Category: Research Updates

This past week I have been looking over two similar but entirely different Imagineer focused books as well as listening to the “Imagineer Podcast,” all of which I have found to be incredibly inspiring material. When
I originally dreamed up my water screen project, the frame of the screen was just a necessary piece of the puzzle but secondary to the actual film
I planned to project onto the screen. After completing this weeks research I realized how every piece of the puzzle is equally important. What makes an Imagineer an Imagineer is that not one detail in the storyline is lost. What makes Disney World a World rather than a simple theme park is the storytelling at every angle. I remember a specific scenario pointed out in one of the Imagineer books where the author mentions the Disney Cruise Line and the entire pool area was built to tell a story about Donald and his three nephews. It was observing this type of attention to detail that caused me to want to push my project into more of a full room type experience. I plan to incorporate objects into the room such as a 5 galloon jerrycan (what residents living in Swaziland have to carry whenever they set out to get water) and leaving out a water bottle filled with dirty water to push the Thirst Projects “Dirty Little Secret” Campaign. I have also considered researching patterns that are relative to the water crisis and using the laser cutter to burn them into my water screen frame.

Another type of research I experienced this week was conversational with Professor Lorna Frizell in the Communications Department. Professor Frizell and I talked through my project for at least an hour. I had always thought my film would be completely documentary style but Professor Frizell offered a different idea where the video is taking place in a future world without any access to clean water. I suddenly imagined a new film where I tie to the two worlds together. I begin the film with a post clean-water world and open with an introduction to how awful this type of world would be (to what lengths will people go to access clean water?) and later on transition to where we are now and how this is where we could end up if we don’t do something. I plan to use some statistical graphics as well as morph comparison shots between here/places like Swaziland to emphasize the need for action. For example, I think beginning a shot with someone living in the United States splashing some water in their face to wake up fading into a shot of someone sifting through orange waters to try to find a clean area would be extremely powerful. Professor Frizell also opened my mind to the Flint Michigan water crisis and helped me realize that this is an issue that is currently growing at a rapid pace not just outside our country but also fairly close.

Lastly, I completed some on field research when I received wood shop training with Andy on the bottom floor of the AIMM building. I had the opportunity to use each machine in our wood shop while training and have spoken with Andy about using the area to work on my frame for the next few weeks.

Long way to go but progress is progress !

This week’s research updates will overlap a bit with my Industry Event post, since I’ve been reflecting on my visit to the Jim Henson exhibition and how it has helped in my process. Find that post here.

I’ve continued working on my prototype for next week, which will be finished as soon as my sewing machine gets delivered! Since it’s about 2 hours from being finished, here’s my takeaway from my prototype puppet:

1. Take time with the details. I made the decision to “rush” through this prototype puppet to make mistakes and figure out where I was ASAP. (It was also good for my usual perfectionist self to just get through something and learn from mistakes.) I stand by this decision! But I definitely want to be a lot more painstaking in the character puppets. For example, making seams line up on the neck, body, and arms, and making sure facial features are on symmetrically.
2. Roll with the changes. I talked about this a little bit in my last post, but I’ve struggled with being nervous that my puppets won’t look like what I pictured in my head. My prototype hasn’t ended up exactly what I pictured either (not for better or worse, just different). Truth is, it’s my first time working with puppets and I’ll have a hard time imagining results within the realm of reality. So I need to be prepared to roll with the changes in the designs based around the materials and skills I have available.

As I discussed at the end of my Industry Events post, I’ve been researching to further define the themes and tone of my show before I totally finalize the script. I was inspired by this sheet I saw at the Jim Henson exhibition to make a list of all the themes and adjectives to describe my show. I expanded it further to describe the two main characters, since I’ve found that creating unique, flawed characters is a huge part of the children’s shows I’m modeling my show after (Sesame Street, The Muppets, Nick/Cartoon Network shows I mentioned in my research plan). Find this sheet below!

This week was focused on reading physical books, mainly selections of three: Laws of Simplicity, Emotional Design, and Don’t Make Me Think.

