Creative Technology Blog

A blog for uni. I still don't like tumblr.

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Portfolio Post - Studio

Mainly due to job applications, I didn’t want to feature this on my live website. The gallery features various different angles of the exhibition and beneath that is a link to the video. It’s ordered in such a way that it almost recreates the experience in a digital way. You get the first impression of the space, watch the video and then finally go back to the space and see it in a different light.

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The Exhibition - Studio

We’re finally here. The video is done and rendered and so it’s time to start talking about our exhibition space. 

We really wanted this to feel like it was a personal space for our trickster. We incorporated elements from the video (the materials for some of the animations as well as the costume) and some more personal touches. The layout was partially inspired by the cliche idea of tea parties that some children have with their toys, but themed towards a movie screening.

A slightly more last minute touch was the idea of incorporating the police investigation into it. Cordoned off with bags of evidence alongside ‘reports’. This was to build on the uneasiness that we wanted to instill in our audience, provoking more thought. In conjunction with the video, it’s an addition onto the themes of single perspective and reflection. At first glace, everything is not what it seems.

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Our Poster - Studio

Maggie has said she’s not a big fan of the posters. I’m not either to be quite honest. We want the work to sort of speak for itself, so we’re taking this opportunity to build up our character and world.

Like basically everything in this project, our poster is made by the trickster. It’s supposed to be an ad of sorts. Drawn with heart and again showing their view of the events. It doesn’t give away what it’s truly about and is again building up the twist and trickery.

It’s drawn with jumbo crayons as well. 

Most of our actual documentation will be provided through our statements and blogs. It just seemed that this would be a perfect way to continue the development of the project outside of the video and add another layer to it.

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Speech and Body Language - Studio

Our trickster identifies and acts like a kid and so he does this on camera. We looked into how children act in front of a camera and we attempted to try replicate this sort of behavior in our film.

Weird method, but I searched on YouTube for ‘My First Video’ (same vein as our film ‘My First Movie’) and then sorted by new uploads. There were a lot of videos. Mostly of kids trying to get YouTube famous, but I narrowed it down to ones that were making videos of things they thought were interesting or them telling stories.

Some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuEo1w0pkSU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQWMoIh0ucs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlU0NLmKUEs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsR2n_Lk1I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzI_fenXJsE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9-ZI4k-q2o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge--oN82gOM

Very unprofessional obviously, but I noticed some common trends.

Erratic hand movement and gesturing

Playing with hair

Ums

Ahs

Sniffs

Audible breathing

Repetition

Trying to sound like an adult through their speech

Actually bumping the camera/microphone

Lowish quality audio and video editing

Speaking through their train of thought

With all this mind, we attempted to recreate some of this. We realised 2 major things while doing this.

1) These things are almost endearing when it’s coming from a child. They’re excusable because of the context. When we ran through it with our actor, the removal of that context meant that we completely lost the endearing factor and it suddenly became almost creepy. Exactly what we were looking for. Especially the breathing into the microphone. Especially that. Oh man.

2) Having a refined script seemed out of place. We ditched it and decided to give our actor the general flow of the story and video and let him improvise over the top. This was to recreate that feeling that the kid had an idea of what they wanted to talk about, but it was 90% off the cuff. Speaking what came to mind and even if it wasn’t entirely relevant, it was relevant to them at that moment so therefore it must be relevant to their viewer as well. This also gave us much more natural um and ah fillers.

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Animation Styles - Studio

Our final animation styles have been decided. All of which are fairly innocuous and childish. We’ve also cut down a lot of fluff as recommended by Maggie during our crit.

Style 1: Traditional 2D digital animation

We wanted this to have a Sunday morning cartoon vibe. I worked with a friend I made during my time making YouTube videos to create an animation. We actually lifted our base audio and concept from the popular family movie, Shrek. Key ideas here is that everything is still fairly innocent, nothing horrible is going on at the moment and we wanted our animation to reflect that. Vibrant colours, cute characters, innocent setting and fun relatable audio. One idea that we’re looking into here (if we have the time) is that we want to record the TV playing the video rather than just putting it straight in there, we feel this would play into the over aesthetic better.

Style 2: Crayon papercraft

This is where our video starts to move towards being a bit more odd. The trickster has created these scenes out of paper and is moving the characters around it while delivering dialogue and commentary about the situation. It all looks like it’s drawn by a child and there are a few surprises that I won’t ruin now, but they do play into the idea that he’s not overly sound of mind.

