Reflection:

For the last 3 studies I feel as if my creative process has become a lot more fine tuned than what it was in the beginning of this semester. If you asked me to create something at the start of semester I would’ve had no clue where or what to start in order to achieve my end goal. I think one big factor for me at least is whenever I struggle to find some inspiration I can just have a look at what other people have made through the google drive. I find it interesting all the different pathways people are taking in this class and now I feel as if I can truly create something of my own. In some respects I am happy with these 3 studies, but once again I also feel as if I’ve failed to accomplish some of my goals. Studies 4 and 5 gave me some real trouble with being glitchy and just a pain in the back. And I know that studies 4 and 5 are far from polished and that doesn’t feel great but in order for me to have finished them to the level I want it’s just totally unrealistic with my slowly developed skill set.

During this design process I think I kind of learnt more than I did comparative to the last assignment. The positives that I can take out is that I still keep the idea relatively simple. I think that keeping the idea simple in turn lends itself to a better finished project. And I guess at the start I thought simple idea would mean simple execution, but this study has proven me quite wrong. Classic example is studies 4 and 5. Our group thought it was a simple idea, but the execution was just too hard for us to make a fully polished piece of art.  Comparative to my major study where it was a simple idea, and execution was rather simple compared to studies 4 and 5. I think this simple idea of thinking clearly shows a better project as I am much happier with my major study than my other two. Studies 4 and 5 almost made me feel as if I was in the early weeks of the semester, learning how to use max again which ultimately wasn’t a great feeling. Especially because I am the sort of person to set a goal and really want to achieve it no matter how great the task is.

In the end though, I believe my work has been far more sophisticated than what I had previously making and that’s a really good feeling. During these 3 studies I found myself looking or watching tutorials online, and I also spent a lot of time on the Max forums. This is completely different to the pervious assignment where I was just asking for help in class. I started to realise when I was in the forums looking for specific things that my skillset was begging to become wider and I was getting to the point where I had to look at other information sources to find things that I wanted. I also think a large reason as to why my research has been more in depth is the fact that these are non-tactile studies which led myself to actually thinking outside the box. Taking away the tactile part of interaction seriously made me think of how I am going to create something that can engage and interact with my audience and have the same effect as using tactile interactions.But I still feel as if I have a lot to learn within Max and I’m keen to see what not only max holds for the future but what I can achieve in the years to come.

Statement:

For my major project I wanted to try something different than what I had previously been making. Basically what I wanted to do was use audio to manipulate some visual effects. Once again I think I over estimated my abilities in max and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to make the user feel excited or almost as if they were seeing things. What I did was grab a visual video off the internet and mixed it with a daft punk song. The user then can click on one of 4 inlets that does certain visual effects to the already trippy video. Basically I wanted to draw the attention of my audience and lock them into these visual effects. I think the end product turned out okay, but it could defiantly use some work here and there, such as adding even audio effects. But as a whole I think it does the job alright. If I had more time to do this project again, I would’ve liked to try and actually create my own visual effects/animations in max as that would’ve been ideal, I also think that I would’ve had a greater learning experience from that.

Statement:

In study 5, we were given the task of reworking our original study 4 ideas and creating something even better than before. The feedback that we got from the class was decent, basically add more dogs was the key, as well as making the piece of software more stable that the previous version. Unfortunately I spent hours and hours trying to figure out a way to make the software more stable for everyone as a whole and not just working well for myself. As a result I couldn’t find a way to do this, and after spending a lot of time on the max forum I could not find anything useful for this. As for making other improvements, we decided to change both the images used. Now when the user raises his or her eye brows they are greeted by a lot of dogs. I think that in terms of creating or feeling an emotion this piece does a better job than the first one because there is more dogs, which always brings more smiles.

Study 4:

In my fourth study, the focus was to interact with the audience in a non-tactile way. We also had the aim of making the audience feel a certain emotion. The emotion that our group chose was happy, because we thought it was the easiest thing to accomplish. The idea for our project is to use facial features in order to trigger something on screen. So what we did was use face osc and max to create an image of a sad dog, and when the user raises their eye brows the image of a smiling dog appears. The idea was pretty simple but execution was a lot further from our reach than what we had originally thought. The problem that we had was fine tuning the software to work for not only myself but just everyone in general. Although we tried our hardest it was too hard for us to figure out a solution that wasn’t glitchy or that even worked. Looking into the future, it probably would’ve been a good idea to test face osc more extensively to see if the outcome we wanted was more realistic or achievable