Presentation of Prototype (2 weeks prior to final installation)

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.     

Project Overview and Evaluation - Callum Ward

The extremely collaborative atmosphere in which this project has been undertaken has been present ever since James Medd, James Howard-White, Tony Ball and myself first convened to discuss our ideas and objectives for the coming weeks. 

After viewing the interactive exhibits already on display at the Rotunda Museum we had a basis for development and we outlined what we believed to be the most important concepts to bear in mind whilst designing the exhibit; these were that it be clear, concise and engaging to users across our target age group of fourteen to twenty-four year olds.

With these things in mind we explored many possible routes for development before deciding upon the apothecary scenario. We felt this idea was a suitable platform for displaying the information about the charms in a readily accessible fashion whilst also offering ourselves a large area for experimentation with interactive elements and the audio/visual experience.

We sketched out our respective ideas for the visual layout of the program and discussed what environmental sounds would be required and as soon as we had come to an agreement we started work.

All the animation that appears in the final exhibit has been created using the same production technique; I designed and illustrated the graphics freehand before they were scanned in and coloured digitally by Tony. We have worked together closely and Tony has several times asked me change aspects of a design or create supplementary elements to incorporate into it, similarly I have often discussed changing colour options, styles and other factors with him. 

Both James M. and James H-W. have also been on hand throughout the graphic design process to offer their thoughts and opinions on its direction. 

Tony and I were in constant dialogue with James H-W. who was responsible for audio production as we needed to keep him informed of any design elements that would necessitate the use of foley sounds such as the opening of a chest, rain on the windows or bubbling liquids on display in the apothecary. 

James Medd, who has been responsible for the design of the MaxMSP interface, was also frequently in touch with Tony and I ensuring images were the correct resolution and letting us know which items needed to be created as separate sprite objects as opposed to static elements fixed in the backdrop so he could incorporate them into his programming.

In addition to feedback from within the group itself, we also reacted to feedback from Rob Mackay and Mark Hildred as well as from staff at the Rotunda Museum with whom we met several times throughout the production process to discuss conceptual progress, factual content, graphic design and interactivity within the program.

I wrote the information segments about the charms which appear in the exhibit. After initially writing these information sections and meeting with museum staff they expressed concern that they may be too difficult to understand for people who wish to view the exhibit but who fall below the fourteen to twenty-four year old target age group. I subsequently rewrote the information sections omitting any vocabulary which may have been confusing and separating the content into smaller statements which can be scrolled through by the user at will.

James H-W. and I researched the charms and thought out potential questions for the quiz before I worded them and provided them to James Medd for inclusion in the program. We had two options for how the quiz should operate; trial and error or sudden death.

The trial and error option gives the user as many attempts as they need to answer each question therefore the user always ends up winning. Sudden death would allow the user only one attempt at each question and subsequently if the user answers incorrectly they would not be shown the congratulatory video. We decided on the trial and error option for a number of reasons but two reasons in particular stood out; firstly the museum staff had already made clear the need for the exhibit to be appeal to users below our primary target age range and as a group we felt that the trial and error option was more child friendly, always offering a reward for persevering with the quiz. Secondly, our exhibit is competing for the attention of museum visitors against larger exhibits that the museum places more focus on. Failing one section of the quiz could be all the incentive someone needs to abandon our display, referring back to one of the key objectives we outlined at the start of the project, keeping the user ‘engaged’ is paramount therefore we didn’t want to risk giving the user this incentive to leave.

The quiz questions are separated into categories about each individual charm and as well as writing the questions themselves I was responsible for the creation of the congratulatory videos which play upon the user’s successful navigation of each category. I used Adobe After Effects to create the videos and Adobe Photoshop to create some of the elements used within them (for example the scratches that flicker frame by frame). I asked James H-W. to create several separate sound files such as the projector starting, the projector running, the film burning, appropriate music for each scenario, the character saying congratulations and a few foley sounds specific to each environment and requested that some of these sounds were of a specific duration. I then arranged these sounds alongside the video content. The illustrations used in the videos were created using the same animation technique as the rest of the program with Tony digitally colouring the illustrations  I designed for the videos and providing me with them as soon as they were complete so I could incorporate them.

James Medd asked Tony and I to then create MaxMSP patches which would play our sections of video (Tony having created videos of the apothecary character that were lip-synched to match James H-W.’s audio files) upon receiving a bang from his main patch. As we had planned for Tony’s video of the apothecary character to play continuously on the main screen and for my videos to only appear when the user was playing the quiz, after completing my MaxMSP patch I passed this on to Tony so he could incorporate it into his own. After trying this new section of patching with James Medd’s main interface we found it didn’t run as efficiently as we might have hoped.

