distracted from the experience was the tug of war happening for the audience/performers between their iPad and their TV. Sometimes the audience/performer would miss something on the TV because they were checking their iPad to see if there was a new instruction to follow. The opposite was also true, that while the audience/performer was watching the TV, they didn’t notice that a new instruction had loaded onto their iPad. I think to alleviate this problem I would try an alarm of some kind, ie the iPad would vibrate briefly when a new instruction came in so the audience/performer could focus primarily on the TV and know that whenever they’re needed for perform an instruction, their iPad will tell them.
Also, another killer improvement would be actually presenting media on the second screen instead of just simple HTML text instructions. The audience/performers could wear one or both of their ear buds and not have to read off of the iPad screen. Their instructions could be dictated to them over their personal soundtrack. Since each audience/performer gets different instructions, one could also put some information on one audience/performer track that is not on the other track. This way, after the show the participants would have to talk about their experience with each other if they wanted more details. This is really fun to me because I think this allows the show to live outside of the time and place that it exists (waves and radiations) and it transcends being just video and sound into something with hidden information, privileged information. This is an important aspect to story telling for me, that people can have a private experience in a public setting. That’s how we live life but our stories don’t really reflect it and TV certainly doesn’t reflect it since TV is traditionally 100% face value that lives only inside of its box.
Technically, I was mostly impressed with the way that the web page delivery worked. Stepan took the lead and employed a mixture of PHP, HTML and AJAX to create the timed web page interface. I think that the proof of creating a dynamic interface on ubiquitous hardware that is time synced with the entirely OTHER medium of television broadcast is really cool and is probably the most important and useful interface that interactive television has at its disposal. I’m sure it will prove valuable in the future for other experimental productions.
I worked with Catherine McCurry, Kate Watson, Matthew Rader and Fernanda Bak to create a debate game show that employed audience text messages to subvert a high brow debate with low brow shenanigans.
The shows worked like this;
Two guests with opposing views on a chosen topic are asked to debate each other in a round table discussion moderated by a host. At the beginning of the show, the audience is asked to text in words they would like to hear the debaters somehow weave into their arguments. The debaters earn points by using the suggested words. Different words have different point values; basic curse words are 1 point, a single word suggested by the audience gets 2 points, suggested phrases get 3 or more points. At the end of the debate, the audience will vote on who won the argument which will earn the players more points. This ensures that the players will need to maintain a cogent argument with integrity if they want to win since only concentrating on getting points in one way will not guarantee a winning score.
The production was difficult. We definitely bit off a bit more than we could chew by trying to employ video and sound streaming for the presentation. We set up basic set elements, lighting, four cameras, a camera switching and streaming program and two additional video screens on set for content and one more display so the players could see their word lists. Most of this worked. Unfortunately the streaming didn’t pan out in time and was cut from the presentation. This meant that the audience (which was going to be down the hall in the classroom) had to come into the room where the production was taking place and watch from inside the room. It was still fun.
System
The audience was asked to send text messages to TextMarks, a SMS/web interface. The texts were fed into a Google Doc, where they were copied and pasted into a text document that was saved and displayed both as reference for the players (on their private screen) and on set so the audience could see the lists. We intended to use Isadora to display the lists and other video content (title cards, credits, word lists, etc.) on two screens, one for each of our stages. A four camera setup (using webcams) would control and broadcast the show using a Max Jitter patch (with much help from Luke DuBois).
Here is the Max patch I made to switch between the cameras and broadcast.
It was really great to hear Will Kreth in class. He gave us a run down on the history of interactive applications and hardware for TV since the 70s. Then he led conversation and answered questions about current projects and methods being employed and where the industry is heading. It was nice to hear from him that he was so excited about what is becoming possible and the space that we in particular have to experiment with new ideas and their implementation through the class. It was a great reminder that the medium of Television is in such a state of transition and accessibility that it’s ushered in a new Wild West for content delivery. He really made me understand that television networks, television service providers and internet based content providers are all interested in the new shiz, whatever that may come to be. He was also a reminder that whatever those new innovations are, they best come with some form of advertising.
It was also great of him to detail the way Time Warner (and other similar systems) deliver on-demand media and the way set top boxes are used as widely deployable (read: cost effective) ways to deliver a dynamic interface to customers. Now whenever I watch TV (which is more than before) and I use the on-demand services (also more), it is interesting to see the system work and know that for any key press on my remote, the set top box is simply relaying it to the servers at Time Warner where the switching and computing is actually being done. It’s slow and it reminds me of the interaction speed of the first hand held computers I remember coming across – the Palm Pilot.
The Palm Pilot was really slow and not super intuitive but still simple enough to be accessible to most folks. The thing that parallels most for me is that the speed of both of these things are just barely fast enough to make them usable. When you change channels it always takes 1/2 second to complete the switch, load the title data and start streaming the content (which is wearing when you have 250 channels to go through). I certainly don’t mean to rag on the quality of Time Warner’s system because the Palm Pilot was one of the first things out there that was usable. And because of devices like the Palm Pilot we now all have a smartphone with more computing power than all of NASA when they landed on the moon in the 60s. It gives me hope that the coming advancements in interfaces for media delivery will be huge improvements and that interaction will not only be more fluid but more intuitive and offer qualities of experience that will help reshape the culture of television.