From reading Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda, I have learned that there needs to be a balance of complexity and simplicity. What this means is that when thinking about a solution to the problem at hand, I cannot make the simplest solution that comes to mind. There needs to some type of complexity, i.e. different sections or new concepts, with the design that can balance out the simpler decisions that could be implemented when designing.

Within Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman, talks about how the three-level of emotional design: Visceral (appearance), Behavioral (usability), and Reflective (rationality). Each can be used separately, but when combined correctly, can help design a beautiful user experience. For my purpose, this will help guide me when I am analyzing the collected data to uncover a possible “umbrella problem” that might be causing the failures of hidden navigation. This can also help when designing new concepts by giving new insights to help with ideation.

Finally, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This focused on web design and how to ensure your website is user-friendly. It goes in-depth on how people navigate the web today and some helpful tips to ensure the discoverability and pagination are intuitive. This book will help to set some guidelines when it comes to auditing and designing new concepts.

Overall, these books will help throughout my process, from research to designing, to keep both the scope and end goal in check.

This week for my research I read about where electronic waste actually ends up, and how it gets there. One article I read called Where does America’s e-waste end up? GPS tracker tells all on PBS news hour discusses geolocating tracking devices that were stored in old computers, TVs and printers before sending them to donation centers.

An organization partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside machines that were strategically sent to nationwide donation centers, recyclers, and electronic take-back programs which advertise themselves as “green”, “sustainable”, “earth friendly, and “environmentally responsible.” The data they collected showed that 1/3 of the electronics went overseas, even as far as 12,000 miles which included 6/14 trackers that were dropped off in Washington and Oregon. Other trackers ended in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada, and Kenya. Most traveled across the Pacific to Hong Kong.

Puckett then traveled to Hong Kong where the GPS trackers say they are located, called the New Territories, an agricultural area along the border with mainland China. Along the way they passed several steam trucks carrying shipping containers from the port. When he got closer to the destination they heard power drills and shattering glass coming from the other side of a high metal wall made from old shipping containers. The journalist that Puckett teamed up with knocked on the gate and said hey wanted to fill a shipping container with printers to refurbish and sell in Pakistan, and the worker opened the door.

Behind the door workers were dismantling LCD Tvs. The ground that they were standing on is filled with broken white tubes. The fluorescent lamps were made to light up flat screens, however when they break they release invisible mercury vapor into the air. A minuscule amount of mercury can be a neurotoxin.

Workers had no idea of the risk that they’re in by being around these toxic chemicals. New Territories used to only be a pass-through for smuggled e-waste, but the Chinese government cracked down on whole electronic imports so now they’re doing the processing there.

This week I dedicated my research time to finding out more about the cryptids I hope to incorporate into my museum; however, the cryptid with by far the most information available was Bigfoot. I spent time reading academic papers trying to both prove and disprove his existence, watching sighting videos (the most important being the iconic Patterson-Gimlin Film that started the Bigfoot hype in 1967), and learning about Bigfoot’s origins from Native American myth. Out of all of this, what I found to be the most important was not whether or not he was real, but that I recreate Bigfoot in a way that respects the Native American lore.

Originally I wanted to include the Wendigo in my museum, but during the initial concept phase I learned how Wendigos are formed by the possession of the body by Native American spirits that seeks to cannibalize and harm others. Being a white woman, this is not my story to tell. On top of that, if I portrayed the Wendigo wrong I could risk creating negative stereotypes about Native Americans; therefore, I decided to cut it from the museum. The difference between the Wendigo and Bigfoot is that Bigfoot lore is extremely varied – Native American tribes all have completely different ideas of who he is, if he’s a simple creature just trying to survive or a bloodthirsty ape that attacks anything that comes too close. This vast difference in storytelling means there’s really no wrong way to portray him (as long as he isn’t meant to stereotype a real group of people), since there’s no one “correct” way of portraying him either.

