The Visuals for the final

Time to write up on everything I've been working on outside of the blog in one monster entry-

Well, it took me forever to figure out as to what to do as far as visuals go for our project, but I think I may finally have something that's quality-not just taking the sound and turning into random visual aids, but actually building on it. Before I get to it, though, I feel I should dwell on some of the other more ambitious, but far less visionary, ideas I've come up with.

Dylan's original idea was to have cartoon faces who's expressions and such change based off of the music. While an interesting idea, if I were to pull it off perfectly, it still would only be all right. Think about a face moving to the music-it's not all that original-it's what's reffered to in design as a level 1 idea-one of those things that would be immediately thought up. There's not only that, but also the fact getting it to look right would quite possibly more labor intensive then the animation I've had the whole semester to work on in Heath's class. Not only that, but I'm nowhere near the skill level to pull off those faces on a level that I would find adiquate....so forget that.

Building on that idea I thought of such things as having video where an actual face moved or where possibly a whole body moved. Kind of corny, tought to pull off, and really not soemthing that would turn out well no matter how well done. I built upon that and asked myself what does that have to do with the instrument wand we're using. The answer came through the ideas of having an interplay of fingers. It would be the sort of thing where one screen would have a finger dancing around it, another screen with a hand of a person upon a finger, another where the hands did Labrynth towards of combinations of faces of such. This, however, had similar pitfalls to just the faces or just the bodies....so forget that.

I was back where I started looking around for good ideas to do-there's all of the sites I found based off of Doug's link sent to everyone-many of the sites were gateways to others, and there were afew things among those that I didn't find completely bunk. A lot of them just kind of seemed like using Max's equivilant to filters. It gives me the impression that the compitition for Max video isn't very high, except when used in conjuctiion with other software or hardware. Max really works best as a middle man, but it works quite well at that. With that said, I will be using Max almost entirely-I'll probably mess with the images in photoshop a bit first, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The best site i found in that heap of links would have to beEric Singer's site. It didn't do anything as far as video-but as far as spurring ideas for what could be done with audio, it's a wonderful jumping off point. He mainly focuses on one sound with any given instrument, while we intend on mixing a few-but his concept of using chords and moving up adown scales and such in different keys dpending on location, allowing for multiples of these going on at the same time and so forth worked really well, and had a nice sound that went along with it. I'll discuss this with Chris, although I really see us all working on sound sampling.

But I digress-the idea that I settled on for the video was an andywarholish displaying of the screen, think his multiple Marilyn Monroe piece, but with a different image then that, and the various images, while they will have the stark contrast throughout, will change based on the music. The actual concept is rather simple, however, if pulled off well I really see it working-I'll have to study color theory, and what colors people inately see as loud, which as soft-which as stark, which as bland, etc. I have a good idea of it, but I'd like to know what Munsell thought. I also will need to study a good deal of Warhol's work to get a feel for what I need to do to build on it as appose to butcher it. The images themselves could be anything from the member's in the group or Doug's head, to something a bit more relevant-I could go with something similar to his 16 Jackies where each of the heads is in a different position, or more likely, I'll go with the same basic image with a slightly different 'print' that changes in each spot.

Other ways to expand on this idea (although I definitely don't want to make it too busy, for I feel that would defeat the purpose to a great extent) could include having different images with simimlar colors or vise versa-figuring out exaclty how to tweak the images so they match the music on the given computer-possibly changing how many boxes it's seperated into, or switching how big a singal image is compared to the others...there's a lot of directions I could go with this. I'm looking forward to using this as a starting point, and being ready for our group's self imposed self review. Netsend and net recieve were working fairly flawlessly when I saw Glenn testing it, and I ahve complete trust in Dylan's ability to handle the wand, music we'll see how it develops, but now there's something for visuals, and that's a major plus.