Thesis Blog -Week 7
March 11th
60 Days until Showcase
DEMO DAY IS OVER, AND I DID IT. I was stressing out all day over the grading and luck has it went essentially last. Setup went very well and I was able to construct a little environment for my setup. I made a cardboard CRT cover for my computer monitor and it really brought together the look and feel. Honestly, every time i make something out of cardboard I’m so amazed at how fast, affordable, and effective it is. I had a successful demonstration to Matt, Amy, and Regine. I revie3ved feedback on fleshing out more of the UX elements, communicating that to your participants, and accessibility. I should sit down with Amy, Apoorva, and Spandita to get some interesting ideas on how to make this more accessible. Amy recommended captions, I had the idea of making it sensory friendly but I think there are other things that can be done. Adding tactile items, smells, tastes, and other items. I don’t know if I’ll be able to incorporate all of them for showcase but I would like to have plans articulated. Regine had great insights on UX recommendations but I believe I could’ve addressed most concerns with longer presentation time to explain my project. With only about 5 minutes time, the demo took up a sizeable portion. I also didn’t come prepared with questions I would like address which would have been advantageous.
This week I’ve been working on incorporating all of my scenes into my Touchdesigner file. This is a bit arduous of a task but I believe we’re beyond the point of system automation making things better with a cost benefit analysis. I went through my entire script and added every possible cue I could imagine while reading it. These were labeled with the schema [SCENE.NUMBER.TYPE] and that allows for a n expandable system that is easy to track. I do wish there was an easier way to incorporate them alongside the script. Right now there are inline but I would prefer something along the lines of split page like the Cornell notes system.
After outlining the full list of cues (approx 105! with 10 avg per scene the same as demo day) I went about entering those into a tabular format via csv. This may seem redundant but it allows me to do multiple things. One, only view the cues for the show, I should be able to know 90% of the show from cues alone. This emphasizes the show don’t tell. The next is I now have a checklist of what to do. And finally I have the ability to bring that into Touchdesigner. Through some refinement, and computational thinking I was able to make a system that automatically creates timer lists for each element in the table automatically. I can also do this on a scene by scene basis so once I have a scene established it automatically pulls in the information from my master cues list.