Unlike Bigfoot and the Wendigo, my research into the Jersey Devil and Mothman found that their legends are rather simple. The Mothman’s origin is simply that someone saw a flying man moth creature in West Virginia, while the Jersey Devil is said to be the 13th son of the Leeds family who was cursed by his mother to become the devil. These two get up to light mischief, at most killing a goat every now and then. I would even argue that Mothman is a neutral party and the Jersey Devil is to be pitied as an abandoned child acting out. Either way, their vague histories allows for a great leeway in personal interpretation that has convinced me to have the Jersey Devil be the cryptid that comes to life in the museum, rather than my original plan for Bigfoot to do so. The Jersey Devil makes the most sense since his story can be interpreted as literal devil or a child with physical deformities abandoned by his mother. I intend to fuse the concepts together and create a kind of Hellboy scenario with a devil child that runs around the museum causing chaos.

 During my research of different mythologies, I wanted to find something that was unifying of all these vastly different cultures despite being from totally different times and places. As I began to research different stories and characters one thing that I found quite fascinating was that there is almost always the theme of a hero trying to solve a problem, albeit a natural force or an entity. These stories always start with the hero themselves and their backstory. Then there’s always a call to action, which serves as the driving force of the hero in their journey. The interesting part of the story is at this part, as this is what leads up to the climax of the story. In most cases, the hero will achieve their goal and return back home as a hero. The way these stories are formatted are extremely reminiscent of Marvel movies. Funnily enough, Thor is a well-known Marvel hero who originates from Norse mythology himself. I started digging online about this and ran across a concept called The Hero’s Journey. This format is used in many stories and even still used to this day. While it was coined by a man named Joseph Campbell in 1949, this format has been around centuries before, quite possibly since story telling has been a thing. After doing this initial searching of similarities to unify the character choices, I decided to go with the theme of different protagonists and antagonists that are found in various mythologies around the world. After all, my favorite elements of these stories are always the characters themselves, and considering my project is going to be depicting mythological characters I feel like this would be a good fit.

I took a trip to the Library to find some books on Mythology. Here, I picked up four books all detailing the mythology and stories from four different cultures. I read A Handbook of Greek Mythologyby H.J. Rose. It started with detailing the creation myth that the Greeks believed in, with the Greek titans and how the Gods overthrow their tyranny rise in power. Zeus, the leader of the Gods is very well known and would fulfil the role of a hero with his father Kronos being the villain, but I’m not too sure if I would like to use these two. The story of how the Greek Gods rose to power and Zeus’s journey of gathering an army to fight his father isn’t very well known to many people, but Zeus himself is a very well-known figure. I’m leaning towards more lesser known characters. Regardless, I don’t have a limit to how many characters I can use so I can keep them in the back of my mind. The book details a lot of information about major and lesser Greek Gods but nothing really caught my attention too much. However, as the book got to stories of regular humans and their stories it become pretty interesting. Often times, the protagonists of the stories were often regular people who had to find ways to fight a creature or a force that wouldn’t really be humanly possible. Famous examples include Heracles (Hercules) and Perseus, but there are other relatively interesting stories such as King Minos and the Minotaur, or even just the tragic story of Orpheus. I’m planning on diving a little deeper in Greek mythology because of its popularity and massive amounts of mythological stories that can be further explored. 

While doing some online researching and admittedly through playing the game Persona 5, I did find two interesting characters from Bali mythology. They believe that there is an evil witch named Rangda who causes disease and misfortune. Her eternal rival is a lion creature named Barong who fights her to death every year. The Balinese people hold a festival every year dressing in costumes of these two characters to commemorate this myth. While I was aware that the game contains a lot of mythological characters, thought it was pretty interesting that I would find direct inspiration that I can use in my project while I was initially procrastinating. Who said playing video games isn’t doing homework? 

I honestly haven’t researched as much with the other books and mythology as much as I wanted to this week. While my focus for this upcoming week is to research more technical aspects of project, I’ll definitely keep researching more on mythology and history.

Instead of turning to the internet for more research i actually picked up some books and started reading them to gain more information for my game design. I picked up on book on general game design that covers a lot of area from ideas and mechanics to some small coding. The other book that i had picked up was a book about learning more advanced codes with C# for unity, which is the language and engine i will be using to create my game. By reading through and learning these books i can improve my codes and debugging to make the game easier and faster. It will really help me make the game that i want to make because it will give me more time to make it instead of searching endlessly for the information that i need.

