Final Video Project: iBracadabra
Class: Audio & Video Fall 2018
Teacher: Marina Zurkow
Team:
Hayk Mikayelyan
Jaekook Han
Becca Moore
Audio pulled from the youtube Audio Library:
Operatic 3 by Vibe Mountain
Category: Commlab:Audio & Video
iBracadabra Rough Cut
Shooting iBracadabra
My group members Jaekook, Hayk and I shot footage for our iBracadabra video for Audio & video. It was a fun learning experience, as we learned a lot about trial and error with lighting, sound, camera settings and framing. We used the documentation area on the floor to shoot, which worked great from 8am to around noon but as you would anticipate became much louder with softlab sounds & students throughout the day.
I think we’ll have to try to incorporate the floor noise into it / blend it in with sound design maybe? To help with the floor noise, we ended up using the Sennheiser omnidirectional headset mic for our Stefan character. We’ll need to make sure to split the audio into stereo & clean it while working with the rough cut.
We ended up getting an all black puppeteer suit for our AI / SmartMagic character that performs all the magical functions. Characterizing the magic behind our technological black boxes
more soon ❤
CommLab: Storyboard session
When brainstorming, we all really like the idea of a design fiction, while thinking about the concept of magic and technology. We were inspired by Apple Event videos (specifically the 2018 September Event and the Iphone announcement in 2007) + the Adult Swim style BroomShakalaka video when looking through references from class . If we cut down the storyboard? We’ll remove the intro paraody, and flesh-out Act 2
Team: Jaekook Han, Hayek Mikayelyan, Becca Moore
Option A: A 2-4 minute (max) promotional video for an invented object or service. This could be an infomercial, a design fiction, or an instructable.
Product Announcement: i.Bracadabra
Company: Waffle
Synopsis: It’s the year 2050, where magic has become an everyday reality. Wooden wands have expanded people’s daily abilities to perform tasks like moving objects and flying. Stefan Bobbs from the company Waffle is announcing his new revolutionary wand.
iBracadabra story board draft
Link to Sound walk reflection here
Commlab: Liminal Spaces Soundwalk
Duration: 5:00
Starting Point: The Paulette Goddard Staircase in the Tisch Lobby
Team: Mary Notari, Brent Bailey, Becca Moore
For our first assignment in Comm Lab:Audio & Video, we learned about and experimented with sound. I learned so much from my collaborators. We realized the value of brainstorming tools, like whiteboards, to help us map out our process. It helped us map the narrative arc of the piece.
Our feedback from the class was very helpful! We had been struggling with a way to make our theme less abstract – more specific. We had started with an umbrella concept of liminal space, inspired by the stairwell. We had wanted to highlight liminal architectural spaces like the stairwell, elevator, the lobby or a bench. Moments of the in between. As we re-routed to make our walk more physically accessible – we found ourselves in the lobby and attracted to architectural moments and textures. And were very inspired by Marina’s feedback to think about “what does it mean to move through a liminal space”. We had chosen a Solnit quote, compelled by her themes of inbetween-ness and how stories are often our compasses through our liminal ever shifting landscapes of cities.
To respond to what we could have done differently? If we were to do another iteration?I think really distilling a “through-line”. We may have started with thinking about liminal spaces? but could be good to keep the pulse on how the project evolves through the collaboration, sometimes that means it starts to shape in a different way thematically.
I think a post-it note wall organization strategy could help us arrange the elements we explored. I think by trying to organize it in that manner, the through-line would start to emerge. It could’ve helped to have started off the project that way too – then we using the same post-it notes to our development arc timeline.
I would also have had us all sit down, and demo/decide a workfile system. Mary showed me a fun/ helpful way to incorporate google drive autosync for shared files, but i think my update wasn’t quite registering.
Working with Brent and Mary was super inspirational 🙂 ❤
Link to Next Assignment/ Storyboarding
Liminal Spaces: User Testing
We did a user test run of our audio walk Liminal Spaces
User Feedback
Likes:
- that the first action loosened you up to be more open to the whole experience
- that you flow throughout the space more fluidly without holding a physical thing like a map
- quote content
- opening door into the outside effect
- really liked the Laozi quote
Suggestions:
- add more space to the actions:
- find your way into the lobby
- grab the handrail and carefully lean over to look downstairs
- drift towards the exit doors
- add transitioning /sonic cue into the Solnit reading – like an opening door, maybe ambient sound like Brent’s architecture quote?
- bump up the levels of outdoor crescendo section
- more detail in description / context clues of where the handrail is / had started towards the retractable cloth Queue way
Comm Lab: Audio & Video: Soundwalk Planning
Soundwalks
Our first assignment in CommLab: Audio + Video is to develop a 3-5 min sound walk with our group after each having experienced various ones in the city. My two group members, Brent Bailey and Mary Notari, experienced Passing Stranger: East Village Poetry Walk.
They both really liked how each character voice became associated with a specific kind of content in the walk. One woman, whenever you heard her voice, you knew she was giving you walking directions, due to the context of that being the only time you would hear her. We thought it might be nice to try and incorporate that strategy into our walk as well.
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Comm Lab: Audio & Video – Oil Twitchers & Barge Spotters
Oil Twitchers and Barge Spotters:
A Field Guide to Whale Creek
Created by Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (Nicholas Hubbard, Rebecca Lieberman and Marina Zurkow)
Voice: Bruce Shackelford
Sound Engineer: Jane Cramer
Music: Justin Peake
Post-natural, bringing the past forward, rehabilitation and reclamation of nature. How did they choose which plants they used as part of the wetland healing process? Did they know the metal for the light posts would rust in a birchwood pattern after exposed to weather and time? All these things came to mind, but the first questions for me were what is Dark Ecology? What is the post-natural world, the anthropocene?
On Monday (9.10) I visited Newton Creek Nature walk with my partner Chad to experience the sound walk – Oil Twitchers and Barge Spotters. I thought he might find it interesting since he works as an environmental scientist, and to hear his personal stories of the rehabilitation of the Chesapeake Bay. The Newton Creek Nature Walk (2007) was “designed by an Environmental Sculptor George Trakas, to encourage visitors to ponder the errors of the waterway ” ( track 2 of audiowalk). The health of the Creek is so poor that in 2010 the EPA declared it to be a federal Superfund Site and entered into agreement with the Potentially Responsible Parties. (FSDE)
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30 KM/s 