Comm Lab V/S

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Three Pigs of the Apocalypse

Oh No, the End is Near…

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What can I say, the expected end of an outstanding seven weeks of class. But let’s get into the making of “Three Pigs Of the Apocalypse”. Stephanie Chen, Shaurya Seth, and I set out to tell our re-imagining of “The Three Little Pigs”. The Big Bad Wolf is represented by three current events: civil unrest, environmental chaos, and the advent of technology. Using a 3D modeled and rendered environment allowed us to take video clips of these current event s and set them into a world a little different than our own. 

The challenge of this particular project was not of content or technical skills but that of geography as the groups was spread out between 3 different time zones.  Never fear though, with the advent of technology,…pun intended, and with the help of Zoom and Google Drive it was like we were sitting in the same room. This whole process went pretty smoothly.

So what were the biggest issues you might ask, well for one Adobe Premier Pro has a nasty bug in it that causes persistent crashes. After loosing a day due to this and a few hours of research an answer to the cause of these crashes emerged, .avi. Premier Pro has an issues with it’s .avi compiler/converter. This would cause dropped frames and the software would try and recover from this in loop causing the playback window to freeze and eventually crash the program. Thankfully, having worked on files with many components before, my incessant need to save constantly was a life saver. After finding the issue I converted all the media to .mp4 and replaced the clips and voilà no crashing!! Adobe, I’m calling you out here, this issue has been logged for OVER a year now and there is no official response anywhere on the internet ( I know cause I viewed all the internet in search of a solution), Adobe you need to fix this problem.

It took 72 hours of rendering to complete the 3D modeled environment. We also had to troubleshoot an issue with embedding the video into the modeled environment. The solution finally came by using After Effects to extract each individual frame and use those frames as the source file for the embedded video.

As with any creative process your biggest friend is problem solving and perseverance. So without any further diatribe by yours truly, enjoy the show.

Clouds cover a mountain top, oddly shaped multi-colored walls surround a maze-like structure

Dream-Like Even

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Week 2 Comm Lab V/S

Made in collaboration with Eden Chinn and  Adekemi Borode

Create a virtual soundwalk using Unity to create an interactive OpenGL experience. 

As a team we first approached this in a linear fashion with two options. One option consisted of discrete sound events and were buffered by some transitional sonic element, the other progressively added discrete element but layered them on top of each other to form a complete environment. These however, were not meant to be after realizing the soundwalk would need to have a visual component we pivoted and looked at journey that was non-linear. Starting in a central point and giving the choice to the user as to how the journey shaped out before them. Below is a visual representation of our first idea.

After the decision to create a user developed story we thought about how the environment would play a role in the development of the narrative for each user individually. We noted that dreams, nightmares, and memories all have a familiar and non-linear feeling associated with them. Depending on the user’s life experiences dictated the feeling the environment produced. You  be the judge as to which you think this world is for me.

We each created two unique micro environments and used the dreamscape/memory lane idea to connect them together. Much like when in a dream your mind wonders for event to event with little to no transition, this world allows the user to expire this. There are a few elements that symbolize transition such as the rugs leading from the central start point. And the are many clues to show that this place is somewhat known but makes you feel uneasy or curious.  Aesthetically all of the aforementioned elements play a role in defining the dreamscape/memory. Furthermore it was imperative that the micro environments feel inclusive so that all users can have some attachment to the space. 

Distanced group work us something that is part of my everyday life as a contract industrial designer. The challenges such as time zone difference, scheduling conflicts , and work priorities were not an issues at all. The hardest part of group work was figuring out the best way to export and compile assets created individually. In all reality it only took a few hours for us as a group to figure out the best workflow to use. 

Unity has an interesting workflow, I am intimately connected to 3D or CAD modeling and have been for some time, it took some time to develop an understanding of why Unity functions the way it does. There were a few issues I could not resolve, namely a clipping issue that did not render the terrain at mid-distances from the user. Near terrain and far terrain rendered as expected though. 

I’m Excited to add Unity to my toolbox, I see great potential for using it to visualize spaces, create VR worlds, and hopefully being able to integrate its use into large scale immersive installations.

