within / without
within/without touches on simple human connections finding ways in which we can be comfortable with the uncomfortable. Creating a world of our own that allows us to be a part of a whole and still find ourselves. By utilizing color, shapes, and lights throughout our piece, we hope to add a certain depth to our performance by playing off of the movements of the actors as they navigate through the "day".
Meet The Team
Myrah Porter
Choreographer
Laura Godinez
Lighting Designer
Natalie Broussard
Visual Programmer
Pollyana O'hara
Visual Programmer
Matthew Lyons
Composer
Kelsey Bacic
Atticus Griffin
Matthew James
Mackenzie Lawrence
Tori Loper
Toni Neal
Azari Slumber
Avery Moore
Brooke Shore
Reflection
May 15, 2019
It is a week after the performances have ended and I am able to reflect back on how it actually went down. In retrospect, I am happy with our product. I am happy with what we were able to accomplish and how it looked onstage. IT wasn't without its difficulties, but I am happy with the end product. My team was able to communicate effectively to each other and things were decided on as a group. Of course there are some things I would like to change, as I think anyone would after such a process, but I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm going to dwell on the fact that this was a successful performance as a whole despite some fundamental issues with its management. Many people from different backgrounds inside of Fine Arts and different levels of knowledge were able to create 8 distinct and unique pieces to show our audience.
The Performance
May 9-10, 2019
It happened. It actually happened. After weeks of working towards this final product, it actually happened. We had an audience, we had our team, and it happened.
This morning in class, Polly and I made our last few final tweaks that I described in the post below, and I could tell we were both finally feeling a little bit better about the week. We added a UI Slider that controlled the "Turb ball" visual so that we could have more control over its movements, and restricted our mouse to the UI screen only, so that we didn't have any slip-ups during the performance and end up with a mouse on stage. I was extremely sleep deprived because of the past two weeks between working on Evolution for two groups, final projects, and exams, but at least EvoLutIon was just about done.
Since I recently found out I was no longer going to be able to make the second performance on Friday, Polly stepped up and practiced the middle section that I usually controlled so that I was able to do what I needed to do. Instead of switching off like we usually would, she ran the entire thing with me next to her guiding her through the middle portion of the piece. The show ran smoothly, with no errors and I am very happy with our group and what we we did.
The Final Dress
May 8, 2019
It's the day before we open and rehearsal went a LOT smoother today than did our group tech. We had a functioning UI that was clear and to the point, we had all of our media we were using ready and set up to go to the correct projector, our music was set up to talk to QLab, and Polly and I were ready to go. Because I was Lighting Designer for the first piece that was being performed, I didn't start out in the booth, but had to sneak my way up afterward. I'm proud of how it turned out. We still needed practice with the transitions between media, but all of our content worked and was able to be seen. The switch function in Touch Designer allowed to to switch between medias, we could see what was being projected on the scrim and cyc in the UI itself, and it seemed as though all of our sliders were working. We had finally scratched the idea of using a Midi board to control our visuals, as we were having a few too many problems with connection every time we came back that Polly and I decided it wasn't worth it if it worked just the same using the mouse only. The only thing I could see us needing to change/add/fix was...
- Add mouse constraints so that our mouse wouldn't accidentally end up on stage.
- Add a UI Slider to control the "Turb Ball" so that we had more control as to where it went.
- Add a timeline which we had run out of time to do beforehand.
It has been a rough week due to everything in all of my classes happening at once and being due at once, but my team made it, and we are almost to the finish line. We just have to tweak a few things and then we will be final performance ready.
Act 1 Tech Rehearsal
May 5, 2019
It happened. It actually happened. After weeks of working towards this final product, it actually happened. We had an audience, we had our team, and it happened.
The First Tech Rehearsal
May 2nd, 2019
It's TECH DAY!
Today was our first time in the space with projections, Lights, and Sound, all at the same time, so we were able to really see how our media would look onstage, and not just projected on a wall in the PLAI Lab with the lights turned off. So we jump right into it. Myrah is by the stage directing her dancers, Laura is at the Hog Board programming looks, and Polly and I are at the Media table trying desperately to..... get our file to OPEN.
After quite a bit of troubleshooting, we come to find out that an "Experimental" version of Touch Designer was downloaded and being used on the performance computer and that version of Touch didn't like our file. It took a while for Polly, Earnest, Michael, and I to figure out this was the problem (and by us I really mean Michael McKellar is the one who figured it out) and Helen (our wonderful Stage Manager) started the rehearsal without us since it was going to take a hot minute to download the regular, non-Experimental version of Touch Designer. After that was done, however, our file was finally able to open up and we could continue on with our tech.
