Post-mortem

      For the project Dance Lab – the Legend of the Sun, we started working on the project by splitting it into two parts: animation and interaction (MaxMSP). For the current stage, we have almost finished animation and get our interaction patch working properly. For the animation part, now we have 12 scenes and a total time of 3 minutes and 52 seconds. And the final state of the animation would be approximately around 5 minutes including the interactive part that we haven’t made yet. As for the interaction patch, by multiplying matrices we can now realize the basic function that we were planning to do in the proposal:  adding controllable elements to the animation. And the rest part of the work is to contact our dancer and do the timing and adjust anything that needed to be adjusted.

We have now finished the process assignments of concept book and the progress report presentation. We found that forming the concept book did made a great contribution to our final project by giving us a chance to explore more elements and examples that can either inspire us or be used to build the project. By watching the video references, we came up with different versions of the story boarding to narrate the story and choose the best one that can demonstrate our idea of expanding the space by combining virtual and reality which contains several groups of either pushing the camera or moving the camera around. Since we are telling an Asian story and we have to be convincing to our audience that it is an Asian story by making a believable scene, a matter of visual language. We also did a research for the concept book. In the research we’ve learned what performance art is and also have a more clearly understanding of digital art. On the other hand, the article Performance and Technology Practices of virtual Embodiment and Interaction by Josephine Machon and Susan Broadhurst was very helpful to construct the project while dealing with the proportion of technology and human performance. This article helped us to make decisions in the project, like what we wanted our dancer to do in the project, and how we are going to make the animation that is convincing and will not overshining the performance.

     The second process assignment was the progress report presentation. We were focusing on user interaction. To accomplish the user interactive part, we mainly devoted ourselves in connecting max to Kinect and since we were making use of Synapse, we have to understand what each data means and how we could make use of the data.

      All the process assignments were helpful to our final project, they helped to push us do as much as we can in a certain amount of time and on the other hand, gave us a great chance to do researches not only on the theories that we are demonstrating but also the pre-exist projects that we can learn things from.