September 1: Sabbatical Officially Begins!

It feels like the last days of summer vacation, still a few days away from Labor Day weekend and my kids' school starting, but it is indeed the official start date of my sabbatical.

Last Thursday was the final class meeting of the Animation course at the MFA.  It was an excellent whirlwind 5-week introduction to traditional animation techniques. We used the class time to make our animations, so they were short, and there were more/other things I would have done for each had I been working on my own time, but it was also great to push through the cut-out animation (2 sessions) and also the claymation stop-motion technique.  Being able to use the camera setup was also terrific and helped me focus on the animation.  I had very little sense as I was doing it, though, what I would get as a result.  Maybe that's what experience gives you as you get used to the medium in which you're working.

Here is my cut-out animation, and I'll post the stop-motion claymation one when I have the file.

The idea is that the robots have time traveled to the 1920s.

When I was on the Cape last week, I found some great rocks that I thought I could use in my claymation animation, and so instead of working with the bots again for this, it has a sea theme.  Here are some pictures of the puppets.

Sabbatical Project Update 2: Cut-out Animation in Progress

In class session #3, I began shooting the animation.  Over the week, as I worked with the digital images I had of my bots and the Dover clip art flappers that intrigued me, a crazy plot emerged that combined them both.  I spent way too much time looking for, then trying to make, then finding a photo, then trying to draw, then printing at the correct size . . . an art deco background for the animation.  This project blends traditional and digital techniques (rather than using found images and collaging them as is), because it relies on scaling and modifying the images digitally (although it could have been done with a photocopier).   

As I made decisions about the story the animation would tell, it became clear to me that if I had a specific story in mind, I had to make the assets or spend way more time hunting for images in more specific magazines or books than I had, and so I made them.  Fiddling with them in Photoshop led to other ideas, like making scaling integral to the story.   If I were to do another cut-out animation, I would scour used book sales for material, or let the story emerge from the assets I found.  Another thing I'd like to try is to use hand-drawn elements in the background (which I did for a virtual art installation to good effect).   

My awesome teacher Tim McCool set up the camera and my background and cut-outs on the copy stand and helped me see how much to move the objects for each frame.  It's challenging to imagine what the animation will look like as I slowly move the cut-outs according to my storyboard sketches.   No automatic tweening here!

Check out http://timmccool.com, which may be the most clever webpage I've ever seen.

We'll finish shooting the animation next week.  I've been listening to 20s music for just the right choice, but the traditional animation process is so different from how I would do this digitally, which is to animate to sound.  Moving the legs of  the robot dancing the Charleston was guesswork, and I know from doing digital animation of dance, how precise it can be.  So I am very curious how it will turn out!

Sabbatical Project Update 1: Animation Studio Art Course at MFA

My sabbatical doesn't officially start until September, but I'm getting a jump start on it this summer.  Last night was the second week of the Animation course I'm taking at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  The first week, we did some hand-drawn animation, and last night started cut-out animation.

Terry Gilliam of course is the master of that form, and because his failed attempt to make a film of Don Quixote features so prominently in my What Is Being? course, that is my primary association with his work, in addition to the animations in Monty Python.   Since 2010, every time I google Gilliam and Don Quixote, I find a relatively new mention of the film project.  Today's is http://www.avclub.com/article/amazon-sponsor-terry-gilliams-new-attempt-make-man-220689

Gilliam's choice to make a live action film of Quixote instead of an animation is interesting.  All of the problems that plagued his film production, from uncooperative weather to injured actors, don't exist in animation.   But the challenge for him is to make the live action film.

For me, animation is plenty quixotic.  As I embark on taking what has become easy for me to do digitally into puppetry, actual world installation, and now traditional animation, I am continually confronted by pesky physics, the lack of the undo function, and my limited abilities to manipulate physical materials.  But I'm curious to see what my bots from HouseSmarts will do as cut-outs and claymation figures.

Two of my bots, and an art deco person 

Cut-out animation character and background possibilities

12 Core Principles of Game Design

I've been thinking about Game Design Principles and although it seems arbitrary to list a dozen, as opposed to 100 (see Wendy Despain's book), or thirteen (see Matt Almer in Gamasutra), here are my essential twelve.  There are of course many more, and some of them are more fundamental than others, and have sub-principles.  But, not in order of importance, here they are, offered as a place to start, rather than any kind of end point.