Style 3: Burger Puppets

Now it’s time to get weird and where that idea of hunger comes in. Our trickster has made poor puppets out of hamburgers, general craft supplies and some trash and acts out more dialogue. There’s much more of a feeling that he’s talking to himself and towards the end is where there’s a bit of a curtain reveal that this story isn’t nearly as innocent and fun as it portrayed earlier.

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Characterization Points - Studio

During the crit one of the main pieces of feedback was that we needed to do more research and take a step back from what we’ve done and look at it objectively. So we set out to redevelop our character and explore the ideas that we wanted to work with a more academic approach. 

Forewarning, while we want this character to be unsettling, we’re not trying to undermine people that experience these issues. This is not a commentary so much as it is about combining these to create a character. We’re trying to execute this is such a way that our character is displayed as creepy through his mannerisms and the medium itself, rather than insensitively associating negativity with these conditions.

The key characterization points are:

Age Dysphoria

Gender Dysphoria

Age Dysphoria - Transage

This is an interesting one. We’re particularly looking at people that identify as a much younger person. Under this name, most of the resources available here are anecdotal. There’s actually not a lot of academic research on this, it’s not classified in the DSM, however there are people that allegedly feel this way.

Stefonknee Wolscht (transgender and transage)

http://www.mrctv.org/blog/52-year-old-father-lives-6-year-old-girl

This is an interesting one. Sort of glossed over, but he identifies as a six year old girl. It seems that this is mostly related to the fact that he wasn’t able to do these things as a child, perhaps due to his gender dysphoria. He mentions things like colouring and ‘kids stuff’.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mentalhealth/comments/47tqd3/is_age_dysphoria_a_real_thing/

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/transage

This is definitely the sort of idea that we’re wanting to work with, but we decided to do a bit more research into more concrete mental anomalies. Mainly those classified by the DSM or ones that have had some form of peer reviewed research conducted. 

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) well as this sort of seemed to fit the idea of having this alter ego. An innocent child and this very deeply disturbed adult male.

“ Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD),[1] is a mental disorder characterized by at least two distinct and relatively enduring identities or dissociated personality states that alternately show in a person's behavior, accompanied by memory impairment for important information not explained by ordinary forgetfulness. “

http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/189/Dissociative-Identity-Disorder.html

The problem with DID though is that giving the character this removes some of the element of trickery from his character and places it on us and thus OUR video. Especially due to the fact these personalities are distinct and there are often lapses in memory (ie one personality is not aware of what the other one has done). He’s producing this to tell his story, he’s aware of what he did but he doesn’t see it as ‘bad’. He’s trying to get people to see this event through his eyes. That’s where our trickery comes from.

The other topic that pop up during our research is Paraphilic infantilism. This is when someone regresses to an infant-like state, but unlike our other two conditions, this is more sexual and is fetishised. The conventional definition of infantilism means the persistence of childlike traits in adults and medically the failure to attain sexual maturity. This seems to describe some elements of what we’re wanting to achieve, although we haven’t delved into sexual motivation as it’s not really what we’re looking at.

Gender Dysphoria

There’s less of a research based reason for our choice to have our character identify as a female as much as it was our initial perception and starting point for our development. We felt that it would be a good choice in terms of design and cinematography, even though our portrayal of it might not be an accurate representation of the disorder itself. 

Our justification more lies on the trickster’s perception of innocence and the idea of creating an endearing personality (not that he does it in a particularly effective manner). 

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Evaluation Feedback and Synthesis // Entry 7

The result I received for the evaluation component of this course was less than satisfactory, I don’t feel as though I deserved a mark as low as I ended up getting, in saying that though, I do kind of understand why I got it. I believe the main part comes from the lack of evidence of the experiment actually being conducted as well as my prototyping process being lackluster and falling more into the synthesis category rather than an actual prototyping process. I did end up selecting one sort of idea to work with and creating an experiment with that and modifying it slightly during the process, but I guess the lack of variation did hamper me. At least I have a more solid basis for synthesis,  but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I might repeat the experiment and append that to my synthesis report.

Regardless, I believe I’ve settled into the idea that I want to work with in synthesis. I want to make a programmable robot, but using a coding methodology that is more suited to inexperienced users to teach people the basics of robotics. Slightly more complex than the original proposed in my evaluation in the sense that it will not just use sensor to map a room, but perhaps interact with the environment (on a small scale) so that it can be used in a slightly more varied context ie arms to pick up objects included in the kit and cue stickers to act as markers for the sensors.

I will be doing this all in a written format mostly, possibly creating some for of ‘tech startup’ or ‘kickstarter info video’ to describe the features. 

Key ideas that I want to stress in order to create a sense of originality:

Education for younger people

Education for those with no coding experience

The design of the robot (even though I’m definitely not very good at anything that isn’t a purely digital experience).

