A Review of the last week...

This week has been quite intensive! I thought I'd run through what we managed to get through from Tuesday onwards:

Tuesday

We travelled to The Dales School in Northallerton to check out what equipment they have, he space we'd be using and the children we would be testing the product on.  We discussed several things with Mike Sissons who is our contact there and it helped us shape the design of the product for when we go back next thursday.

Wednesday

This day the group worked separately. I worked on my Final Project Report which is proving to be very difficult and will take quite some time to finish.

Thursday

The group worked together from 10-6 at my house.  We worked on the visual and audio patches, and tested the wii remote on my mac.  Through working on the patches we could begin to see how memory intensive they were on the mac and design solutions accordingly.  I also worked on the DVD menu and that is now finished, ready for the actual content.  I also design the fold-out business card leaflet.

Friday

On friday we intended to work in a similar way to the previous day but unfortunately Gareth was ill so we had to occupy our time with other things. We managed to work on the visuals a little more and filmed Jon D discussing his patches and how the visual system works.

Saturday

Day off!

Sunday

Today Gareth and Jon D worked on their individual patches and began integrating them. Jon C joined up later work continued until 7 working on bringing the systems together.  Tentative work began on using the wii remote with the systems.  We aim to buy the reflective tape on wednesday and will order an infrared light bank on monday morning.

We are slightly behind schedule and the coming week will be very intensive as we expected and planned.  Monday and Tuesday will be spent working on the patch and filming it in action in the exhibition space.  Wednesday will be spent buying what we need to make the glove interface working and finishing the patch and preparing for The Dales School Visit the following day.  Thursday will be dedicated to filming the product in action at the school. From Friday onwards we will be editing the footage we have gathered and putting the DVD together. 

Monday 20th April...

Today Gareth, Tom and myself had a short meeting, here is what we discussed:

• We went through what we had been up to individually and agreed that we are roughly on track as far as the group plan goes.
• This week we will focus on tying together both the audio and visual patches and the interactivity side of things.
• The installation needs to be 90% complete for next Monday as we are in the exhibition space.
• We need to talk to Kingsley Ash with regards the video pools and Paul Emery to firm up what we actually need to do with regards to the exhibition space.
• We put together some questions which we intend to ask Mike Sissons at The Dales School when we go tomorrow; leaving at 11am by the way.

After this meeting I worked on the DVD. I have created Gareth and Tom's contact sub-menus and authored all of the elements.  Everything is working fine, and sounds and looks good.  However the transitions between the Main Menu and the Main Contact Menu aren't correct.  They are missing the 'Back to Main Menu' button so when the Contact menu loads this button suddenly appears. So, your going to need to export these again Jon, Sorry! I'll show you what i mean tomorrow.

Cheers Guys, 

Jon

My Contribution during 2nd Week of Easter

During the second week of the Easter break my contribution closely followed what I had planned.  I spent the best part of two days supporting Jon by cutting up the raw footage he had gathered over the entire project to date.  This entailed using Premiere Pro to cut up the footage into manageable sizes.  Once this had been completed I then colour corrected any footage that suffered from poor light, etc.  I also sped up and slowed down footage respectively to give us a deeper and varied pool of footage.  I then compressed all the files using H.264 to bring down the file sizes and help use manage the files when used in the Max patch.

As well as this i finished the DVD music, creating six different pieces of music to be used for the different menus.  I also intend to create a longer piece of music for the actual content on he DVD.  The music includes Acoustic guitars, Piano, Keyboards, site-recordings and my Kontakt work.

Finally I created another Kontakt Instrument which creates abstract winter sounds including crystals, and organic growth sounds.  Snow and Ice doesn't really make any sound naturally so it has allowed me to create something more surreal.

Editing the samples

Today I've spent some time editing the samples. Well mainly just downsampling them to make the file sizes smaller. Some files were 32 bit and 44.1 kHz which made them a lot larger than necessary with relation to their frequency content. Tom has been busy away doing the same today. There is still a lot of editing to do and plenty to do before I can make any use of them in Max but its definitely getting there and I think with the correct documentation I should be able to have the system built up in a couple of days (I'll explain the documentation in the next paragraph). A folder of samples that was 450mb is now around a third of that at 150mb with not much noticable difference in the audible quality of the samples.

I mentioned documentation for implementing the samples which sounds a bit odd but is really quite useful. I've come up with a method of building the system up really quickly before even putting it into Max. Basically I've set up a set of tables in Excel with info on the object name and any arguments. This makes it so much quicker implementing into Max as I can just copy and paste all the relevant info in a new object and everything we need is there. Also in the table theres info on each individual sample such as its length, whether its a looped ambience or interactive element and whether it requires fixed or random volume and pitch.

Right I've written enough and probably made no sense in the last paragraph. I get it so thats what counts I guess.

Cheers guys

Audio Patch

Hi chaps,

Everything sounds to be going well with the promotional side of things. Sorry to hear about your Grandad J to the D!

I've spent some time today trying to get some samples into the system. As it currently stand there are 104 samples in which 10 samples load every half a second. On my computer which admittedly isn't the best it pretty much kills it, this is mainly due to the samples altogether working out at around 660mb. I can reduce this quite a lot by downsampling all the samples which don't contain much high frequency content.

