Jason Kempshall’s Weblog

After creating my buttons i wanted to do a very premature usability and bug test, heres what i noticed—-

1, The key down event that is generated from the I-Pac is a continues  stream of on button downs so that the movies do loop when the button is stood on, this is good but as the random generator picks out the individual movies it re-plays some movies in a row, or before their turn creating a repetitiveness about the rig.

2, Every now and again the .SWF stops working, this seems to happen randomly also and see no correlation between the crashes and what the user or player is doing.

——–see user test below——–

As i am building two areas of activation on the floor i (one closer and one further away), i needed to create two big buttons where the user can stand and therefor interact with the piece. To do this i bought a pice of hardware called the I-Pac, the I-Pac is primarily used for arcade set-ups but works very similar to the key components of a keyboard, all are needed are two wires connected to hardware, when these wires are touched it creates a full circuit  which sends information to a PC/MAC of which combination of wires are crossed which in turn simulates a key press. As my .SWF works through KeyDown events this was perfect for my rig. All i needed to do was make 2 relevantly sized floor “buttons” to send this information from the user. To do this i simply created two pieces of foil backed card, sandwiched some foam with a hole cut in the middle and connected the wires two each foil sheets. when the user steps on the “button” the foam collapses and thus the circuit is complete via the hole.  Ideally the buttons would not be noticeable in the public/commercial but as this is a prototype it is just not cost effective and/or practical.

This is my final composition of the minor (attention grabbing) clips. Again it needed to be simple but (hopefully) effective. The visuals for this where simply a silhouette of a young girl that i created in Photoshop that flash in and out very quickly. It was the sounds that i think carry this clip, first i  added a 10 kiloHertz sine wave to play from start to finish. This sound is very unpleasant and almost hurts the ears adding to an extra level of unease. This is then followed by several loud swishes as the child’s silhouette flashes in and out. (see video below).

For this clip i wanted to create a short but intense visual, something to grab attention but to also make the user jump. In the end i went for an intense flame burst created by animating fractals in AE. The clip has no fade in or out, so to surprise the user even more so. I then created an overlay of a demon face warp of my wife to add an extra ghostly effect to the composition, this was done by using motion tracking and carful animation of the liquify effect. i finally added a few seconds of black before the “Flame burst”, this was to give a few extra moments of suspense as the user walks past the mirror as this clip is meant to be caught out of the corner of the eye. (see video below).

This is my second minor clip, very simple yet effective (i hope). I found a sound wave file via http://www.freesound.org under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License. of two children singing “Ring a ring a roses”. I found this fairly creepy as is, their voices sounding a bit vacant and ghost like. For this mini clip i have simply added the last verse of this clip, added reverb, echo and time remapped it to sound slightly slower and more drowsy. I have then added a very subtle red glow over a cracked concrete texture to simulate veins as the song itself is about bubonic plague and i felt a slightly more medical visual was needed. (see video below).

After some research it transpired that actionscript 2 was just not specific enough for the .FLV control that i needed. This obviously meant it had to be done in AS3 which i had still yet to scratch the surface on learning. Due to time restrictions the only sensible option for me at this point was to enlist help of someone who knew actionscript 3. I then went about asking for the assistance of Liam Birtles and Joshua Shard.

My set-up consists of two floor sensors (or buttons), an outer sensor which will play short attention grabbing clips and an inner sensor which will play the feature clips. My first brief to Liam and Josh where as follows—-

“each key pulls out a video from the respective category folder at random, then plays the other videos in sequence from the random one.”

This proved to be very difficult even for these guys and in retrospect not the best of ideas, this is because my feature videos have a start and an end, therefor having them play straight after each other would have taken away from that and would have lost the  aspect of suspense. So i re-wrote my brief and came up with this—–

1, user steps on outer ring (eg button A), random movie from folder A loads, plays then stops even if user is still stood there.

2, the same thing happens with inner ring but button B and folder B .

3, if user steps on inner ring (B) before outer ring (A) has stopped playing…inner ring (A) overides (B)…….. i dont want this to happen the other way round.

Josh then went about writing the logic for me which was as follows…..

if user steps on inner ring(button b) and no movie from folder b is playing, play a random movie from the 4 in folder b. If a movie from folder a is playing start a movie from folder b.

if user steps on outer ring (button a) and no movie at all is playing play a random movie from the 4 in folder a.

if user steps on outer ring (button a) then starts to play a random movie from the 4 in folder a but if they step onto inner ring (button b), stop movie from folder a and start movie from folder b.

—About an hours after he sent this message to me he had already coded and completed the player for me and it works perfectly to the spec that i want. A HUGE THANK YOU TO MR SHARD——–

For the forth and last of my major category video clips i have chosen to go down a more intense and abstract route. The visuals themselves hold a slightly religious undertone, having the main subject within the video having their arms outstretched to represent jesus on the cross. It is my belief that by turning a pure and generally good entity such as christ into a more unsettling image will create an extra feeling of unease within the user(s). See below…

This is the last lot lot of raw footage that i had to reshoot this evening as the last batch was a little shaky and i also wanted a full body shot. (see below).

This is the final version of the first minor clip or attention grabbing clip. Designed to be short and not to intense just so to grab the attention of the user. These clips will be triggered at a further distance from the mirror as apposed to the longer more intense clips.

Here is the final version of the clip i have called “Body”. This clip is a little more graphic than the last ones and have based it around certain aspects of the human body, Hand, Mouth and Eye. I wanted the eye and mouth to cause unease by creating an extreme close-up, therefor alienating them from the normal point of view. Also the way they are portrayed is to emulate death (or dying), the positioning of the eye upward and the lips pulled open too create the effect of acute decomposition. The hand also has this decaying effect by using a textured overlay and is the final “JUMP” of this particular clip.