One of the first things we realized... actually, the FIRST thing we quickly realized was that our fog that we start out the performance with was not being reflected onto the Scrim as we thought it would. At first we though it just wasn't showing up at all, in that the projector wasn't getting the signal and we had skipped something in our Touch Designer System that was causing it to not send the signal, but actually it was. It was just extremely hard tell that it was there at all. But, we were able to fix this later on by editing the Point Sprites that were being used to create the fog and by adding some color to it as well.
During our rehearsal time, I realized that we really did not have that much in the way of different content. Our piece was relatively minimalistic, yes, but I felt as though it needed more. It wanted more. So, after our Tech rehearsal had finished, we had realized a couple of things...
- We needed to edit our fog so that it showed up on the scrim.
- We needed to have a clearers idea on when we wanted some things to happen in the performance.
- We had to clean up our UI as it was a bit too confusing for myself to effectively operate.
- I wanted to add one more visual so it wasn't the same thing for 5 minutes.
- We had to finish the ending look where the fog will mimic the dancers coming to center and crouching down.
So after our official Tech Rehearsal ended, I stayed after in the Payne to try and fix a couple of these points and started with cleaning up our UI. We needed to be able to see the content being projectd on our UI itself, so that was the first thing I added. The background of the entire UI was our output, and onto was the individual containers of content that we eould be able to click to switch and sliders that would allow us to alter the media in real-time. Once I added the containers of the media we already had to the UI, I then started to create a new look. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I wanted something a bit different than the calm "fog" and "paint" visuals we had already created. Through experimentation, and edits, I created what I have deemed the "turn ball." The "turn ball" is a particle system using a sphere with its position on the cyc reflecting the position of the mouse on our UI. The movement the particles exhibited that was not mouse controlled was constantly being changed by an LFO system connected to the turbulence force. This caused the particles to form into a sphere due to lack of turbulence and then splash out across the screen because of the sudden increase in force on the x and y axis what seemed to be random.
I also edited our paint falling and added the slider that would affect its color, movement, and feedback. This is when I added the sliders that would affect the feedback opacity, opacity of the particles themselves, color, and speed as they were "falling" down the screen. To me, these seemed to be a good idea given the VJ aspect of our final performances.
At this time in the night though, I had to call it quits, since it was late late into the night. I updated Polly in the morning on the progress I had made and shared the file with her.
Recording with Dancers
April 30, 2019
Today we all met in the PLAI Lab once more to record some of the animations we had been talking about for so long that we were going to play back live during the actual performance. I was coming from an off-campus class so I wasn't able to get there until closer to 5:30, rather than 5:00 like I was hoping. But Polly, Myrah, and a couple of the dancers were there and waiting, and immediately I was told the Kinect wasn't working again.
Once I looked at the little alert in Touch Designer, I quickly realized it was simply a different computer than the one we were using the Saturday before and we just had to download the software that made it work. Once that was dowloaded, we were able to start experimenting and recording with the dancers. We experimented with how the Kinect and Touch Designer system would react with one person, and then we experimented with two people, and then three. We quickly realized, that while although the Kinect is great at following the body, when people cross each other, or stand behind each other, it can quickly get confused as which skeleton is who's and the feedback we created would jump around in a way that wasn't exactly what we are hoping for.
When we at the meeting though, we had some miscommunication as to how exactly we wanted to record these movements. I had the understanding we were going to record them as Movie Files using the MovieFileOut Top, and Polly had though we were going to record the movements themselves into a Chop/Dat table.
I admit, I was unclear on how to record the movements and was eventually able to figure it out, but was unsure of how to utilize that information in the end to control our visuals' movements. I began to record the movie files themselves as I thought it would be best to have actual content to use rather than unusable Chop data if we ran out of time to understand how to use it properly and in a way we liked. However, there was miscommunication due to the larger number of people that were in the PLAI Lab in at our meeting that there usually were, and Chop data was only collected for one of the movements we recorded.
Nonetheless, movie files of the movements were made, and during the process, Polly, Myrah, and I decided that exact movements did not come across how we wanted them to, and more abstract, gestural movements, that just reflected what was happening onstage were more of what we wanted to happen.
