This weekend my thesis was performed at the Drexel Dance Ensemble Spring Concert Moving Forward in Mandell Theater. The piece went off without a hitch and was well received by the audience. In fact, one special guest that made it to the performance was author, Edward Tenner, who wrote Why Things Bite Back, a book that directly influenced the concept of my piece. Check out some of the pictures from the performance; I hope to have the video up soon.
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The Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design awards for Drexel’s Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity Day were announced and I (drumroll please) won a Dean’s Award for Information Overload!
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I submitted my thesis to the 2007 SIGGRAPH Student Research Competition and Sketches & Posters. The submission required an one page abstract explaining your project. I chose to focuse on all the different people I am collaborating with to accomplish my project. There was also an optional 5 minute video you could submit. I’ve uploaded the video on my portfolio page.
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Yesterday was Drexel’s annual Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity Day where students present projects that they have done to be judged. I presented my thesis by creating a poster, video with all digital assets (including music) compiled together, and displaying of some of the influential books I read as well as my notes and sketches. The judges really seemed to enjoy my presentation and project. Awards will be announced May 9 so keep your fingers crossed for me.
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All digital media components and music for my project are done! I’ve compiled everything together so you can get a general idea of what the piece will look like (minus the live dancers), sound like, and how everything will flow together. Enjoy! more »
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It wasn’t easy, but I finally finished silhouetting the “digital dancers” for the beginning of my piece. I brought the footage from filming in Mandell Theater Winter Term into Combustion and used a difference key to silhouette the dancers. After the footage was silhouetted, it needed to be brought into Flash and the bitmaps needed to be traced so that the letters could be programmed to bounce off the dancers. more »
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This week we were in the theater doing some more testing and filming. I was able to measure and determine what pipes I wanted my piece of cyc(s) to be for the city scene in the middle of the piece. I also tested different versions of my animation at the end of the piece to see what translated better on stage more »
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Its hard to believe that the Winter Term is already over! You know what that means, only 10 more weeks until my thesis performance!! more »
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This weekend we were in the Green Screen Room filming the “digital dancers” in the Rain scene at the beginning of the piece. Each dancer was filmed separately, but because they had to appear to morph out of each other, I had to measure and mark the floor with tape so they knew where to stand at certain points in the piece.
We had some constraints though because the Green Screen Room wasn’t deep enough for the camera to capture the entire stage. This led to us positioning the camera on an angle. Another constraint was that the size of the stage was not very big. This led to the dancers having to perform small movements. Because of all the space constraints, I will most likely have to film the final version of the digital dancers on stage in Mandell Theater during the time I am in there testing.
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Today I went to check out a possible space on Drexel’s campus for testing the engineer’s motion capture system. The Annex building, located on Cherry Street (between 32nd and 33rd streets), had a room that was just about the width of the stage in Mandell Theater; however, the room wasn’t very deep so I don’t think we will be able to use the space after all. Click here to see the photos and measurements I took.
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