Well, against all odds, it would seem my final coding project is complete (or as complete as I’m willing to make it – adding more code is now making it all very unstable). In the end, there was a bit of a struggling and wrangling disparate sketches, trying to get them to play well together.
Before I go into my process over the last week, I think that it’s important to point out that whilst this sketch ‘works’, it’s likely that I haven’t put it together in the most efficient manner possible. My knowledge of which code puts pressure on CPU is totally non-existent, so I don’t doubt that this project could be cleaned up a great deal to run better. My work around for this project was to decrease the size of the display window to just 320×240.
Sketch 01
My first step was to bring the main elements together: the RSS feed and particles. I ended up quickly ditching my original idea of using the traer.physics balls in favor of using Andy Best’s bubble popping sketch. To keep things simple to begin with, everything is triggered by holding down the mouse button for a few seconds…
To create some movement from different sides of the sketch, I shifted the falling bubbles to come from the left of screen. But instead of them simply moving from left to right, I wanted them to move toward the face. Introduction of face detection suddenly made the sketch run very slowly. A bit of digging through the Processing forums led me to discover that other people have had similar experiences: video feed at 640×480 in Processing can be very clunky…
I was struggling to get an x and y coordinate out of the face recognition rectangle, so instead I started by using the mouseX and mouseY coordinates. I also switched to using the traer.physics cloud sketch, which gave the particles more movement and randomisation, as they head towards the mouse cursor…
Finally, I found the face detection coordinates and replaced the red bubbles with mini newspaper articles. However, the events were still being triggered by the mouse button being held down for a few seconds, not through movement of the user…
The next iteration of the sketch refined the movement of the particles and added a sound loop with the Ess library. As part of my pitch, I wanted to have an array of sound samples playing in a completely randomised and generative way, almost like a John Cage piece. Because of the time constraints I found myself with, I instead used a single sample of tuning between radio channels…
The final few versions of the sketch simply moved through refinement of the major elements: the sound would slowly lower its volume as the particles covered the face; the video feed would decrease in brightness the longer the user did not move; the RSS feeds would repeat and cover previous feeds to create a nonsensical version of bars across the image; and finally, the loop would restart once the user moves their head a certain amount…
Note: the movie maker in Processing has exported at a fairly quick frame rate and I’ve added the sound in afterwards.
There are a couple of problems with the final sketch. As you can see in the video, occasionally the action loop will restart, even though there has been minimal movement. This seems to be when the face detection thinks there is another face in the image. The jump in coordinates re-triggers the loop.
I also think that even though this is very close to what I planned as my concept pitch, in the end it was not successful as an interactive work. Although I had planned it to be the antithesis of interactive: it’s triggered by non-action, there needed to be another element to encourage users to explore this non-action. Whether there was a secondary event that happened when users move, or something that happened at the end of the loop, I think that the end result was a bit weak.
Having said that though, I am encouraged that I managed to pull this together in a short amount of time. Over the break, I plan on trying to get this piece to work more effectively and through that, learn a little more before I set foot in Multimedia Authoring 2 next semester.
Digital Video 1 was a subject which it was not a requirement to write a weekly journal. However, I found that this is a process that helped me throughout my work, so I kept completing them anyway. This was until a couple of weeks ago, when my workload shot through the roof and anything not marked as ‘required’ was pushed to one side. So this will be a bit of a wrap-up of the past few weeks.
I think I’ll start with the end. Here is the final product…
It actually came together surprisingly well, considering some of the problems we came up against. I think this was in part because of our experience with the first project. This time around, whilst there was a much greater workload (both because of the nature of this project and the other subjects we needed to present work for), each member of the group seemed to have a better idea of where their own role was. And aside from a couple of people falling away at the very end (most definitely due to commitments in other subjects), everyone put in a great effort.
