A few weeks ago I made a presentation to the staff at uni. The glass half full version is that I learnt a lot about what not to do. The glass half empty version is that it didn’t go very well.
Things I found out:
Less points is better
I had about 40 slides prepared and had time to get through less than 10
Less words on screen & more in my notes
I had quite a few slides which were dot points or quotes. Since I had them up on screen I felt weird about just reading them out and got muddled. Next time I will use mostly images or examples on screen and use the dot points and quotes in my notes.
Less explaining - more referring
Looking back I didn’t quite know what the audience would be like and who I should target my presentation to. I made the mistake of trying to explain a whole lot of my background research when I should have been focussing on the implications of these ideas on my work and just referring to them in brief.
Again - Less points
The focus of my presentation should have been what my work is about, why it is important and so on. These were going to be my last points that I was building to…. before I ran out of time. They should have been my first points.
Dual monitoring is a bad idea
I should have used video mirroring on my laptop rather than the dual monitor output. When I was preparing things to move to the projector display the audience had nothing to look at. I ended up leaving error messages etc on the screen without knowing it. It is much better to show the audience what you are doing
Keynote / Powerpoint presentations are not very flexible
When I got the ‘five minutes left’ warning I realised how fixed and linear my slideshow was, there was no quick way for me to jump to my last points and I ended up trying to summarise the other points as I went through them.
StumbleUpon is a socially moderated ‘channel surfing’ interface for recommending and finding cool websites. When you sign up you select a number of topics you are interested in, and a series of buttons are added to your browser’s toolbar. The most interesting one is the ‘Stumble!’ button which, based on your interests sends you to a random site. If you like a site you can give it a ‘thumbs up’ and its URL is added to your personal StumbleUpon blog and you can make a comment. The URL is also added to the pool of sites which can then be suggested to other users. If you find a site you like you can also see who else suggested it and look at their other suggestions.
I first read about StumbleUpon ages ago when Jill wrote about it. It took me a while to sign up because it doesn’t work with my regular browser, Safari so I downloaded Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is not bad but I find it struggles a bit with media rich sites so I still use Safari mostly.
This is the most bizzare spam comment I have found so far:
For those of you who have been unfortunate enough to never have tasted the
‘Great Chieftain O’ the Pudden Race’ (i.e. haggis) here is an easy to follow
recipe which results in a dish remarkably similar to the above mentioned
protected species.
Ingredients:
1 Sheep’s Pluck (heart, lungs, liver) and bag
2 teacupsful toasted oatmeal
1 teaspoonful salt
8 oz. shredded suet
2 small onions
1/2 teaspoonful black pepper
Scrape and clean bag in cold, then warm, water. Soak in salt water
overnight. Wash pluck, then boil for 2 hours with windpipe draining over
the side of pot. Retain 1 pint of stock. Cut off windpipe, remove surplus
gristle, chop or mince heart and lungs, and grate best part of liver (about
half only). Parboil and chop onions, mix all together with oatmeal, suet,
salt, pepper and stock to moisten. Pack the mixture into bag, allowing for
swelling. Boil for three hours, pricking regularly all over. If bag not
available, steam in greased basin covered by greaseproof paper and cloth for
four to five hours.
This is a little movie I made to test how Quicktime deals with real time text input. It is also the first step in a project to dynamically source video material from any URL. In future examples I will use this same method to paste a URL and load it into another window.
Click the poster movie to load the real one. Click above the line and enter some text. The movie copies the contents of the top text track to a string and adds it to the start of the bottom text track. I initially had the movie execute this action only when you clicked. In a purely ‘functional’ interface this is how I would do it but I wanted to stress the real time aspect of the process so I have the movie add text on the ‘Idle’ event handler. This means the text will start cascading down the second track as the user types without waiting for them to finish.
Office Voodoo is a great example of an interactive video project that uses a cinematic/televisual aesthetic with real life actors whilst maintaining meaningful real time user interaction. It is rare to a project which achieves all these aims at once.
