Today I showed performance 2 to 5 peers in person. I would like to use this post to digest some of the feedback I got from them…

Technical:

When filling out the space, I found that the lights filled the room, but lacked a bit of power. If I am going to move to a bigger space, I may want to consider purchasing some more hues. Sound wise, I was running on bluetooth from around the corner to my speakers and everything seemed okay. There was the expected latency which makes performing kind of difficult. However, I think this is something that will get better with practice. The major issue that I had was with sound quality for the voices coming form the speakers. Basically, both of my tests with Dorian and Adam were spent troubleshooting this. I ended up adding in a Tone Volume object to bump up the sound significantly. I also removed the extra distortion to fix this.

Conceptual:

The conceptual framing was really lacking. It did help out for me to add in a bit of direction at the very beginning for the user to “treat the space as [their] own environment” and to notice the things that they liked, the things that they would change, and the things that felt familiar.

The main thing that wasn’t working was the Shell commercial/advertisement connection to user behavior. In talking with Julia, I agreed that it felt like a let down for audience engagement to not result in the kinds of advertisements that they believe reflect them. This effect was what I was going for, but I did not do a good job of framing the concept and the effect lacked a deliberate feeling. I don’t know what it will take to get this feeling sarcastic and sardonic like I intend it to.

As I worked through the user tests, I also understood that the Shell advertisements definitely need to be changed. Whichever ads i select have to be very relevant to the storyline and not confuse the audience. My story is about smart home devices, not necessarily about the environment.

Acting:

My improv got better the more I worked through it. However, I would say in general that the characters were unrelated and their interactions were surface level. It would be hilarious to find some “device-related” storyline to give my characters so that the interaction is not so general. I forgot who asked, maybe Kelsie, but are these two devices brothers? What is the punny storyline that I can draw from to have more material.

Additionally, I want to encourage others to indulge in their guilty pleasures or for their sense of morality to prevail. I want to fill the space with little bits of interesting things to do. I need to put in a lot more effort to designing the space.

Thoughts for Next Steps:

Monitor for the audience to watch themselves being watched. I want to have a monitor there for the audience to watch themselves as they are being monitored and for them to watch whatever advertisement I do end up playing, rather than listening to it.

Better on storyline. I want to develop a story line for my devices that is funny and interesting. I think this will help me with my improv as well.

I want to design the space so that there are far more fun things to play with. I want the space itself to be tempting for the audience.

More runs! More runs! More runs!