Alvin Lucier

A History of Sound: “I Am Sitting in a Room”

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History of Sound

Alvin Lucier – I’m Sitting in a Room

Week 1 A History of Sound

Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” is a temporal experience moving for something that has clear independent parts and form to a sensory wave that is hard to reconcile. Much like the how the repetition of a single word many times in sequence causes a loss of meaning for that word, it becomes sounds strung together with some vague memory of its former self.  I believe this is the point that Lucier is trying to make with the endless reduction of discrete sound elements the focus shifts from words to resonant frequencies. The longer the experience goes on the more the memory of the words fade and finally it becomes clear there is nothing left, forcing the listener to come to terms with the eerie notion that there was never anything there in the first place.

There are many examples of this work preformed in different locations and different times of his life, some are fairly short and some run the clock at almost an hour. The more time given to the repetition of the recording, the less discrete the sound becomes and the more it becomes a feeling.

The example I have included here is 45 minutes in length the transformation becomes very evident around minute 16 and at minute 35 almost all individual sounds have all but vanished. If you don’t have almost an hour to listen to this version try some from the list below.

https://youtu.be/mngBRKEw-Ws

spotify:track:09pHNT4RIvhLui6eIi4HKO

 

Screenshot of Audition, 7 discrete sounds mixed to form a story

Sound Collage: Wolves in the Laser Room

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Wolves in the Laser Room

Sound Collage: Wolves in the Laser Room

I can say Audition is pretty fun, the ability to have instant gratification with small changes to the audio input is a rather rewarding feeling. I find it almost meditative and calming. 

During this exercise I realized that small changes to the mixing of the different audio sources make a large difference in feeling and atmosphere of the final mixdown. Placing emphasis on one clip over another can change the final piece from scary to please ant or vise versa. I want to add some visuals to this track, mostly obtuse color fields or soundwave-like images. It could be a fun way to push this further however, for now I will leave it as solely audio. I encourage you to listen to this with good headphones or on a set of speakers. Turn it up, close your eyes, and pay attention to the nuanced interactions of the different clips. see if you can match up the sounds with the image of the mix in Audition

Sources:

08 Footsteps on leaves; close; open space By juanlopz (CC BY 3.0)  https://freesound.org/s/389491/

Door_Heavy_Reverb_open_Close By LamaMakesMusic (CC0 1.0): https://freesound.org/s/403537/

Footsteps, Concrete By InspectorJ (CC: BY 3.0) https://freesound.org/s/336598/

-p

Portrait of Chimamada Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author, on a deep burnt yellow background

“The Danger of the Single Story” Response

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s  “The Danger of a Single Story” is a profound inquiry into why the single story is so damaging. She speaks about how her characters were modeled after British books and life, and how for years after she wanted to taste ginger beer because that’s what the characters drank in the books she read.

“What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.”

This made me stop the video and contemplate the gravity of this statement, we talk all the time of how impressionable we are as children yet we insist on using these “Single Stories” to provide material for imagination, then why should it be surprising that, as adults, we have preconceived ideas of other cultures. Furthermore this demonstrates why it is so hard to change a person’s mind, from the time we are young our outlook on the world is shaped by the stories around us. The stories we are told take many forms, from music to movies, from books to news media, and most importantly from our family and role models.

Probably one of the most pointed segments of the talk, is how Adichie recalls the narrative by which her mother communicates the class or social status of her “new house boy”, Fide.

“The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.” 

She finds herself in Fide’s village and has a single idea of what he and his family are, poor. This is how the “single story” has shaped her idea of the village where Fide is from. This has shaped her view on an entire group of people. For the first time she brings to light a real world example of the damaging nature of the “Single story”. She later goes on to say

“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. “

 

“What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking?”

These two lines very gracefully illustrate the point of this piece, the stories told about us and to us do indeed define us, all you know is what you have been told and to this end we have a great responsibility to engage our audience in a way that pushes them to want more, to find other stories or varied opinions, to challenge the stories told to us, and to gather information from multiple sources before committing to a viewpoint.

I’ll leave you with a final quote that shows how demonstrative the “single story” can be.

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

For the full video please visit

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en#t-8975