by Himanshu Vartak | May 11, 2014 | Newsletter
Academically, this is our final week on this project, and what a project it has been! We had our ups and downs, some close shaves, but with the great talent working on the team and great support from faculty and staff, we have made a tool we are proud of. We spent the first two days of the week working on the feedback received from Dr. Thomas after our latest tech rehearsal. Some of the virtual camera movements still had to be toned down and there were some slight issues with regards to placement of the visual elements on the screen. We were also prepping for our final presentation, which involved a live performance on our system. We had our finals presentation on Wednesday this week. We had a separate time slot, starting at 1:00 pm, where we had the School of Music students, come in and play a sort of concert, driving our system. It was the first time the faculty at the ETC were seeing our entire experience, the way it was meant to be seen. Apart from some minor niggles in the beginning to get the system started, the performance was a success. It was a great way to set up our presentation, which was explaining our entire journey from conception to execution. While we are done academically with this semester and are ready to wrap up, our final performance is still ahead of us.We are wrapping up with all the paperwork, but are still making minor tweaks and fine-tuning the system according to feedback we received from our client on the final presentation. We are...
by Himanshu Vartak | May 11, 2014 | Newsletter
This is the penultimate week here at the ETC. We had a couple tech rehearsals planned at the Kresge Hall to make sure we’re ready with everything before our finals week. While our actual performance for Dr. Thomas’s lecture is on May 14, our academic finals is next week, on May 7. We had consecutive rehearsal dates at the Kresge Hall this week; April 29 and 30. We utilised the first rehearsal date more for testing our setup and teardown times. We also tested the lighting system from the School of Music on that day. This earlier day also allowed us to leave our equipment behind at the Kresge Hall, which meant we wouldn’t have to spend time on transport the next day. On April 30, we had our most successful and the closest-to-final performance at the Kresge Hall. We had all our equipment, full access to house projector systems and lighting, music stand lights and the musicians were coming in to play live music. The only thing we didn’t have access to were the unidirectional microphones, because they were being used elsewhere in the School of Music. However, last time’s experience with them had helped us to create a method within the software to programmatically assign the correct microphone input to the correct virtual instrument within the system. We were able to have a complete performance of all the four movements, with only minor niggles in terms of the sound bleeding into neighbouring microphones. Dr. Thomas was also present and liked what she saw for the most part. She provided us with valuable feedback about what could be...
by Himanshu Vartak | May 10, 2014 | Newsletter
This was Softs week. Softs were on Monday and it involved us presenting an experience as close as possible to the final performance. For this, we set up most of our equipment in the second floor classroom. We had 4 stage risers with the tall seats on them, with speakers filling in for musicians. We had our self-fabricated screens in place in front of the stage risers and we had our main screen up too. This was the first time we were displaying our visuals the way they were going to be on the final day; on five separate screens. We got pretty good immediate feedback from the faculty with respect to the visuals. Almost everyone loved the use of color and felt there was a good connection between the visuals and the music. There were still some doubts about how the setup would look at the actual performance space. Some felt that the virtual camera movements were too fast and possibly distracting. This week, we had another tech rehearsal at the Kresge Hall. This time we were able to take most of our equipment to the hall and it was the first time we were able to set up like our final performance. We had all our stage risers and all our screens ready. We were supported by School of Music staff and had access to the house projector and screen. It was during this tech rehearsal that we learnt about further technical requirements, such as adapters, converters, extra power strips etc. We were still able to have a test close enough to the finals performance. We were...
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...
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