I’m also researching a person’s enjoyment of the game and how much random luck should be implemented in the game to make it fun but not to random making players angry. You want to reward the good players but you don’t want to let the weak players be left behind too much. I was thinking about implementing a luck system to make some small comebacks happen or whatever to try to make it fun.

I have watched more videos in blender to model characters better and make each one unique and more fun looking. Instead of making them look stiff and such i diced to ring them better and start adding physics to clothing to make them flow better. I will also be modeling humans so researching anatomy has been useful for getting better models with proper figure.

My main research this week was looking at the different programming languages I specified last week and learning a bit about them. Since I already knew a decent amount of Java and C++, there wasn’t much to look into with them other than sound and MIDI libraries. If I were to pick between the two, I think I would pick C++, as I found a lot of useful C++ MIDI/sound libraries for my purposes.

The main language I worked with was Nyquist, due to the main textbook in my research field utilizing it. I found that the biggest upside with Nyquist was that making sound with it was very simple. Nyquist allowed me to define instruments in the code and directly make sound with them. However, in terms of coding the algorithm, I feel that a different language personally may be a bit easier for me to use.

One language I didn’t initially list that I think could be useful is Python. Python is becoming a very popular language nowadays, and like C++, it has a lot of useful libraries available.

In addition to checking out programming languages, I learned a little more about neural networks. I had previously learned a little bit about them, but I think using them in my code would be very useful in making the end result more accurate. I would use them as sort of an extension to my original plan using Markov chains.

Basically, the program would compose a few songs, and human input would give feedback on how accurately the song depicts the end goal. For example, on a scale of 1-10, I could say a song composed by the program is a 7 (10 being the most accurate, 1 being very inaccurate), another would be a 3, etc. The program would use this data to find the patterns that make a certain song “accurate”, and therefore be able to compose songs more intelligently. I was able to find a Python library for this purpose.

This week I read How To Make It in the New Music Business by Ari Herstand. Ari is a musician who is popular for his music as well as his music marketing blog. For this project I will only be looking at the first couple chapters that cover starting a music career and managing a first release.

This book came out in 2016, so some of the advice could be dated, but I think it’s a good guide for navigating the current landscape of music streaming and social media.

The book describes that musicians need to develop discipline and routine in order to be successful. I’ve started to spend more time during my day writing and recording. I want to schedule this semester as an incubation period, a time where I focus on writing and developing musical skills. Winter break will be reserved for recording my final ideas and next semester will be a full release.

Next week I will research managing digital ads. This will help me with a test campaign I’m running next month, and the lessons I learn from that will be applied to the actual campaign next semester.

So far this update will be very simple since during this week I had little time to fully conduct some actually long length research, However, this did not stop me from at least attempting to get some information on how and when I will be conducting this project.

For starters, I began reading a bit of this book that explains how comic books can be interpreted and used to convey its messaging, including the structural bases for how comics are made. The book is titled “Understanding Comic: The Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud, who gives a very artsy but detailed description of the art form of comics. The most interesting aspect that I read was actually at the very beginning of the book as he talked about the art form of comics, on how its a vessel comprised of a number of ideas and images to convey an overall point and meaning to the story. like many works of art, this is considered to be a basic building block for many different interpretations of media alike. These tips along with many others will help guide me in the right direction when it comes to creating this book.

Another thing that I discovered while doing this research was a video that gives off basic information in Unity about hoe to create an interactive book with buttons. This was done in an older version of the program but I am sure that the code is still used for it. I would consider this to be quite useful since My goal is to incorporate some form of code for this project to actually create the movement I have in mind for the pannels in question. There are probably more indepth tutorials on how to create an interactive story like experience that discovery will come in time but for starters, the information that I was able to find was quite useful in the sense of getting a feel of how this project will be created.

These findings as short and not as much as I’d like them to be, are a good start to the beginning aspect of this project. As I continue to find more about the ways to shape and create this story, it will be beneficial for the department of possible narrative changes for a story that issint exactly set and stone at this point. As of now, the current goal remains with creating the assets to move them on to the esting phase where I will make an attempt to put them in the program for further examination. A slow start for sure, but a welcome one at best. I will keep you all posted on anything that happens in the coming weeks.

Thank you