A few left (day 284)

June 4 (day 9) -- 
(written on June 5)

The new build of the Touch was posted already!  I got the textures working and now we have many lungs with distinct videos.  The next step is to get them breathing at different rhythms.  I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet.  Right now the instancing is done at the group level (whole lungs) and the animations are on its components.   That separation may be an issue.

We also got the communication going between the graphics and the sounds.  It was a thrilling start but it still needs work to sound good.

We ate at L'Express and met Glen Lowry there before showing him the studio and our progress so far.  We ended the evening recording the Montreal night ride with the soundfield microphone.  Right at the end of recording a group of girls out for a bachelorette party wanted to be recorded.  It was a really kind of sweet and joyful encounter.

June 7 (day 10)
(written on June 8)

This was the last day before the presentation the next day.  We prioritized the things we wanted to get done and all our priority lists were longer than humanly possible.  Nevertheless we set out to do the first things first and munched on cacao nibs to keep the momentum.

My priority was to get the lungs breathing in sync with the breaths.  Zoe had isolated four examples of each person's breath (miles, leila, zoe, maria).  Unfortunately in the end I wasn't able to use Zoe's own breaths because they were too quiet.  I matched the other breaths with the lungs by stretching the animation keys to match the length of the breath clip.  I combined the animation transformations with those of the geometry instancing.   It all worked well except for the transparency of the lungs which, for various reasons I won't go into now, didn't follow the breath properly. 

Thea kept working on the stereo videos.  Miles worked on foreground sounds and Zoe worked on background sounds.

Dinner was a bit scattered because we had to get back to the studio quickly.  Miles and Jocelyn went to Schwartz.  Leila and I took out some sushi.

June 8 (day 11)
Everyone put finishing touches on their little bits and pieces.  Leila went out and shot some last minute urban video which I felt we needed to balance out the more natural shots.  We moved the whole project over to the big gallery space.  It looked much better there and had room for many people to sit, move around, listen, look.  The Oboro techs were so gracious and amazing to arrange to move the project.  It all went smoothly.

In the end I didn't manage to do more than three pairs of lungs for the visuals.  One was mapped with a video of wind in the leaves, one with Montreal part and cityscape, and the other with pelicans swimming in the Bow river.  They each had their own rhythm.  To scale it to more than three lungs I'll have to redesign and offset the bad design choices of a sprint to deadline.

Zoe had a really great background audio composition which played while Miles added some foreground sounds like laughing, uncertainty, like it/don't like it, humming, etc via OSC messaging.  It sounded a bit cacophonous at times but I think it worked well for a crowd feel.  The stabilizing breath sounds helped offset the chaos a bit.  I really enjoyed walking around to all the speakers and listening to the individual voices speak or hum, and the returning to the centre to hear it all together.

Once again no pictures.  I am embarrassed by this.  The event was documented by others so I'll try to get some pictures from other sources.  Just before I archive the files tomorrow, I'll make a video of the lungs breathing.

I'd say about 15-20 people came to the artist talk.  Lots of great questions and discussion afterward.

We finished the day at an Afghan restaurant nearby.  Great food.

A song for this post. (an unexpected nostalgic group favourite one evening)