Video and Sound – Alan Winslow

Video and Sound Final

For our final Video and Sound project, Stuti, Sara, and I teamed up to create an interactive Alice in Wonderland themed experience in Unity. The project’s goal was to create a surreal representation of moving to NYC for the first time. The main character is a mouse that falls into a magical tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, the mouse starts its journey by navigating four subway cars. The first being a cramped apartment – next to a social/going out car – third a car where the mouse needs to navigate the crowded and confusing Manhattan streets- finally making its way to a cramped and crowded car that closely resembles real life. In the end, the mouse walks out of the final car, dropping back into reality.

Individually each one of us contributed a car, mine being a color-blocked cramped apartment. Upon entering, the character is met with a mirror where they can check themselves out and see that they are a mouse. As they progress, everyday furniture is all over the place. A stove is upside down; food is floating, a fish tank is tipped over. In the subway windows, videos of NYC are playing on the loop. When the character walks by the tv, an invisible trigger turns it on, playing a short video of pigeons in Washington Square Park. Finally, the faint sounds of neighbors can be heard through the walls.

The team collectively worked on troubleshooting our individual cars, compiling the entire project, creating the entry and exit points, and the final car. All three also agreed to meet up after class to further polish and expand the piece.

Some ideas for future expansion include:

Having the mouse turn back into a human in the final car.
Introducing scanned objects and people.
Adding more cars.
Making a more seamless experience.
Adding more objects that we create.

I couldn’t ask for a better team. We spent hours on zoom collaborating, brainstorming, and laughing at all the errors we needed to fix.

Final Assignment Storyboard

For our final assignment, our group that includes Stuti Mohgaonkar, Sara Ro, and myself decided to create an interactive video installation. We chose to challenge ourselves and design the experience within Unity. All three of us are new to the software but are excited to tackle the task.

The deck below describes how our world will work.

Before creating the deck, we watch Ira Glass speak on Storytelling, and we watched the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland remake. Both sources gave us inspiration and clarity on how to weave a storyline throughout a narrative. While discussing this project we flagged and are being conscious of how we could easily just focus on creating a visually interesting world without creating the story arc.

Virtual Sound Walk – First Steps In Unity

This week Shannon Hu, David Leyva, and I collaborated on a virtual sound walk using Unity. The goal was to build a wilderness themed maze using assets from the Unity Store and sound triggers. As the player progresses through the maze, they would encounter various noises triggered by invisible collision frames. Our sounds would be made up of recorded and found clips that we edited in Audition.

First, we tackled building the maze from a hand-drawn sketch.

We found an asset package that included Redwood tree models that we used as the walls. From this point on, our problems with Unity began.

Character Falling: We found that our character kept falling into the abyss when we hit play. After adjusting for gravity and weight of the character with no visible change, we removed the plane and used a cube as the floor. The cube idea seemed to work, but we’re not entirely sure why.
Stuck Character: Visually, it appeared that we had enough room for the character to navigate the maze, but that wasn’t the case. Every few steps, our character would get tied up on a tree. I need to investigate if there is a way to map out the area that a character can and cannot walk.
Sound Triggers: In our original world, the sounds played on a loop rather than triggered by the character. We later found out that we did not apply the trigger script on the trees.

The world quickly got confusing to work with, so we deleted most of the assets and started over.

For this second piece, we removed the idea of a maze and scattered trees simulating an old-growth forest of Redwoods. With the triggers adequately placed, the character can experience birds chirping, a wolf howling, bears growling, and a few other surprises. We also were able to import rabbits and birds that a player can find.

In the end, we would like to add more wildlife and possibly create some creatures. We would also like to make the forest denser without altogether impeding the character from moving.

Below is a working version of the world uploaded to simmer.io.

From this exercise, I believe that I started to grasp the basic fundamentals of Unity and look forward to creating more worlds!

Sound Collage and Readings

Sound Collage Study:

For my first assignment, I made a recording of a subway journey. This past year I haven’t been riding the subway very much at all, which is strange. I got thinking of this assignment, layering sounds, and the subway kept popping into my mind. I wanted to record the familiar sound of the conversations on the train, the clicking of the turnstile, the ding of the closing door, and of course, the screeching of the wheels. Usually, I pop in my headphones and drown out the sound, but I missed them, so I set out for the first time in months to ride the train. Back home, I used Audition to layer the clips because, just like the rest of NYC, everything is crammed together fitting vying for attention.

I would like to dive deeper into transitions and cleaning up sound. I feel that my audio cuts are far too noticeable.

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Thoughts on “The Danger of a Single Story”:

I’m moved by novelist Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk on the harmful impacts of telling a single story. She spoke on how we naturally create stereotypes of other people and cultures by only tuning in or listening to available stories. By not investigating entirely how a culture, country, continent, or person is made up, we go down a path of miscommunication and misunderstanding. This is something that we are all guilty of and need to work harder on understanding to prevent. I appreciate that she shared her own experiences both as a person being stereotyped and as someone who is stereotyping. I don’t believe that single stories are ever going away; instead, everyone needs to learn to identify and openly speak about them. By doing so, we can all get a little better.

Two of my favorite quotes from the talk are:
“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

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Thoughts on “The History of Sound Art”:

A History of Sound Art from J Milo Taylor on Vimeo.

This entire composition was challenging to digest. I found myself being removed from the piece entirely during the long stretches of what seemed to be random and disconnected noise samples. To make some sense of the non-speaking sections I started to listen for interesting single sounds and effects that I would like to include in my work. At roughly 12mins 29secs, there is a beautiful scratching sound for example. These individual sounds brought up memories, sparked emotion, and sometimes just sounded interesting. I thought that the comment at 28mins 02 sec “With our whole being we can be responsive to sound. It doesn’t have to be communication of some deep thought.” was fitting for the way I was experiencing the piece.

Overall, I enjoyed the artist’s explanations of their work and process, for example, the one description of how the performer was scratching, cutting, and distorting records to produce new works. However, I continued to be pulled out when quotes were getting repeated or harsh noises were played over the tops of what they were saying.