We got together as a group to discuss our options for improving the efficiency of the patch and how best to work with the hardware that the museum was providing. We found that it wouldn’t be possible to utilise all the ideas which we had generated and so decided upon the substitution of the lip-synched video Tony had created for a still image and the alteration of the MaxMSP patches Tony and I had produced, previously based around the ‘movie’ object, to now be based around ‘jitter’ objects making more efficient use of the computer’s CPU. The decision to omit the lip-synched video as opposed to the congratulatory videos was taken as we felt that the lip-synched video wasn’t integral to the overall experience of the exhibit. The congratulatory videos offer a reward to the user upon completion of each section of the quiz and an incentive to complete the other categories. The lip-synched video, whilst impressive and certainly more desirable than a still image, has far less a significant impact on the user’s experience. With this decided upon, Tony made the necessary alterations to the video patch and after James Medd had incorporated all the proposed changes to the program its functionality was greatly improved. 

On Monday the 15th of November we presented the fully operational exhibit to staff at the Rotunda Museum.

If we’d had more time to work on the project I would have liked to expand the content of the exhibit to feature a greater range of charms. I would also have liked to experiment with a broader range of challenges and games for the user to experiment with as well as a greater range of multimedia content. I would also have liked to create quiz sections of varying difficulty designed to appeal to different age groups allowing us the freedom of using the ‘sudden death’ quiz format as well as ‘trial and error’ allowing us to cater more specifically to different users. Whilst the time scale of this project played a part in our not being able to implement some of these ideas, the hardware we had to work with also impinged on what we were able to achieve. If we were to design another exhibit, I would prefer to use more powerful hardware capable of supporting a great deal more multimedia content. If given more time and the benefit of such hardware I would link many more objects in the apothecary environment to audio and video content that we couldn’t have justified including with the current set up.

That said, I feel we worked well as a team to draw as much as possible from the available resources, we kept ourselves well informed of each other’s progress and activity and we have consequently been able to offer each other advice on all aspects of production from start to finish. I feel extremely pleased with what we have achieved in the time frame and now the project is completed I would like to thank James Medd, James Howard-White and Tony Ball for all their hard work on the project and thank the Rotunda Museum for the opportunity to have our work displayed. 

Animating Chemist Brown - Tony Ball

After processing our Vendor through Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I exported a series of 30 Images, each displaying a unique expression from our Vendor. By this stage of the project, work had really mounted as we aimed to have our patch completed by Monday 1st November. After a short discussion, Callum and I decided we would push to achieve the congratulatory videos we desired rather than settling for the next best thing. This took 24 hours of solid work leaving me with but a couple days to get the Vendor Lip synced and exported ready for the large display.

Due to the organisation and preparation of the audio created by James Howard-White I was able to get started as soon as my task to aid Callum with the congratulatory videos was complete. I imported the audio file created by James into Final Cut Express and then dropped it into the time-line. By slowly scrolling over the audio file I was able to place appropriate expressions that best suit the syllable sound. Preparation on my own part ensured that I had very little trouble when applying the images to the time-line.

 Here are the final drafts of the lip synced Vendor ready to be placed within the patch.


Chemist Brown's Introduction


Chemist Brown's Introduction To The Quiz

Large Display - Tony Ball

Videos - Callum Ward

Here are the five videos I created for the exhibit.

The Skin of an Eel

The Amber Heart

The Bleeding Tooth Shell

The Mother of Pearl Fish

The Red Coral

Finishing The Installation - James Medd

Planning For Completion

As a group, we spent most of Thursday sitting down with all the final elements of our installation to take a look at our options and complete the piece. Having encountered a few small issues surrounding the integration of large amounts of animation and activity on the larger screen - slowdowns and lockups due to a high amount of required processing - our video and graphics duo had spent a couple of days refining and optimising the way in which the big screen elements worked, as well as coming up with potential contingency plans.

Final Experiments And Decisions

Upon experimenting with using our interactive screen patch with the optimised video patch, we were very close to having them both work together as we wanted. Unfortunately however, we were just not quite close enough. We believed that, for the sake of what we outlined in our early plans and presentations i.e. an interactive installation that operates in a slick and functional manner, dialling back the additional features for a balance between something very 'pretty' and ornate and something smooth and functional was a necessary compromise.

Our Reflection

The fact is that we are all, as a group, very happy with our final piece. We feel we have met all of our aims outlined at the beginning of the project and created something that the museum staff are happy to display. Any of the features we are missing out, whilst being extremely nice, do not in any way hinder the overall piece and in a way show that our piece has had clarity and functionality right from its core, rather than from any additional elements we could have thrown on top.

As a brief side note, I'd like to write something about our blog posts in general. I have seen in comments recently that the overseers of this project would have perhaps liked to see a few more, shorter posts about each step of development. As part of a general reflection on the process, I'd say that I'd have liked this to be the case also, however in the short time frame that we have had, I think most of the group honestly have been far more wrapped up in working on the piece and co-ordinating with other group members to stop after every small stage of development and post an update. This is especially true of the multiple times during the project that things were changed not long after being implemented, which may have lead to confusion about the actual content of the project. I believe that on a longer term project, regular blog posts may have been easier for us to contribute, I only hope that the final product itself is enough to prove how consistently and regularly hard we have all worked as a group on this project.