Having spent the last couple of months disturbing my friends and families (and occasionally complete strangers) by filming them eating and drinking round tables, today I went to Inspace to play with the Puffersphere and see how the different shapes of tables, lighting systems, combinations of people and spatialisation worked when displayed on the sphere. It was truly exciting for me to actually see things I’d filmed up on the display unit- it felt like a turning point. It was also exceptionally useful to talk through some of my ideas with Mark Daniels and get his feedback on how they could be developed. There’s something really energising about sharing ideas with other creative people, especially when they then say things like ‘have I told you about this cupboardful of flat speakers we could use to make cones of sound?’ and ‘have you thought about getting the actors to be there in real-time as well?’. I was also given a glass of bubbles and treated to the sight on Inspace being turned into the inside of a snowglobe as Mark was editing footage from Saturday night’s display of Edward Scissorhands: very festive. I’ll be away for a couple of weeks over New Year- hoping to get a rough script draft together so I can start doing specific R&D rather than conceptual ‘um, I have no idea how this camera plays out’ filming. I also viewed some of the writing/editing footage, but that was less exciting.
In other news, at lunchtime today I turned into a guinea pig and went to the basement of The Forum to take part in a motion-perception experiment. I was put in a little box of a room and sat in front of a computer screen, which gave me instructions to follow. Fortunately I’m not claustrophobic. I was, however, a little disappointed I wasn’t asked to have pads stuck to my forehead, made to wear headphones, or surrounded by twenty people in white coats with clipboards. The gist of it was that I had to stare at the white dot in the centre of the screen and use the computer mouse to direct a red line in the direction of the faded dots moving across the screen. Left click if there were moving dots (once the red line was in place), right click if i thought there were no moving dots. Every so often it would tell me i’d either won money (c.3 pence) or lost it. I was given feedback on my progress about every twenty clicks (your alignment is good! Your alignment needs improvement! You suck!). Strange how quickly you become addicted to the praise; it was like a really unimaginative computer game. I was also called out halfway through so Cle could check I wasn’t dead and offer me a jaffa cake. I’m due back at the same time tomorrow, after which I’ve been promised an explanation of what it is they’re actually measuring. Couldn’t find any hidden cameras, but you never know…
Today I also… wrote lots of lists of ideas. Brainstormed combinations of 6 characters (working names: Andreas, Thomas, Jennifer, Steven, Aleia, Lauren). Uploaded a lot of footage from the last week and gave it a rough edit. Read through all the departmental emails on my staffmail alert and once again marvelled at the amount of snacks this School gets through.
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Viccy Adams 