The interface and environment of the coding - easy, intuitive, visually oriented, user centric.

Considering that sketch is open source, I can technically just use this as the interface straight up, so the originality will be mainly around the interaction of the software of the robot, the capabilities of the robot, the design of the physical unit itself.

Links to evaluation will be mainly related to the interaction of the ‘software’ and robot as well as the ease of using and understanding the concept. Links to research will obviously take into account existing competition and their features as well as research linked to education and interaction.

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Presentation Aesthetic // Trickster

We’ve opted to try get an overall aesthetic to the project. Possibly even taking a much less explicit approach to our story telling and as a result, we’ll be experimenting with lack of narration as well as our original idea. 

We’re also looking at the idea of working with home movies and working with VHS. We’re currently planning on having our trickster making a film called ‘my first movie’, it’s going to be crudely edited and look quite amateur. Possibly even recorded over an old tape (depending on our boundaries, amateur pornography (over the parent’s tape or something) or possibly some children’s show). 

The overall presentation of this film will also be a major part of the project. The tape will have to be pressed into the machine, and it will then play on a large CRT television which will be presented on a table. Our poster design is again going to be relatively crude, possibly even drawn in crayon. A small blurb about the film, the title, some drawings... anything to make it look innocent and that it was created by someone a lot younger than our character. In front, chairs with soft toys lined up to watch and reserved seats for mum and dad. From the outside, it’ll look relatively innocent but kinda creepy, much like a lot of the motifs used in horror movies involving a child monster.

This is all to try and build a complete experience that has been created by our trickster character for his audience to be a part of. Creepy but innocent. We’ll be working on this idea over the next week and attempting to refine this idea.

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Evaluation // Blog Post 6

Not a lot to report this week. I’ve done a blind test and it seemed to work relatively well. I do want to tweak the test a bit more and definitely try doing it university rather than at home. There’s obviously going to be a bias with testing something like this on a known room layout with someone that knows the place (my brother as an example in this situation). 

If I try testing at studio, I should be able to change the layout using the chairs and have someone try find all the objects in a specified space. Almost in a battleships styled game. So I’ll be trying that this week.

I’ve been using paper blocks as code and that seems to be fine at the moment, however I’d like to potentially look into the idea of doing a more hifi design for those and possibly the overall layout. So I’ll be working on that and doing more testing this week.

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Feedback - Trickster

First crit did not go well. I’m going to post the response to our feedback as it will illustrate the problems and what we’re intending to do about it.

----------------------------------

Obviously there’s a lot we need to work on here. I think the reassuring thing that we ended up hearing today was that the core idea of the trickster telling his own story was a really interesting subject and that we were onto the right track in terms of doing something relating to the paper. Other things that were positively received were exploring the idea of gender and age dysphoria as well as (interestingly enough) the costume we had Reuben wear. That was about it though.

We need to severely work on our documentation. We have a bit done on paper, but not nearly enough. We need to go back and basically start from square one. Do some research on tricksters, film makers, surrealism, dysphoria, production techniques and make sure that we actually explore and develop these ideas in our own work. As I mentioned before, the idea was interesting but our execution so far is both rushed and unclear. This might come more from the lack of evident documentation and also that our presentation was incredibly subpar. The fact that we came off like we were making a crazy, long, boring film for the sake of being edgy was not what we were going for.

Things to do:

·         Look over the resources mentioned during the crit and evaluate them to see if we can learn anything from them.

·         Document everything.

·         Research everything.

·         Give the idea a more coherent and clear form.

·         Cut our content down. Focus on developing the idea of telling it from his perspective and find animation styles relevant to that rather than going for shock factor (eg. Cutting out the gross organ stuff and focus on stuff that say children could make to build the character of the trickster)

·         Really work on clarity when it comes to presentation.

·         Ultimately just take a step back and develop the idea further.

We evidently have a lot of work to do. It was definitely reassuring to hear that the core concept is good though. I hope to be able to refine idea and actually justify why we’re doing it why we’re doing it the way that we are over the coming weeks to ensure that we have a much more successful formative next time.

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Our Trickster and his/her Costume - Trickster

So our trickster is an adult male that believes he is a young girl. Thinks like one, acts like one, dresses like one... but this facade doesn’t fool anyone. We wanted to work around the idea of gender dysphoria and age identity problems and overall work with quite a troubled individual. Not to say that this is ‘troubling’ for all those that experience it, but in this particular context we wanted it to almost come of as unsettling. This is where we felt that the casting of our actor and creation of costume became very important.

