How to Solve a Rubik's Cube from Aaron on Vimeo.

For my Comm Lab final, I wanted to play with Final Cut Pro and at the same time experiment with different ways to mash up audio and video. Lately I've been most interested in the ephemeral videos that are licensed under Creative Commons on Archive.org.  Since it's the end of the semester, I wanted to find footage that I could do something funny with but that might also be relevant to our time here. I stumbled upon a video from the 1988 series, "Computer Chronicles," where they covered the first ever Computer Bowl. It was a gathering of geeks from the east coast and west coast, including luminaries like Bill Joy from Sun, Esther Dyson and Mitch Kapor (who, for the record, ripped it up). Ultimately, I was blocked creatively. The raw footage (including the TV commercials at the end) were so funny by themselves, I couldn't figure out what to do with them. I thought about finding episodes of both the Simpsons and Family Guy that I could remix for the east coast vs. west coast battle. I also thought about how to play with the audio and video to make it funnier. Here's the result:
Computer Bowl I: Redux from Aaron on Vimeo. Given the time constraints and my lack of experience in Final Cut, I think it turned out pretty nice. However, I still think the audio needs some work.

For our first foray into After Effects, Sara and I created a short clip using the first line of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" for inspiration: It was a lot of fun learning how to use the program, but also frustrating. We got a quick and dirty 30 minute tutorial and class, and then set out to create our piece. Part of the problem was that we had collected assets the week before, and once I learned more about how After Effects worked, I had wished that we picked different images as our starting point. Also, I had started creating the project on my computer and Sara had done the same in the lab at school. Unfortunately, we had different versions of the program and therefore couldn't combine them. We ended up rebuilding my section in AE. I'm pretty pleased with the final result, especially given our time constraints.

Alex, Zach, Michelle and I decided to work together on the two-minute video assignment for CommLab. When we met for the first time, we started talking about different story ideas. Alex said there was a story he always wanted to tell about a pianist who is walking home and has his fingers broken by a mugger for no other reason that he's pure evil. Huh? I wasn't really in to the idea. For one, I was much more interested in doing something funny. If the audience is my CommLab peers, then I wanted to make them laugh. We decided that we would take the basic premise, then go and draw up our own storyboards. A few days later, we'd get together and compare. Here's what our combined storyboards looked like: As you can see, I tried to take it another direction by adding a clown, but the group wasn't feeling it. I agreed that this would be a new experience and that I would try something new, like making a dramatic/horror type film. The first challenge was finding a place to shoot a piano scene. It's amazing that ITP has no connections or agreements with any other departments within Tisch, so we were forced to scavenge. I don't mind guerilla style shooting, but it does seem a bit ridiculous given that we're part of NYU, which has state of the art facilities that I assume my tuition helps fund. Nonetheless... It took us about two full days to shoot all of the scenes we wanted, and we did so focusing on the pianist's hands and avoiding any face shots. Lighting proved challenging, but I also learned a lot as we tried to appropriately light so many different scenes. Alex shared this video as inspiration: The editing was probably the hardest part of all this, mostly because the lab isn't really set up for four people to huddle around a computer. The process was slow, with most of us taking turns in different shifts over the weekend to prepare a final cut.  There were, of course, disagreements. Some people felt that their ideas weren't listened to or respected. While it's an unfortunate outcome, I think it's a risk that all collaborative processes run. I'm very pleased with the final result! So without further ado, here is Sonata No. 666:

Since before I started graduate studies at ITP, I've been asked, "what exactly is it?"  Here's one video that helps to answer, "explain the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU." Simply awesome! I expect I will come back to this often for inspiration, especially during some of those long, dark, bleak nights towards semester's end. Created by chris cerrito, ja in koo, eduardo lytton, kim thompson rodrigo de benito sanz, xiaoyang feng, ami snyderman, che-wei wang. (link)

For my ICM midterm, I had a lot of different ideas. I thought about building a teleprompter for bloggers and I considered building a video program that would track colors on the screen and create a disguise based on some really colorful things people could put on their faces. The problem was that I just wasn't too passionate about either of these ideas. So I thought some more and decided that I wanted to try and use Processing's brightness tracking video feature as a detector that, based on the colors read, would facilitate some other kind of action. Premise I created a video around the premise, "Help Me Get to the Subway." As the character tries to get to the subway, he reaches three places where he can choose between going two directions. He holds up a brightly colored ball in each hand, each representing one of the choices. The user then holds a ball up to the video camera to designate which way the character should go. The camera reads the color of the ball and the video then jumps to that point to continue the story. If the user chooses the wrong direction, the character gets beaten up and the game restarts First Step: Filming I started by filming all the video. I had the actor walk to the subway and when he got to three separate points, he held up the two balls. Then we had to film him going the right way and going the wrong way. When he went the wrong way, I had two actors beat him up. It took about an hour to film. Second Step: Coding Once I had the video, there were two different pieces of code that I needed. The first was to jump between video segments. After reviewing the available code online, there were two choices. I could either have different videos start and stop or I could make one long video with all of the choices and program Processing to jump to different points. The latter seemed to make more sense. The next piece of code I needed was for the video camera on my computer (or an external video camera) to register the different color balls and jump to the different parts of the video based on it. This was the most frustrating and most difficult to figure out, but Shawn was a huge help during his office hours. Once I had the code, I had to test it. Obviously the hardest part was the different lighting conditions, which affected how bright the pixels were on the screen. Here's how I set up the balls so that I could find the average brightness:

I really liked this project, and I'm thinking that I will continue using this system as I think about my final project. The hardest thing to control of course is the lighting. I had it working perfectly in the Japanese room the night before I demo'd it in class. The next morning, I got to class early in order to try and recalibrate it for the brightness of the room. That didn't end up working too well and I could only demo one of the three threads. The feedback was that I needed to change the way that I found the average brightness by putting more limits on it, rather than just using greather than and less than.

Here's the code.

Nobu and I worked together on this project, and it was a lot of fun. We started by watching a few popular stop motion YouTube videos for inspiration, including Tony vs. Paul and Ping Pong Ball Manipulation. We then discussed some different types of narratives. We tossed around the idea of taking our camera out to the park to film something in "Tony vs. Paul" fashion, but we couldn't figure out how to make ourselves fly and so decided against it. So we went to the Halloween store on West 4th and Lafayette to see if we could find something fun there to use for our film. Jackpot! We settled on some silly string, a tube of fake blood, a package of rubber rats and a package of rubber spiders. We constructed a bunch of different storylines with these new props, but we still needed a place to set it in. Back at ITP, we decided we liked the West Side Story angle, and we wanted our rats and spiders to fight it out cage match style. Nobu and I rummaged through some garbage cans and the junk shelf to construct our set, and then took our first stab at shooting with iStopMotion. It didn't take long to determine that 30 frames wasn't very much. What you see here is our third attempt. In the first, we spent too much time on the intros of the rats and spiders and not enough on the actual action. The second take was a complete departure that began as a fight, transformed into a choreographed dance and ended up as a fight again. But in this version, you can see we had a better understanding of how to tell a stop motion story. In the end, there were only a few frames that needed editing: and one more: So without further ado, here is "Rat vs. Spider": Rat versus Spider from Aaron on Vimeo.

So I've been at ITP for almost three weeks and I still haven't had the opportunity to meet Clay. Nonetheless, I found this video from his presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference in NYC last week and highly recommend you watch it. He's an engaging speaker, building his argument about information overload through awesome stories that really illustrate his points.