Thesis Blog - week 2

Thesis blog 2

This week I spent a lot of time pitching and refining my ideas for the narrative design of thesis. I got many differing opinions in terms of direction. After reading the feedback excerpts from the assignment I tried to take their recommendations to heart and evaluate them for the valuable content. I know I struggle with getting relevant feedback and this usually comes from my struggles in articulation. It’s extremely demotivating to try and pitch something only to have the response be irrelevant or misguided. I’ve been trying to be more direct in what I’m specifically looking for in feedback by directly asking, or dismissing other parts of my projects from feedback.

The greatest breakthrough came from reading more of Curtis Hickman‘s book, “Hyper Reality.” In a chapter it describes the difference between storytelling, which is a completely linear, sequenced, non-interactive experience and story building, which is a collaborative process with the audience and the balance that has to be struck between the two for an effective experience. By increasing audience agency, you exponentially increased the amount of content needed for the experience, but by not allowing any audience interaction then there is no opportunity for them to feel active in the story and it could be better suited to a non-immersive medium. There is also the opportunity to present a choice, where the audience does nothing, and that should still have its own outcome.

So in order to strike a balance, I will continue with my interpersonal discussions, which I will aim for three in the final project, but for the showcase will only do one. I’ve chosen to do two different opportunities of choice for the participants that will affect the narrative storyline, these will have minor differences, but will allow the audience to interact with the set and the story while also limiting the content needed to be produced. I have not yet determined what part of the story that will be, but once I have the script, revised and scenes broken down, I will be able to determine which is the best moment for those choices.

I also continued work this week on the touchdesigner sequencing aspect. This was a much more technical process and manage to wrangle different portions of data by using tables within the script. This allowed me to create master table in my script and reference different data points from it and individually sequence, audio and midi for my animatronics. I am in the process of building the physical prototypes and controlling them with Bluetooth low energy midi. My next steps are to refine my script and draw on my storyboard and then determine which scene I want to do for the demo day showcase, from there, I will determine the media assets and start building out that individual scene. Other technical issues I foresee are needing to work on our sequencing in touchdesigner, and how to ensure I can fire all of these elements successfully, using either timecode or an external system like Qlab. ideally, I would like this all in touch designer, so that I can augment and creatively bring in new features, such as generative AI easily, and if I desire have the entire system, run entirely off of audience interactions over a timebase sequencing.

I made a schedule to time-block a chunk of space per day for the next two weeks in order to set miniature milestones per week. I am struggling with having enough energy between working full-time and creating the project to what I aspire to. I think setting the small goals to move the project along and understand the scale which I can accomplish them will be effective and even knowing if I need to dial back while In still have time.