The last couple of weeks - James Howard-White

The last couple of weeks of our assignment we all seemed to really pull together as a team. When I last blogged I had finished a few musical ditties for the congratulations segment of our quiz. It was Wednesday the 3rd of November and Callum, Tony and myself were working to a self-imposed deadline of Friday the 5th to have the congratulations segments completed so that James Medd would have the weekend to incorporate them into the patch before visiting the museum on the Monday.

Late Wednesday night I received a text saying that the requirements had changed, the musical ditties I had made previously needed to be six seconds long along with a projector sound, a projector burn sound and a congratulations voice-over. Not only that but that he needed it as soon as possible on Thursday, to which I replied that I would have it ready for him by 2pm that day. Thankfully some of the original tunes could be edited to the new specifications but some had to be remade. A projector was put together by recording a fan heater which was effected and filtered to create a low rumble and a regular fan with cardboard stuck in which was also effected and filtered to create the high click effect.

Once it had been completed I had the audio ready on time and arrived at university to find Tony had postponed his voice syncing my dialogue to the Vendor animations (also needed by Friday) in order to help Callum as they had decided to really go all out on the Congratulations videos. Callum was busy putting together the videos and Tony was painstaking animating a highly detailed drawing of a large wicker basket that Callum had previously drawn onto the computer. Having added the audio to some of the videos Callum and Tony had decided that the Amber charm video needed a little extra and included an owl. So I spent a few minutes creating a improvised owl sound using a mac laptop mic and Audacity. After I had left a received a text later saying the urgently needed a snake sound, which (after a few experiments) I managed to email back to them after about 10 minutes. Thankfully we had it all finished by the self-imposed deadline.

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After our first museum meeting we all met up during the week to iron out the creases with the patch. Our main issue was that we didn't have the processing power to incorporate everything we had created. James Medd had experimented in news ways to streamline the patch so we had some scope and spent the afternoon discussing what should be included and omitted and some last minute tweeks. This involved regular rounds of tea, ideas being batted around and James working frantically on his laptop. After about 5 or so hours we finally had (barring a later discovered typo or 2) a completed patch.

To conclude, I'm delighted at the way in which we worked together the create our exhibit. We all seemed to work to each other's strengths, met up together regularly and imposed and kept to our own deadlines. I find the sheer volume of the video work done by Callum and Tony quite staggering as well as the fact that they managed to maintain a high quality. I'm sure I'd also feel the same about James Medd's interface work if I can ever figure out how he managed to do it.