by Himanshu Vartak | Apr 22, 2014 | Newsletter
This week was majorly a development week. While movement 2 was mostly done, movement 3 was in the beginning stages of development and movement 4 had still not started development. The tech team got into the development of the remaining movements on full steam. We had our client, Dr. Thomas come in again this week to see our progress. She was enthused with our findings of the first tech test at Kresge Hall and extended full support with regards to any further requests. We showed her our progress with movement 2 and the rudiments of movement 3. She was appreciative of the design change wherein the instruments and their emissions would become invisible when the instrument wouldn’t play. The other major development in the week was logistical. We got the support of the CMU Campus Police and the College of Fine Arts with regards to moving our equipment from the ETC premises to the Kresge Hall for our further tech rehearsals. We have further tech rehearsals scheduled for April 23, 29 and 30. We hope to make the best use of our time at the performance location. We also have softs coming up next week. Our goal for the softs is to have our entire experience up and running, enabling us to give the faculty the closest possible experience of the final performance scheduled on May 14. We also began production on our promo videos. These should be done in time for the softs online on...
by Himanshu Vartak | Apr 12, 2014 | Newsletter
This week we began development on movement 2 and movement 3 simultaneously. The mechanisms for these movements are slightly different from the first movement, but use the existing art assets. Thus, these are incremental upgrades to the mechanism of movement 1. The major part of this week; on Wednesday was our first ever tech rehearsal at the Kresge Hall. We needed to see how we were going to power our computer and the projectors and see how the screen would display our images. We took a couple of the small screens that would be used for projecting the virtual instruments, a set of our stage risers and the tall chairs and lights, to simulate our stage design. This was the first time we were in the performance space with most of our equipment. This session was extremely helpful to us, as we realised what we needed to do with regards to lighting and stage design. We tested the brightness of our projectors, and how far the images will project. We also spoke with Sang Mok Lee, who would help us with lighting and providing power to our equipment. We discussed the various options available to us with regards to lighting and stage design. We even had a playtest on Thursday with all the musicians. This was the first time we had all five musicians together. It was an opportunity for us to test our system with all the musicians playing their instruments simultaneously. We were aware that the live instruments would be considerably louder than all our tests so far, and had to test and fine-tune the mic inputs...
by Himanshu Vartak | Apr 8, 2014 | Newsletter
This was our first week after Halves.While our Halves presentation was well received and we got good feedback for what we’d created, internally the team realised that there is a lot more left to be done. We set about developing the animation for the main screen. So far we’d been concentrating on the individual instruments; we were yet to see how the particles created by the instruments would be interacting on the main screen. We were able to get a rough prototype ready by our client meeting. Our client was satisfied with the way we were planning on depicting the rest of the movements on screen. By mid-week, we were ready with rudimentary animations and camera angles for the main screen. This week, we also got quite some opportunities to playtest our system. On Thursday, we had dignitaries from Roche visit our project room to view what we had created so far. While we were still debating many portions of our system within the team, it was very encouraging to hear that first-time users of the system were impressed by what we had created. They also were reacting positively to our visuals, saying it did indeed enhance the musical experience. We had a first ever ETC playtest day. On this day, the ETC had organized to have playtesters of all possible age groups playtest for all the ETC projects. We got quite some playtesters in our target demographic. Once again, we got a positive feedback to the system, with the playtesters saying they found our system ‘calming’. This was reassuring feedback, proving that we were indeed moving in the...
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