Office Voodoo features footage of two bored workers as they sit in an office. By physically manipulating ‘voodoo’ dolls with red flashing eyes, two users may control the characters’ emotional states. Depending on the combination of the two characters’ moods a real time editing engine cuts together shots which form a kind of ‘algorithmic sitcom’, as the site says. The editing engine respects the conventions of shot / reverse shot and continuity editing, making for a fairly seamless TV like program.
While I haven’t played with it myself, the About Office Voodoo movie on the site shows examples of people using the system and the effects of their actions on the characters. It reminds me of being a director holding casting auditions where I would get actors to act out a scene in a couple of different ways. My favourite was when I asked an actor to rap a David WIlliamson play.
From the site:
“With advances in compression standards and faster, larger hard disks, the film form is finally freeing itself from the inherent linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, as it becomes chunks of data that can be retrieved instantaneously. This explosion of the film medium is redefining our approach to narrative filmmaking and over the viewer’s control of the time flow and the plot. In the attempt to carry on the tradition of mimetic storytelling with real actors, this piece brings together the craft of cinema with automated editing techniques, trying to replicate in new media semiotics what 1920s soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov did to film with montage. Here, the knowledge of the editor is represented in the machine, and the rules are scripted according to user interaction. As a filmmaker and a programmer, the author is telling a story not only with audiovisual media but also with computer code.” [my emphasis]
Click the poster movies above to load the real ones. The second one will take a little while to load (3.9Mb)
Alternatively (recommended) download the two files, ControlTOBE.mov (Controller) and TOBE.mov (Player) and open them both in Quicktime Player.
Ok, this is a half finished draft of a basic Quicktime vision mixer. Like the inter-movie text communication movies I posted earlier , this project comes in two parts: one movie to control another. I actually created the text sender movies to troubleshoot when I was making this movie.
The ‘player’ movie contains three video tracks. The ‘controller’ movie features a number of clickable sprites which tell the ‘player’ movie what to do. By clicking on the green or red buttons on the left hand side of the ‘controller’ the tracks in the ‘player’ movie may be enabled or disabled. In the middle of the ‘controller’ movie there are two gradients with a percentage number, these control the opacity of each of the two ‘upper’ video tracks. By clicking on the gradients at various different places along the horizontal the numbers should change and the tracks should fade in or out. On the far right of the ‘controller’ movie is the ‘invert’ button. This inverts the top video track so that white is black and black is white etc.. The other button at the bottom of the ‘controller’ is the ‘add’ button. It is the latest addition and it also controls the top movie (I’ll move it up top in the next version). Rather than simply inverting the video track, the ‘add’ button produces an additive effect (like a Photoshop layer) which changes depending on the presence or absence of the underlying two video tracks.
This draft was designed as an experiment in building a VJ instrument in Quicktime with Livestage Pro for a recent Segmentation Fault gig I was organising. The ‘player’ movie is designed to automatically go to full screen on the video output of my laptop while the ‘controller’ sits on my screen out of sight. I built a more complicated version with about 20 different video tracks for the gig but unfortunately most of the effects such as fading in and out and layering decided not to work on the night. I think I’ve worked out the problem so I’ll post a new version soon.
The buttons usually take a couple of clicks to get going but they should work after that.
On Wednesday night I attended the Film Victoria Digital Media Fund briefing on the recent MILIA World Interactive Content Forum which was held in France. The briefing was held at The Westin Melbourne - very swanky MILIA is a huge annual event that started out as a primarily ‘multimedia’ industry conference and has, since last year, merged with another even larger television industry conference. The speakers at the briefing who attended MILIA were Amelia King, Nell White, Rosie Allimonos, and Brian Buchanan.
Amelia King is the manager of the Digital Media Fund.
Rosie Allimonos is the producer of the excellent ABC Online works Winged Sandals and The Space: Tour Of Duty. For more information on Winged Sandals see Rosie’s informative background information and a review of the project by Barista. Rosie is also the president of Experimenta, a “new media arts, film, video, sound and performance” organsiation that produces events such as The House of Tomorrow which is currently touring Australia (and which I managed to miss when it was in Melbourne - oops).
