by Himanshu Vartak | Feb 10, 2014 | Newsletter
We resumed the second week carrying forward the momentum from out first week. Having worked over the weekend on the various ideas we would present Dr. Thomas, we first presented these ideas to our advisors, John and Shirley to get their feedback about them. They advised us not to restrict our scope and present as many diverse ideas as possible. We also met with Jesse Schell, who mentioned that one of the basic hurdles to cross is to convince the audience that whatever visuals they are watching are being created at real-time and are not pre-rendered. He also advised us to keep whatever we do simple, yet innovative and interesting. On Tuesday, January 21, we presented our client with our multitude of ideas via Skype. While Dr. Thomas was overwhelmed with our entire repertoire of ideas, she expressed interest and enthusiasm in pursuing most of the ideas. One of the ideas that she wasn’t very enthusiastic about was about having the musicians moving about, driving a live camera feed. On Wednesday, we got to see our first basic visual prototype, courtesy Victor. We could see our vocals or a piece of music driving a 3D cloth model in real-time. This proved that our basic goal to convert sound into electronic signals was achievable and that we could go further ahead from here. We also had a branding review, where our artist Nayoung exhibited some of her concepts and we collectively gave her some constructive feedback. We also received an interesting email from our client, Dr. Thomas, wherein she further expanded her reaction to our ideas and gave us some...
by Himanshu Vartak | Feb 6, 2014 | Newsletter
A new team, a new semester, a new project. Same old striving for excellence. We began by getting the obvious out of the way; who are we and what are we good at? Having put up our skill sets, we settled on roles for the project. They are: Christina: Music Producer Nayoung: Lead Artist Victor: Tech Artist Wei: Programmer Michael: Programmer Himanshu: Producer/Programmer We then took care of housekeeping and formalizing our schedules around our electives and such. We had a small informal meeting with our advisors as to what was expected of us and what the deliverable was supposed to be. We deemed it best to get this answer from the horse’s mouth and decided to set up a client meeting as soon as possible. We took some time out to come up with our team name. We played around with various portmanteaus of music and light terms such as ‘Treble Makers’, ‘ See Sharp’, ‘Mathemusique’, ‘Euphonia’ and one of our most ambitious names – ‘Ambient Tessellation’! We eventually decided on something much simpler and something we hope will have quicker recall value, while also describing what we’re doing – ‘Graphic Tone’. On Wednesday, we met our client, Dr. Marilyn Taft Thomas of the CMU School of Music. We had a very productive meeting with her, getting to know better what her objective was with this project. We had a few questions of our own, which were answered and gave us a clearer idea of our deliverable. Dr. Thomas was very open to suggestions and expressed great enthusiasm for the work ahead. With this new knowledge, we spent...
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