Our script writer and director, Jordan did an excellent job in pre-production. This being her story, I think she obviously felt a connection with it and wanted to put together a great deal of the planning work (script treatment and storyboard) we did in Celtx. Our DOP, Daniel also prepared a shot list during planning, but on the day the shots used were more of a collaborative effort. As a bit of an aside, I think my time at Enmore helped out here. My strong attitude to not ‘crossing the line’ with shots did – I think – make for a stronger sequence. And my self-assigned role as 1st AD (head kicker on set) forced everyone to keep moving, so we wouldn’t run out of sunlight.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the equipment we wanted for the shoot. Nearing the end of semester, it was hot property and we could only manage a HC-9 camera and not even a shotgun microphone. Whilst the HC-9′s screen made focus quite difficult outdoors, it was the latter which was the biggest problem. Needing to resort to my own gear, we went with the ECM8000. Not a bad microphone, but being omnidirectional, it was totally inappropriate for getting dialogue on a film shoot.
This was made even more apparent in post. Editing was a bit of a nightmare, and I spent far too many hours processing what ended up being snippets of dialogue, to try and get each piece sitting well together, and losing as much background noise as possible. The Freesound Project came through with the goods once again for me – I grabbed some great atmospheres to layer here. In the end, the sound was passable, but not great. On the upside, editing at home allowed me to sneak in a Ryan Teague track for the majority of the film whilst no one was looking. I’m going to make it my personal mission to expose as many people as possible to post-classical whilst I’m at COFA.
The acting was pretty average, but being self-absorbed, whiny teenagers was exactly what the parts required, so I don’t think it was much of a stretch for them. The star of the show was definitely the location though. Again, Jordan came through with the goods there – some of the shots look fantastic. Unfortunately, we lost a bit of quality on a couple, which needed to be cropped due to a renegade microphone peeking in the side of frame and some poorly white balanced locations.
But really, I’m just nitpicking at the film. I think we did really well to pull it together as it stands. In the amount of time we were allowed, the outcome isn’t bad at all. Now, I think that’s enough group work for me for a while…
For the final week, I covered a lot more ground than I would have liked to (such is the way with most of my projects this semester). I realised when attempting to use a CG texture to wrap my major elements that it would require much more effort. Particularly when the first texture looked something like this…
…it looked terrible. It reminded me of all those lazy 3D works that I pointed out earlier in the semester, so I was determined not to go down that path. In fact, I was so determined that I essentially remodelled most of the scene to allow me to correctly UV map the textures for each element…
Because of the modular nature of my scene, I didn’t want each polygon to appear to have the same texture. Instead of mapping every single element with a different image, I created a few variations and randomly applied them, to give the appearance of each being different. I also created a ‘bump map’, by importing a high-contrast black and white image as a node of the texture, to give a little more realism when lit. I realised pretty quickly that I was on the right track this time…
When put alongside the lazily prepared CG textures, the difference is like day and night…
After texturing all the elements already in my sketch, I added some very basic human figures on the roof of the tower. I had decided a few weeks back that this would create a far more interesting narrative than simply placing people where you would expect them, or not having anyone there at all…
I also added a cyclorama backdrop for the evening sky. I still wasn’t sure exactly what angle I would be rendering from, so using the inside of a cylinder allowed me to change my mind, without needing to shift too many objects around…
Finally, adding the lights was a process of trial and error. Particularly in relationship to the glowing effect I had on all the windows, every light affected every other luminous element. For myself, who has never modelled before, this was a matter of going through all the different types of lights and experimenting with their intensity, colour, direction, and so on…
In the end however, the image came together better than I had hoped (particularly considering the amount of work I found myself left with in the last week). There’s not much left to say, except: here is the final result…
In the midst of three different final assessments, my code has only been taking baby steps this week. I’m a long way from getting it complete and if it wasn’t for the saving grace of a few extra days with nothing else to distract me, I think I would be having a minor meltdown.
Face detection and traer.physics were combined this week, with some positive results…
Whilst it isn’t really the behavior I plan for the final sketch, it is at least a proof of concept that I can combine these elements for the newspaper particles of my original brief.
So the remaining steps for my final project are now:
change traer.physics balls into newspaper particles
detect small vs large movement of face detection
add sound samples, which change once small movement loop is triggered
combine all of the above with RSS feed
find time to write more comprehensive journal entries
It looks like I’ll have my work cut out for me in this last week. Time to immerse myself in some code.