As you all probably know the hearing range of a human being (us mere mortals) is around 20kHz. The Nyquist sampling theorem states that you need to sample at twice the hearing rate to eliminate aliasing and artefacts within the sounds. That means if the sound of a bird chirping is around 8kHz we can sample it at 16kHz therefore reducing the size of the file by nearly a third and not killing my poor computer along the way. Max will recognise this as a 16kHz sample and play it back through the soundcard at the correct speed.

There are also a lot of samples which I can cut down further to make the ambiences more random to use the samples in quite a dynamic way and also give me more marks for my use of interactive audio principles. Well thats my theory anyway. Plus again my computer will probably crack a smile at my generousity!

In terms of interactivity I've not done a lot, mainly because I've been in the Paris celebrating my ripening. Thats actually the least of my worries at the moment. I'm quite optimistic about it and if we can't get multi point interactivity working we can easily solve the issue by parameters relating to the speed of peoples movements playing back more sounds and creating a deeper sound than if the user was moving slowly, setting a more relaxed scene.

Any road, if you haven't already put your pyjamas on and made a hot chocolate for bed I've probably made you resort to it by now. My god I can chat on and on and on.

And yes Jon to the D I can help you with the visuals when we next meet to integrate the whole shazam together. Friday may be good for me, but that depends on everyone else too. Bit of a bugger that I'm occupied on Wednesday and Thursday... Long story!

Thank you for reading this far

Gaz

DVD Music...

Hi Guys,

I've spent most of the day working on the music. Its a simple chord progression which I have layered up with loads of different instruments. Basically my idea is to arrange four different pieces of music using the same motif but with different instrumentation. Each piece of music will have a bed of site recording and will represent the different seasons. Im going to do a longer piece which flows from one to the next. We can then use these for the different DVD menus, slideshows and bed music for the making of documentary.

Could you e-mail me all of your student e-mails, and possibly a mugshot and four titles which you'd describe yourself as. Its for the DVD, we've each got our own contact page so people can get in touch with us. Also when you send me a photo of yourself can you wear a white-shirt and stand in front of something plain.  Its so we can all look uniform. If you need guidance for your descriptive titles I've put: Sound Design, Digital Illustration, Site-Recording and DVD construction.  Cheers Guys

Ps...

Good work on the T-Shirts Tom.

See you tomorrow Jono.

T-shirts

Just to let you know that the t-shirts are all printed with not much hassle really so that is good. Alot of time on the iron(mum did help) I found some cheap printing stuff so that was a massive bonus. I am coming back up on Wed to finnish the editing cutting up some of the samples a lot shorter for Gaz to use. The labels for the tins will be ready on tue and i might pop back home on friday and put the labels on and put the t-shirts in them so they are pretty much ready.
Sounds really good about the music, i look forward to listening to it

Tom

Bad news fellas...

Hello all

hope you are all having a good easter?

Unfortunately (believe this or not) my grandad passed away this week. So i haven't been as productive as i had initially intended. The Jitter patch is getting there, but i would really like to sit down with you gaz and try iron it out because we still dont know what controls we are using and stuff.

Im planning to come back on Monday as planned, but will have to return home on the following weekend for the funeral on Monday. Ill then be back in Leeds on Tuesday. It has just occurred to me that this is the day we are due at the school for our recce. Ill do my best to get back in time for this but hopefully you guys will understand.

Jon ill give you a ring when i get back to leeds on monday.

Hope you're all well.

J

Thursday 9th April....

Hi guys,

Over the last few days I've managed to create all of the DVD menus, the copyright video, dvd cover, dvd disc design and I've started the dvd music.

The music is a soothing acoustic, piano thing at the moment. I think I'll add some keys and some of the site recordings. Then we can cut it up and use it as we wish.  We can use it as an underbed for some of the filming too.

Im going to take a few days off now so speak to you next week.

Have a good Easter,

Jon

Monday, 6th April

Today I have completed the majority of the menu system which will make up the Promotional DVD.  I still need to iron a few things out though and i hope to do that tomorrow.  I also created a flow chart and an asset list so Jon D will know what he needs to create when it comes to next week.

I will try and put up some pictures of what I've created so you can get an idea of what the DVD will look like. 

Jon

Week 6 in Review...

I thought I'd review week 6.  We carried out our Work In-Progress Presentation on Monday of week 6.  Although we put a fair bit of planning into it things didn't really go to plan and we suffered some technical issues.  Although we got quite negative feedback for the presentation our actual product was praised so we were left with mixed feelings.

I Had quite a bad time with illness this week and thus didn't complete as much as i would of liked.  Most of my time was spent completing the final application to MetSpace and amending my initial plan.

We managed to have a group meeting before we all left for the Easter break.  Here is what it consisted of:

• Both Jons discussed the creation of the promotional DVD and a plan was negotiated so we could carry out the work over the break.
• Jon C will create all the menus, music, copyright video, flow chart, asset list, DVD cover and a disc design.
• Jon D will create all the transitions and video elements such as editing the gathered footage, making of documentary and slide show.
• Gareth and Jon D are planning to have both the visual and audio elements finished so they can be brought together in the first week back from the break.
• Tom will sort out the promotional material he has been working on for the last few weeks such as the tins and t-shirts.