Connecting the Kinect
April 27, 2019
Today we had our last official meeting before spacing and tech week started just to go over some stuff and have one last check in before we all met to officially run through our piece. Polly and I were able to show Myrah and Laura what we had interactive-wise and have Myrah actually play with the program capabilities and what it was able to do/look, etc. We were able to really nail down how we wanted our feedbacks and trails to look and interact with the person standing in front of it.
Connecting the Kinect to Touch Designer was not at all as difficult as I had anticipated and actually a relatively straight forward process. You plug this in here, download this program, add this Chop, add this Top to SEE the Chop, and woolah, the kinect was connected. What WAS difficult, however, was keeping it connected. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but it seems as though right when my teammates were walking in for our meeting it lost all connection and would claim to be "connecting to device" for minutes at a time. Trouble shooting didn't help much, and it definitely cut into the time we were hoping to possibly record some visual footage with Myrah. Nonetheless, after what seemed like forever, it finally connected the way it was supposed to and we were able to continue on with our meeting.
While I was troubleshooting the Kinect connection, we were able to discuss what we wanted to be said in the Playbill about our piece and as a group of 4, were able to write a short paragraph about what it is we wanted to accomplish.
Above is one of the images taken while exploring the capabilities of the Touch Designer Particle system we had made. I sett up the Kinect Chop so that it would react to one player and created two points of movement; one on each of the players hands. And I can't lie, it was a LOT of fun to play with because it was basically just painting in the air. We had achieved one of our goals of having that dancer / media connection. Now we just had to record the interactions and movements we wanted to reflect on screen and make it work on-stage...
Paint Progress
April 18, 2019
Today, I was working on creating a background for the middle portion of our performance that would uncover a paint-like background and would reflect where the dancers are onstage. I made one file two days ago, but edited it today in an effort to provide more movement to the visual (videos below). It took me a little bit to figure out, but I was able to get it working in no time. I originally had made a comp fed by three different paint texture images, because I was thinking that maybe I could transition between the 3 images to create interest, but today, decided that it was not the best method for my purposes. Plus, I keep having trouble with my feedback loops and it seems as though they just never want to work for me.
First Iteration
I have my circular ball, which will eventually be edited to reflect the movements of the dancers, connected to my mouse x and y. This then goes into a comp Top with the paint .jpeg files, so that the white of the circle now reflects the image underneath it. It is a relatively simple system, but it was able to do what I wanted it to.
Second Iteration
I wanted to add some movement since the background seemed to static. So I switched out the static .jpegs for a noise top and added that to the Comp Top instead.
Now only if I can get that feedback to start working, then I think this will look more how I imagine it in my head.
Foundry Presentations
March 28, 2019
Today, I was working on creating a background for the middle portion of our performance that would uncover a paint-like background and would reflect where the dancers are onstage. I made one file two days ago, but edited it today in an effort to provide more movement to the visual (videos below). It took me a little b
Foundry Presentations
March 28, 2019
Today we had our presentation in the Foundry in front of all of our classmates, professors, and those in charge of the event. We talked about all of our ideas and hopes, and also what we though our potential challenges were.
Myrah discussed how very human movements and gestures would be the main influence for choreography
Laura discussed the color theme that we had decided on and minimalistic aspect that we were hoping to achieve with her lighting design.
And Polly and I discussed how we hope to create two main "looks", one for the "Nighttime" and one for the "daytime" characterized by different styles and content. "Fog" would used to symbolize the night/early morning, and "paint" would be used to symbolize the day/afternoon, staying consistent with the concepts of our teammates and color schemes.
The Second Meeting
March 26, 2019
Today was used to finalize our slideshow for the Foundry presentations being held in a couple of days. We talked more thoroughly about what we wanted to discuss and explain to our classmates, professors, and higher-ups and built off of the presentation that Laura had originally made. Myrah added more content about the choreographic style and a video of the movements she is planning on evoking in the dance. Polly and I also added our ideas to the presentation regarding the environment we wanted to put the dancers in and technology we were thinking about using.
The First Meeting
March 13, 2019
Today was the day we all got together as a group for the first time! We met in the Winship Lobby to discuss each of our ideas and figure out a direction to go in. Laura had made a presentation for our Lighting class that reflected what Myrah had originally said she was interested in exploring with the piece and showed us her ideas based off of that. Very quickly we all decided on a color scheme and direction to go in and plan to meet up again in a week to make and finalize our Foundry presentation Slideshow!