Our is actually a trained actor, but obviously doesn't really fit the criteria of ‘little girl’. We aimed to go for almost the complete opposite. We made our costume to try and reinforce this idea, young girl’s dress as well as a wig. He wholeheartedly believes that he is a little girl and lives through this. 

Over all, quite happy with the character. Fits the bill in terms of conforming to some of those dysphoria ideas while also coming across as slightly unsettling which is exactly how we want our audience to feel.

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Recording - Trickster

Mika and I went down to the green screen room with my actor friend, Reuben Bowen, today to start doing some recording for our project. This was mainly going to be us getting his actions and whatnot so we could put a voice-over on top once we’ve sorted the script out. We chose to record on the greenscreen to give us a bit more freedom come editing time, allows us to show what’s going on in his head as he records his story.

Here’s a photo, we’ve got a fairly interesting costume and actor as you can probably see. I will go into at a slightly later time.

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Navigational Robotics for Kids // Entry 6

wDecided to focus on teaching children to code robots and due to my base robot being the Roomba, focusing on navigation would be the main feature.

 The main coding system will probably be based off of MIT’s Scratch (pictured below). Essentially the blocks snap together and execute the code when a condition is met. In this example, when something is clicked, the code inside the repeat bracket  (move, change colour, play a sound and print the text ‘Welcome to Scratch’) will execute 10 times.  It’s a very user friendly way of introducing people to the logic of coding. I actually used a variant of it when making my first mobile game.

My current plan of testing this is to create a set of “code blocks” using post it notes, get a floor plan of a room, remove all the objects from the viewers perspective and try to get someone to code the bot to navigate the room and figure out where everything is located. This should result in a completed map by the end.

This will mainly use bumping into objects as the main way to determine where something is in a room. So these blocks will mainly contain movement based commands and sensor commands and can be placed within loops. I’m thinking that this is a relatively efficient low-fi method of a) seeing if this is something that people are actually able to use and see it as simple to understand b) see if the simple method is actually even remotely effective at creating navigational maps.

This is the sort of layout that I will be using. The user will only see the start point and I’ll act as the senors as their written code executes, by the end of the task they should have a rough idea of what the room looks like! Will mainly be testing with peers that do not have coding experience and if time permits, I might look for a couple of younger people (the primary demographic). 

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The iRobot Create // Entry 5

During my analysis I honed is the Roomba Create series as the robot that I want to focus on. As mentioned in the report, this is the variant that iRobot created in order to make the process of hacking and working with the Roomba as accessible and simple as possible while also reducing the entry cost so that anyone could buy and do things with it. Its movement ai, learning and sensors make this an extremely valuable research tool, especially when it comes to navigation and movement robotics.

Some references that cover educational application:

Dekan, Martin, et al. "iRobot Create Used in Education." Journal of Mechanics Engineering and Automation 3.4 (2013): 197-202.

Tribelhorn, Ben, and Zachary Dodds. "Evaluating the Roomba: A low-cost, ubiquitous platform for robotics research and education." Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE, 2007.

Ekong, Donald U. "Resources for using robotics to inspire interest in engineering." IEEE Southeastcon 2009. IEEE, 2009.  

Other existing platforms:

e-puck

Mondada, Francesco, et al. "The e-puck, a robot designed for education in engineering." Proceedings of the 9th conference on autonomous robot systems and competitions. Vol. 1. No. LIS-CONF-2009-004. IPCB: Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco, 2009.

QBOT

Huq, Rajibul, et al. "QBOT: An educational mobile robot controlled in MATLAB Simulink environment." CCECE. 2009.

The evaluation component of this assessment is something that I’m not feeling overly familiar with (definitely something that I need to talk with Ricardo more about). This is mostly due to the fact that I had another commitment half way through the lecture, but from what I can tell this comes down to figuring out a way to test an aspect of my proposed bot. No surveys as that can lead to very inconsistent and useless results, but something more tangible. 

I want to tackle this from two perspectives, the robot and the software. Designing an interface or contact point for the users to interact with the robot on a deeper level as well as looking a programmable robot. I would also like to focus on this from an educational standpoint, academic and also at a novice level such as high school classrooms. 

Software needs to be adaptable and applicable at both levels of education and research. Possibly two different coding methods, MIT scratch integration as well as hard code for those that understand how to use it. Easy to navigate, easy to connect with the bot, easy to update bot software, easy to revert bot software, possible safety barriers to prevent irreversible damage.

