Author: xgj201

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Final Project Documentation – Xavier Juhala

Inspiration

For our final project, I and Grace decided that we wanted to do something fun that would also serve us as a place where we could store some of our memories of this city that has become our home. So we decided that we wanted to document our favourite places in Shanghai. This was really fun as we got to go and film around our favourite places around the city and make videos for our project.

Concept

To make this project more fun, we decided that rather just having a website incorporating our favourite places, which was our original plan. We thought that in order to make it more interactive and user-friendly we would the site be bit more of a game. To make it a game we ended up using the p5 js we learned to recreate the images from the videos we recorded in order for the user to have to guess where that site could be as the image got built up. For that reason, we also decided that it would be to record audio of the places we went to, in order to create a kind of soundscape of the area so which would serve as an extra clue to the person guessing what site this could be. 

Process

For the process, we first started out by creating the basic design of the website using the HTML, CSS and Javascript techniques we’ve learned over the semester. Then I and Grace both went to collect the video for the website and the audio, this was a really fun day! After we collected the video and auditory aspects we worked on editing them using Premier, to crop, brighten, stabilize and increase the saturation on the videos. We also then used Audacity to edit the audio. The audio of all the sites sounded a bit similar so in order to increase the users understanding of the sites we decided to edit the audios by adding subtle sounds that would maybe be more associated with one site over another. For example for our Xintiandi audio, we added the sound of clinking glasses and plates to simulate the many outdoor restaurants that there are in that area, or we added the sound of the wind on the Bund audio to make it sound more like you were walking next to the river. All of these sounds were sounds from freesounds.org which has an amazing extensive library of sounds to use. Once all of these were edited we started to put them into the website, and this is when things started to get a bit complicated. The audio was not playing in the background like we wanted it to, instead a music bar would appear which then messed up the whole layout. We also were having problems with how slow the pointillism was being generated. In order to not bore our users, we needed the dots to appear faster as they were appearing very slowly at first. After trying for several hours to fix these problems we decided to go seek help from the IMA Lab, where Dave helped me to realize that in order to make it go faster I had to add more code that would take another point and generate it at the same time it was generate the first point (x,x1,x2,x3, etc…). writing this was time-consuming but eventually made the experience much better. He didn’t really help with the audio but after much more trial and error we finally got the audio to play in the background which was a huge relief. Another aspect we had problems on was the background, originally we were going to have a video background from a video we took, when we tried this out on its own it worked perfectly but after trying to incorporate the flexbox on top of it wasn’t working anymore. We tried several different things to try and get it to work but in the end, we decided that having a gif as the background would work just as well.

Reflection

Overall I am very proud of this project, I and Grace put in a lot of hard work into it and we ended up doing things and using code that we never thought we would be able to. Having never in my life used code or anything related to, this final project was very scary as previously for our other projects we had other people who would take the lead as they were more experienced. This time, however, it was just me and Grace and we are both very new and inexperienced, considering this however I was amazed at our final project and that we were, in the end, able to create such a stunning website. Although there are some aspects I would like to improve, such as the comments sections and the layout of the front page such as the font size, colour scheme, and maybe adding some instructions. I am very pleased how this turned out and I think that me and Grace made a great team together. I am excited to apply these skills I learned to all of my future endeavours! 

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Web Work: A History of Net Art – Xavier Juhala

This reading was interesting to read because I didn’t realize that the term “internet art” actually had a specific date in which it was coined in 1995 but rather I thought it was just a term which had happened from artist putting their art on the internet. To hear that it was actually derived from an email that was incorrectly sent is pretty cool to read. From reading this I also learned about the importance in which Eastern European people and countries had in shaping and creating the internet we know today. I think this isn’t very widely known because the internet my generations knows is widely dominated by English websites and specifically American websites so to learn this is very interesting. It’s also interesting how the early users of the internet saw themselves as a fringe group away from the constraints of the normal art scene as they could publish and create as they so pleased. I think this still holds true for the internet as a whole as in many ways the internet has relived many forms of art from these constraints, as we’ve seen several artists become famous through the internet first rather through the classic record label push. Finally I think that in one way that the early internet art users would be disappointed to see that the internet has become so cluttered and commercialized, which is something kind of sad because even I can see this from having been using the internet in the early 2000s to using it now, it is a very different experience. The internet is so clean now and commercial and it is not nearly the free space for the people of the fringes to congregate anymore. 

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Interactive Video Project Documentation – Xavier Juhala

Description

For this project, we decided that we wanted to make an interactive comedic murder mystery. We thought that it would be an interesting take on a normal murder mysteries, by allowing the user to guess who the murderer was based on clues we gave them and also allowing them to view evidence which is talked about in the video. We thought to ourselves that our acting is not very good at all so we thought that it would definitely be better to make it a comedic murder mystery, in that way we could just have a lot of fun filming the scenes and just be goofy without worrying that our acting isn’t looking too good. 

Process

Based off of our strengths we decided to separate the work for our project in three different ways; I and Grace performed and did the acting, I made the Nemesis letter as well using the Wacom tablet, while Selina worked on the video editing and Hanna did most of the coding. There was some crossover, of course, we all helped each other a bit but for the most part that was our division of labour.  We started out by making the storyboard for the murder mystery, however, we found that we mostly just filmed according to whatever came to our minds rather than following that along. We had some trouble starting out using the camera and tripods as we could not figure how to attach the camera to the tripod, so we decided we would just hold the camera when filming instead. The lighting was also a bit of an issue when filming, as we filmed at the Academic Building and it was hard to find places that had good lighting for filming. We were then however able to fix the lighting for the most part through editing so that didn’t end up being that much of a problem. Another problem that we had was that when we filmed the videos we could only see the video we had just filmed on the little camera screen, because of this, many times the video looked good when we saw it on there but then when we would watch it on the computer we would notice it was actually blurry. This was quite annoying because we would then have to refilm the whole video which was hard due to our differing schedules which made it hard to film in the first place, so filming again a scene we had already made was quite annoying. 