Inspiration
As a complete distraction from my end-of-semester-stress-out, I’ve been enjoying Moderat‘s new stuff lately. Spotting on CDM that they’re doing a live show with visuals made me super excited: Modeselektor‘s (one half of Moderat) live show is ridiculously good and live visuals would seal the deal for me. Here’s hoping that all this study will lead me down this road someday soon…
Done and done! Both series have been completed and received back from the printers – even with enough time for me to start picking apart the design. Nevermind.
I think I’ve done enough chatting about where the concept came from in general terms, so I’ll just go through a brief summary of each final piece…
‘National Security Hotline’ Series
The first of these links Alan Jones directly with the Cronulla riots, by juxtaposing his picture above news shots of the violence. The text of the poster discusses ways that tabloid media continues to ‘get away’ with inciting this kind of anger and hatred…
The second of these takes a similar look at Andrew Bolt’s continued attack on race and ethnicity. It includes a broader range of images than the first poster, with everything from the Camden Islamic school protests and Woomera Detention Centre, to general racism in Australia, like the teenagers on a Sydney beach, happily showing their stomachs emblazoned with “Fuck off, we’re full”…
The final in this series looks directly at the comments encouraged by these types of journalists. Every comment used to create the image of Australia comes from members of the public who have commented on Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair’s blogs. Some of it is nothing short of frightening. Spending many hours reading this stuff made my head spin…
‘What Are You Afriad Of’ Series
Unlike the previous series, which were a deliberate reference to an established campaign, these posters were designed from scratch. The first of these points out that Australia actually receives very few asylum seekers, when compared to other countries. Not quite the situation which calls for levels of hysteria going around at the moment…
The second of these ‘red, white and blue’ posters displays the difference in financial cost between processing boat people offshore when compared to taking them somewhere like Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. Why we feel the need to put them in detention is another point altogether, but comparing cost is something that everyone can respond to…
The final image shows the military might that the Australian government puts into protecting its borders from boat people. When you consider that the vast majority of asylum seekers come by plane, it’s an obscene amount of money…
The printers did a great job (particularly for putting up with hundreds of questions from a clueless uni student). The only trouble we ran into was when printing the blue ship poster. It seems that when I selected the colour in Illustrator, it had a large amount of magenta as part of its makeup. So when the printer wanted to make it slightly darker than I was seeing on my screen, the magenta came through much stronger, making the blue a purple colour.
After some trial and error, the fix came from flattening the PDF file, lightening it and fiddling with the colour balance slightly – all in Photoshop. I’ve decided that it might be time to invest in a monitor calibrator, like the Spyder, or some frighteningly expensive Pantone cards.
I think I’m happier this semester, having taken on projects with a little more concept and social impact. I don’t think my design has been as well developed as it probably could have been, but that aside, I feel like I’m heading in a pretty good direction with my graphic work.
Finally, the first element of my sketch is behaving itself. The RSS feeds are now appearing one beneath the other, and moving steadily down the page. This was a lot more difficult than I had first expected, and completed in no small part with the help of my good friend, Paul Jebanasam (coding extraordinaire)…
With the first hurdle out of the way, I was hoping that the rest would come a little easier. Not so.
As part of my pitch, I wanted the user to be an abstracted image of themselves: a silhouette. The plan was that this silhouette would attract the particles once there wasn’t a certain level of movement. Pretty quickly, I realised that my project is attempting to combine a lot of different libraries and therefore will likely run into a lot of different problems down the track.
So instead of using a silhouette, I have started trying to combine openCV’s face recognition with the traer.physics bouncy balls. I think this will be a better combination, because the face recognition should already give me an x and y coordinate, rather than trying to find the silhouette pixels from the entire screen.
As a final note, because the final assessment due for this subject one week after everything else, I’ve found I really put this off a lot more than I should. Certainly as a novice coder, it’s important that I continue chipping away at the project and getting feedback from the tutor. Much like learning a spoken language, it’s important that I regularly put myself into the environment of code, so that it starts to become second nature. Particularly as I want to continue down this path, I need to spend as much time with Processing as I can, and hopefully in the same way that HTML and CSS began to ‘make sense’, I expect that Processing’s version of Java will (soon?) do the same.
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