The robot needs to be relatively powerful, but cost effective. So not the most high tech stuff involved, for example the latest 3D cameras or something along those lines, but perhaps support for peripherals such as the Kinect (definitely something to research and look at how people are getting around this issue). I’m also thinking something relatively small in comparison to the Roomba, mainly due to space saving and cost (micro drones compared to super high end drones). Possible interface on the robot itself to allow for minor, on the go changes or switches in behaviors. Obviously room to expand and integrate extra computational power / sensors with devices such as the Arduino or components like sonar sensors.

I think a lot of this will be more solid when I take a slightly deeper look into how iRobot has changed the Create over its iterations based on user demands and also how the competition has responded to its presence in the market.

Ideas for prototyping:

1) Wireframing/hifi prototype of software interface and taking this to users to see if it is easily usable and understandable.

2) Paper prototypes. Used at work.

3) I actually quite liked the idea of acting out a robot. Could possible do an experiment relating to how people used a software and then the results it would give when executed.

4) Actual models of the components of the robot? Things like a top panel with the interaction elements or the robot as a whole to get an idea of the size.

Will definitely need to have a look at what people are doing and have a chat to Ricardo about this to get a better idea of how I want to execute this.

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Studio: Animation

Thought that I would list the media styles we’ve come up. Some of these are food related to work on the idea of hunger and portray the idea of the trickster blurring the lines between reality and his own interpretation of it.

Live Action (cooking as well as story telling). This will most likely be recorded against a green screen to allow us more flexibility when editing.

Manga

Cartoon Animation

Real meat

Puppetry (burger puppets was the big one)

Stop motion (paper craft most likely)

Draw my life styled white board animation (looking at using canned food instead of markers).

These styles will get progressively weirder and more uncomfortable as the video and story progresses.

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Studio: Changes

After some basic prototyping, we decided that our initial idea of a full animated claymation film would be difficult for a variety of reasons. 1) it’s a hugely time consuming process 2) it’s incredibly expensive to get decent looking props 3) our technical skills are lacking in terms of both prop creation and also stop motion which could lead to the whole animation ending up looking tacky which is not something that we want.

We’ve since redeveloped the idea. We’re still going to be telling a story inspired by the Trickster Gets Married story, but we’ll be taking a multimedia approach to telling the story. We’ll be getting an actor to both voice and do live action sections playing the trickster who will be retelling this story. Whenever he goes to talk about the events, we’ll be utilizing a different a different animation style. The main themes will be focusing on the ideas of hunger, trickery, making the audience uncomfortable.

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The Roomba - Hacking // Entry 4

In a discussion with Ricardo in class, we went over the two user groups that I proposed doing a case study on as that was the final question part of my last entry. Do I focus on the users that get a Roomba for its intended purpose, or those that work with the robot in labs or hack it for fun/functionality? I think tackling it from the perspective of the latter would be quite interesting, especially considering iRobot’s stance on the scene.

Going to focus on the hacking community for this entry.

There are websites and books entirely dedicated to homemade hacks for the Roomba. People have been working on ways to make things more efficient such as being able to interface directly and control it with your phone (https://hackingroomba.com/projects/roombactrl-cell-phone/), or link via bluetooth for easier access to software running the bot (https://hackingroomba.com/projects/build-a-roomba-bluetooth-adapter/). Other people (well there’s probably a bit of an overlap here) have been working on ‘fun’ projects like turning your Roomba into a roaming midi player (https://hackingroomba.com/projects/roombamidi2/) or even turn it into a weird vacuum cleaner cylon hybrid (https://hackingroomba.com/projects/build-a-cylon-roomba/).

Just having a look through here is pretty impressive - https://hackaday.com/tag/roomba/. I didn’t realize this, but apparently they even released a version of the Roomba without a vacuum solely for people wanting to tinker with them - https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/irobot-releases-hackable-roomba-without-the-vacuum/

The vast differences in some of these projects are astonishing. There’s an element of improvement and functionality as well people essentially personalizing (and maybe even characterizing) a robotic vacuum cleaner. It’s quite an interesting. There have been some studies done into how people customize their bots, one in particular that states they “build on Blom and Monk's [3] theory of personalization that argues that personalization does not only occur naturally but can also be induced by design choices.” This is an interesting concept, and one that I definitely think is consciously realized at a fairly early point by iRobot given the release of their tool kit. While this mainly focused around cosmetic customization, they found that it created a far more positive experience with the Roomba in the house and I’m curious to find out if this translates when applied to a more technical audience.

Sung, JaYoung, Rebecca E. Grinter, and Henrik I. Christensen. "Pimp my roomba: Designing for personalization." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.

Kurt, Tod E. Hacking Roomba: ExtremeTech. Vol. 48. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.