Conceptualization of Bloody Mary Tale:
Eden and I decided to take the tale of Bloody Mary out of the bathroom mirror and into a laptop.   In our adaptation, Bloody Mary is essentially a virus within your computer. The story is told from the prospective of the computer’s user.

Bloody Mary is awaken through your investigation into her story. She wants you to say her name three times but needs you to do so while she is listening and watching.  After a few popups regarding her tale, she starts open up all the apps on your computer which would allow her to see you.  Unfortunately, your camera is covered. Next, Bloody Mary begins to connect to you through various text apps in order to tell you what she wants.  In order to hear you she opens up voice recorder and lets you know she is listening.

Throughout the creation of this piece, we considered how to incorporate our research regarding divination and catoptromancy – divination by use of mirrors.  Focusing on the act of divination through a mirror became less of a focus as this piece evolved.  Choosing to tell the story from the point of view of the user really informed what we were able to portray.  This perspective brings the experience personal for the viewer and our hope is that it elicits a feeling of fear and curiosity.  Curiosity into the security of their personal devices.  Is anyone watching when we think the camera is off?  Who is watching and listening to us when we use our technology?  Are we actually alone?  It is interesting that Apple’s latest OS update for the iPhone includes a feature that notifies you when an app is using the microphone and/or the camera. Clearly this is a concern for people.  We wanted to play with that feeling in order to create a little creepiness during Halloween.

Medium: Recorded video using screen capture and OBS
If we were technically capable, I would propose this project as an interactive installation where you, the user, would search for information about Bloody Mary on a laptop.  This would then trigger a takeover by the virus of the computer where you would be asked questions, recorded both in video and in audio and eventually be coerced into saying Bloody Mary’s name three times.  I imagine this being in a dark room with only the light from the screen.  With the guidelines for this project being to create a video piece, we needed to find a way to simulate that experience for the viewer.

Before working with the screen recordings and OBS, Eden and I synced our laptop setups so that we could both work on various parts of the project.  Our initial recordings were able to capture the mouse moving which showed that the user was still in control of their actions.  Once Bloody Mary took over, however, we needed the mouse to disappear.  To create this effect, we used OBS. 

Within OBS, we created a simulation of the desktop.  Each window was layered so that it mirrored how the apps would open on our desktop.  Below is a clip of running through the scenes within OBS. For each new popup, I created a new scene with

Challenges:
The main challenge we ran into was saving work within OBS.  As avid tech users, we are accustomed/trained to save our work many times just in case something happens.  As a streaming software, this is less of a concern.  You are able to record, which we utilized.  OBS does allow you to save the profile and the scene setups in the even, for example, that you need to use a different computer for broadcasting.  Related to this is the ability to close out apps when you are finished.  OBS saves the layout and the location of the linked item.   When restarting OBS, you have to open up the linked items in order for everything to appear as designed.  If you are opening up a saved scene or profile, reestablishing links can take some time, depending on the number of scenes and items. 

Outside of challenges inherent in learning new software, I didn’t run into any other difficulties with this project.