Wednesday, June 14, 2006
This morning I decided to attend some final year project portfolio presentations by FCM students, and was glad I did as it helped me to continue cultivating a sense of what the students are up to on campus. While I saw some good in various projects, in all I wasn’t quite as impressed as I was by the installations I mentioned last month. But even Prof. Khong said as much when he declared this morning that the Delta student work (i.e., juniors) was as strong as what was produced by students nearly finished (and I can think of several reasons why this might be the case).
I was able to really focus for 4 or 5 hours in the afternoon, thankfully, and managed to get a few things together. I began by reviewing the Flash files (two) that I’ll be showing, making minor fixes and figuring out the best method of presenting the .swf files (opted for embedding them within .html files rather than straight .swf projection). The other poem in the first set I’ll read while the soundtrack is being visualized through Windows Media Player (to that end I reviewed all of the different visual treatments/animations possible and ended up choosing the one I always use: battery randomization). After that, I sequenced the order of the Malaysia poems. Process: read each one and began to group by loose theme—sometimes by location, sometimes by other threads. Four groups emerged, two containing three poems each, and two containing four. Then I matched each group with plausible soundtracks. Given the length of the audio files, each group will have two or three different pieces that will accompany the texts. There are some other projections that will be happening, like the doors of the FCM building, that I plan to run through Windows’ “My Pictures” slideshow mechanism, which runs endlessly and should do the trick. I’m doing what I can to keep things simple but interesting (knowing there’s really no such thing as simple in this territory). Now I’ve still got to go through thousands of images to show during the Malaysia poems (which I’ve started to do—it is fun but laborious since I’m actually renaming all of the images). I’ve reviewed Amy’s documentation of the MMU campus, 105 pictures with more to be added, which will be set up as an animation and show while one of my “Multimedia University” polyvocal soundtracks is playing. Well, hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have all of the pictures selected and there’ll be enough time to program them before next Wednesday…
I was able to really focus for 4 or 5 hours in the afternoon, thankfully, and managed to get a few things together. I began by reviewing the Flash files (two) that I’ll be showing, making minor fixes and figuring out the best method of presenting the .swf files (opted for embedding them within .html files rather than straight .swf projection). The other poem in the first set I’ll read while the soundtrack is being visualized through Windows Media Player (to that end I reviewed all of the different visual treatments/animations possible and ended up choosing the one I always use: battery randomization). After that, I sequenced the order of the Malaysia poems. Process: read each one and began to group by loose theme—sometimes by location, sometimes by other threads. Four groups emerged, two containing three poems each, and two containing four. Then I matched each group with plausible soundtracks. Given the length of the audio files, each group will have two or three different pieces that will accompany the texts. There are some other projections that will be happening, like the doors of the FCM building, that I plan to run through Windows’ “My Pictures” slideshow mechanism, which runs endlessly and should do the trick. I’m doing what I can to keep things simple but interesting (knowing there’s really no such thing as simple in this territory). Now I’ve still got to go through thousands of images to show during the Malaysia poems (which I’ve started to do—it is fun but laborious since I’m actually renaming all of the images). I’ve reviewed Amy’s documentation of the MMU campus, 105 pictures with more to be added, which will be set up as an animation and show while one of my “Multimedia University” polyvocal soundtracks is playing. Well, hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have all of the pictures selected and there’ll be enough time to program them before next Wednesday…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 7:00 AM 
