Guy's ITP thesis

Friday, April 27, 2007

more pictures

more test shots. This layout will be totally redesigned. Hope I can catch the rehearsal on Sunday (shooting the scenario video)!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

trial - almost done (hopefully)!

Here comes more screenshots for the Comic Exercise. And I still have these following missions left to be done in 3 days (by this week)! Seriously! And after 5/3, MPS degree is coming to me! Yeeeeeeeeey!

1. STORY! I know, I know! This has been bothering me for months! Now finally I got some ideas in mind and decided the ending of the story. (Weird, ending comes out first) Anyway, I have to start from the layout and put all my fragments together and turn them into a whole great masterpiece!

2. Scenario video! Obviously, there is neither room nor time to show my project in my presentation. The only and safest way is to do a scenario play. (Sort of fake it! Great!) I think I have to do rehearsal test as soon as I shoot the scenario. It may take a while to set everything up. Another issue is that it seems that all the rooms are occupied this weekend. Oh, such a worry... and I need to install Maxlink to the classroom's G5 since my laptop is so slow. Hopefuly, some admin can help me to install it.

3. Presentation slides/Documentaions. I have to add future ( potential) development into my powerpoint, and more references maybe?

4. Small bugs in Processing. The image needs to reverse.... a sound of sneeze has to be recorded.... And after all, do I have time to fix the pixel offset problem?

Start drawing my story RIGHT NOW!



Saturday, April 21, 2007

Comic Exercise


Finally, my project's name comes out - "Comic Exercise"! It has been one and a half month since the midterm presentation. What am i doing in this period? Oh, everything goes so slowly.. First, I finished Networked Objects final as working with Greg for "Better Bin", which is an environmental issue project and totally not my style. As for my thesis, the main progress is the visual feedback of microphone input. I programmed dialogue bubbles which were generated by the volume of the sound. It's not (and will never be) perfect yet, and there are something much more important and emergent waiting for me...

The story - Gosh! I have been told that I have to concern most about my content for thousands of times! I knew it! But I just cant come up with very satisfying idea that totally intrigues me to run for it. I did a lot of research and took many references to find out something inspiring. Winsor McCay is a really influential comic artist and i swear after the thesis i will definitely go over his creations!

The design of the interface - My wish it to keep it simple. All interaction is supposed to be done in Processing + Max/Msp so that P-comp stuff is no need. My problem is, as JooYun said, how to make the player's action make sense? He is not just standing there and smiling embarrassingly toward the camera? I hope that the camera is hidden into the wall, which means, the projection wall will be drilled a small hole which allows the camera to peek from behind the screen. Another problem jumps out here: the light of projection will interfere with the camera's image capture since the camera is right facing the projector. The only solution I can think of is to hide the camera under a black (dark) field image, which is very likely a bug lens image (so that it can cover the drilled hole) to make the whole thing reasonable. That means I have to get a picture where and how to arrange a camera image in my story in advance. Maybe it's a good news since that's a direction for my content!