For the interactive part specifically, I made the letter which you see in the pop up which happens when the Nemesis is writing the love letter to my character David. In the beginning, we originally had a photograph of a handwritten letter we had made pop up, but after user testing and hearing back from our peers we decided that it would look better and that it would be cooler if we made the letter digital. Since I had used the Wacom tablet before I decided that I could make the digital version. The letter actually took me quite a while to complete especially the handwritten fancy “T” at the beginning because it was all drawn from scratch so it took me a couple tries to get it to look exactly the way I wanted it to. The handwriting part also took me several times because I was trying to figure out what kind of handwriting a deranged stalker would have so I tried several and finally decided on that one. Finally, to add a special touch, I went and erased all of the dots of the “i”s and made them into hearts to just add a little more to the craziness of my nemesis.

Conclusion

In the end, I had a lot of fun making this project. Me and my partners had really good communication with each other and we got along really well together so it was a really great experience coming up with the whole storyline and working on it together to make our finished product. If we would’ve had more time I think that it would’ve been nice to try and figure out how to use the tripod for filming because I think it would have made our final product just a little bit better. I think that if money wasn’t an issue I would like to have been able to buy some costumes for our different characters so that it would have been more obvious who was who in the film. Maybe a police outfit and a mustache for the police officer and some fake blood for the murder scene. Besides that, I’m overall really proud of the finished product. I think that we really succeed in our mission in making a funny interactive murder mystery!

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Audio Project – Xavier Juhala

Audio Project Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~sls741/audio_project/

Description 

For our audio project, we wanted to explore the differences amongst people, so we decided it would be cool to ask a group of people the same question and see how their answers differed. We thought this would be a cool type of social question given that there are so many people from different countries and backgrounds that go to our school. We ended up recording 12 different people and asking them the question “What does Home sound like to you?”. It was interesting because when we asked people to respond to our question we didn’t really give them any other information so a couple of people actually tried to explain to us what the actual word “home” sounded like to them. Overall a lot of the responses about what reminded people of home were pretty similar, a couple of people even had specific songs which they associated with home. We then decided to create a soundscape of the sounds which the interviewees described as reminding them of home, in order to recreate the sound of what they’re home sounds like. You can hear the sounds playing in the background as they describe their homes.

Execution 

For this project, we used the TASCAM recorders along with the shotguns to record peoples responses. This was probably the easiest part of our project as we just had to go around asking people to answer our question, we mostly stayed within the cafe and cafeteria when asking people. We then edited the recordings using audacity to try and reduce the background noise as we recorded these in pretty loud spaces. We also edited the length of the recordings as some people took a long time to answer the question and there was a lot of blank noise, we also used the amplify feature on audacity to make some of their voices louder as some of the recordings were too quiet. Once we edited their voices we collected the sounds of the things they described as hearing in their homes, such as dogs barking or the sound of people making things in the kitchen, through the website freesounds.org that has a whole bunch of free sounds that are licensed through the creative commons. This was really helpful as collecting some of these sounds in real life would’ve been difficult, such as the sound of the ocean. Once edited and the soundscape created in the background we then imputed them into the website we created for this project. We then used some of the simple javascript code we have learned to create a button that would then play the playlist of the audios of the responses. We then also made a stop button and a pause button to add to the audios, the stop button stopping the current response and playing the next one when started again or the pause button which pauses the track and would commence at the same spot once started again. We then thought to add some interactivity that it would be cool to have a next page where it would create a collage of words of the all the things that were mentioned that remind people of their homes. 

Conclusion

Overall I really enjoyed making this project, it was really interesting to hear the responses from the different people and then be able to create the soundscape and actually hear and get an idea of what their home actually sounds like. Some problems we encountered was that at first, we decided to just use our iPhones to record because since we were just recording voices we thought it would be okay, however, we soon realized that the iPhones recorded way too much of the background noise as well. That was a little bit of a hiccup as we had to go out and record more audios using the TASCAM. Once we used the TASCAM, however, although better and having crisper sounding audio, the background noise was still pretty noticeable. To reduce this we then used the noise reduction feature on audacity but this only worked to a certain extent as the sound would become distorted if we used this effect too much. I think next time it would be better to ask the people we are interviewing to come to a quiet room where the background noise is minimal. Besides this small problem, everything else ran very smoothly and I am very proud of the way our project turned out. I think that if you were to close your eyes and listen to the audios you can pretty much picture yourself there as the background sounds really create a powerful  image in your head.

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The Enchanting Music of Sign Language -Christine Sun Kim- Xavier Juhala

I thought that this video was really interesting and offered a completely new perspective on what sound is that I had never even thought about. When she said at first that sound was something that she grew up believing didn’t affect her but that she was actually wrong in this belief, I was confused because I thought surely if she can’t hear then sound is something that doesn’t affect her. I didn’t think, however, of all of the implications sound has not only on us but on other people and how we use sound as social cues for so many things as well. The examples she gave were particularly eye-opening, especially the one about not screeching her utensils against the plate when eating, because these are all things that we subconsciously do with the sound information we receive, however, these are things which she as well as other deaf people can’t rely on. I found it interesting then, how she explains that she instead uses other peoples reactions to the sounds she makes, essentially hearing through them. Another thing that I had never thought about is showing sound visually such as how she did with the illustration she showed in her presentation, I think that they actually go really well with the sounds that they are supposed to show, and when you hear the sound and look at the paintings you can totally see which sound goes with each picture.