Reverse Cinema

Day one: Final Cut Pro

The Finished Product

Come presentation day this is a demonstration of how our finished Max Patch and Unity model work in conjunction to give a fun playful experience that encourages both experimentation and a greater appreciation of the control and character we give the environments around us by adding our personality to everyday life.

We worked on the principle that no two people are the same, we monitored the colours they wore ( the way they present themself ), the amount of noise they made and the amount of movement they produced. There were two ways you could look at our work; One it was simply god fun, it was colourful and set up in a non-linear arrangement, because it displays a variation of the participants own colour scheme back at them they are sure to recognise themselves in the installation and this encourages them to experiment to uncover what corresponds to what in the city and what what is causing the changes they can observe. On a deeper level this installation challenges the participant, asking questions like 'what are you contributing or what effect are you having on your environment?' Because each new participant will bring a new set of variables to the environment it is unlikely to look the same twice; this to me symbolises the perspective of an individual, we all see the world through different eyes, having different backgrounds, morals and circumstances the big question really is do we like what we see? Are we having our desired impact on the world? Set in a human made environment when we have the power to make all the decisions do we like what we contribute and in return what we see?

Our installation gives us the ability to explore these questions and more through manipulating the world you are given to preside over, I really enjoyed both creating and testing this work and I really think it is a pity I didn't take video footage of it being used by others at the critique because it was clear that they were making the most of and enjoying the situation just as we had intended.

The Model and the Patch

Below are some screen shots of the 3d model we are going to use for this assignment. I have only covered 28 blocks to correspond with the 28 mini screens we have split the webcam footage into. We like that the city is quite contained as we only want the participant to control the immediate, urban environment. This is kind of like a statement on nature but instead getting the participant to engage and consider man-made environments, their aesthetics and our role in giving them character and life.



Below is a plan view of our city, we used a map to give the blocks of the city a realistic and diverse set of shapes. I really liked how simple the starting aesthetic is, I think this will make a very good contrast for when the buildings are brought to life by the participant.



There are a few things we have accomplished on our Max Patch already and a few more that we will need to complete before we have this installation all up and running. We've downloaded Macam that allows Max MSP to use an external USB webcam with the grab component, this will make the installation a lot more professional and adaptable as we will not need to use the built on webcam in our laptops. We also have with the use of jit.scissors and jit.3m have the RGB values of the average colour detected in each of the 28 mini screens, this is also affected by the ezadc~ object which lets us monitor the amount of audio it receives and outputs a value, we have used this value to set a number of volume thresholds that will change the level of saturation of onscreen colours, from greyscale for no volume to technicolour with a lot of perceived noise.

Still to achieve is getting the Max Patch to increase the value of the height for buildings on each block when movement is perceived within the corresponding screen, then decrease again when no movement has occurred for a certain length of time. I also need to get Max to send the specified values to Unity via netsend and change the colour and scale of buildings.

The Beginnings of the Max Patch and the Modelling...

Tasks are to be divided as follows... Anneke is going to start work on our Max Patch and I'm going to try to master Unity 3D and model our city.

There is a bit of research to do with both but we have the first concept of what we want to create.
Max Patch

• We want to register the amount and location of motion for one or more participants
• We want to register the colours worn by the participant and use the changing values in our visualisation
• We want to monitor the level of sound

For the city we want to make a rather simplistic and ambiguous model. We want to represent a city without reflecting too closely any real city or having overly complex buildings that might detract from the actual subject matter and the ideas that are driving the project.

Our basic ideas of how the two might work is that we will use the jit.scissors object in Max to split the screen into a large number of smaller screens, from each of these we will take the main colour and send the RGB values from this and send them to Unity to colour a corresponding block of buildings. We don't want to be too linear with this so the buildings will be built upon a city map to give a random and realistic set up, when we colour the blocks they will not be left to right and top to bottom as with the screen but instead will be randomly distributed to encourage experimentation and a more abstract aesthetic.

Theme, Character and Interactive Art

We had a bunch of things we that we wanted to start with; a discussion on what we were going to use as our character, research on existing interactive art and a discussion on which theme we could tackle with this assignment.

Right from the beginning we decided our existing characters were quite limiting considering the potential scope of this assignment. We were also quite reluctant to use a traditional character as the interaction would be quite predictable and likely complicated to both 3d model and to program.

I found two installations online that involved traditional style characters, these were Pussy Weevil and Interacting with Virtual Characters, they were both quite effective in their own way but they were limited because all the interactions had to be pre-programmed and the characters all have a certain repertoire that they work their way through and is then repeated exactly the same no matter who the participant is, I don't like this as I don't think it encourages experimentation or a particularly playful interaction. Swamped came much closer to an interesting and meaningful interaction, I liked the fact that they used a soft toy puppet as a prop to engage with the environment, I think this gave it a unique and fun twist and really encouraged the participant to experiment and find what was possible within the installation.



Anneke and I found that we much preferred the simplicity of installations such as Text Rain and Dance Floor Moves. The videos of these were delightful to watch because the concepts were so simple but the participants were really experimental and were genuinely enjoying the interaction. I liked that they were trying things out to see what reaction was produced and every person's experience was unique, and not pre-determined by a set of programmed behaviors.



We want to create a project that is nice and simple and encourages experimentation and learning on the part of the participant; I also want something that is unique to everyone who uses it, a fully adaptable work that takes a lot of information from the user and adapts and presents it back to them.

Serious Fun

Today we were given our brief for our next studio project. We are required to "make an artwork in which the audience playfully interacts with the content to reveal meaning." I will be working with Anneke http://annekeinstudio.tumblr.com/ for the remainder of this brief and we will be developing our character further to contribute to this interaction.

Stop Motion Clay Animation

Today we rediscovered our youth as we modeled our chosen character out of coloured plasticine. However the joys of which were soon forgotten when we had to animate them through stop motion, which I have discovered is the bane of my life, a minimum of 12 frames per second means a lot of manipulation of the model and very steady cameraing to create the appearance of a movie.

See below porcupine and his banana.


In the afternoon I joined with Anneke and Dylan to do a 10 second group film

Illustration

Day one of our third studio project we had Beck introducing us to illustration and the ideas of what makes a character. We saw work produced by her and other illustrators and developed some characters of our own. We finished the day by producing a flip-o-rama, very reminiscent of our youth. I'm quite curious to see where we're going with this studio assignment and look forward to the next few weeks although hope there's more thinking than labour as drawing at least 12 images per second is hugely labour intensive.