PRINCIPLE 1: Use design thinking
The iterative process of design thinking, in which we understand who is going to use what we design, then come up with ideas, prototype, test, and revise, is an approach that focuses each stage of the process where it needs to be.

PRINCIPLE 2: Create meaningful play
This fundamental principle refers to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's approach to game design in The Rules of Play, and everything else flows from it.  All your design choices have to result in meaningful experiences for the player.

PRINCIPLE 3: Use player expectations and knowledge from genre and style
Work with, and play with, what's come before, because your player will.  You can go against those expectations, but do so from a place of knowledge.  And of course, not all players will be familiar with genre and style, and your game has to meaningful to them, too.


PRINCIPLE 4: Focus on the player experience
This is as fundamental as it gets, and it's a reminder that your journey as the designer may be the means, but it's  not the end.


PRINCIPLE 5: Consider aesthetics
Always remember the aesthetic experience of your game, and make it beautiful (or cute, or shocking, or ugly) as suits your game.


PRINCIPLE 6: Focus on behavior
Games are about doing, so how the player--and all the objects and characters--behave is central.


PRINCIPLE 7: Shape the arc of your game
Not all games have story, but they should all have an arc, a shape to the experience.


PRINCIPLE 8: Create spatial awareness
Whether 2D or 3D, abstract or realistic, each game represents space in a certain way, and how you create a sense of gamespace for your player is an important part of the game experience.


PRINCIPLE 9: Think of the player in terms of relationships
Your player is in relationship with others, whether they are characters and other components of your game, other players, or other people in social networks and in life.


PRINCIPLE 10: Design for flow experience
This is another fundamental principle, because it addresses the holy grail of optimal experience, including designing a game with a good balance between challenge and boredom, and an experience that the player want to keep having.


PRINCIPLE 11: Test your game on others
An essential step in design thinking is testing on potential users, getting feedback, and then revising the design based on the feedback.  You can't be the only one who playtests the game, unless you plan on being the only player.


PRINCIPLE 12: Imagine the future
The newest, hottest games are the end result of the designs from the past, so in order to innovate and design something original, you need to think about the future.  What do you think and want gaming to be like? Design for that.

These are my core principles of Game Design, each of which are umbrellas for sub-principles. 

updated 12 March 2015

ShadowLoop 2015

Pictures from ShadowLoop interactive media art installation, January 2015.  See: ShadowLoop page

ShadowLoop Recap

It was an amazing experience to finally install the installation.  As the first thing like this I've done in an actual space, as opposed to virtual art installations either as an artist or curator, it was incredibly exciting to be able to share the experience with other people in such a direct way.  The logistics were so complicated, though, and with too little set-up time given to me in the room, some aspects suffered from the ideal plan.  But that didn't matter in the end, when people were able to make the different physical, digital, 2D and 3D Platos and Shadows run and dance.

ShadowLoop: Interactive Media Art Installation April 30, Berklee College of Music

http://www.lorilanday.com/shadow

SHADOWLOOP   Interactive Media Installation by Lori Landay
Get in the loop with the ShadowLoop interactive media installation.
Plato's Shadow is tired of Plato's negative attitude towards shadows, and has gone on the lam!
Use Kinect, Wii balance board, Leap Motion and sound to make Shadow run, dodge, and dance. Interact with video, audio, shadows, animation, and puppets.
Get in the loop between shadow and light, digital and physical, representation & simulation, freedom & control!

What will you choose, Shadow? Reunite with Plato, or not?

APRIL 30
Get in the loop from 4 pm to 7 pm
Drop by--stay for a few minutes, or longer . . .
The Rose Room (2W)
1140 Boylston Street
Berklee College of Music
Boston, MA
http://www.lorilanday.com/shadow
http://www.facebook.com/shadowloop 
A Berklee Faculty Fellowship Project

Plato's Shadow has had enough of listening to Plato, especially his disparaging ideas about shadows in his allegory of the cave.  So Shadow takes off on his own and goes on the lam.  In this interactive installation, you control Plato's Shadow in a Unity3D environment with the Leap Motion and Kinect controllers.  What will you do, Shadow?  Run amock or reunite with Plato?  

ShadowLoop playfully imagines Plato's Shadow as a trickster who breaks free of the bonds of representation.  The interactive installation cascades different forms of media and interactivity to cast literal and metaphorical shadows on the relationships between actual and virtual, physical and digital, representation and simulation, freedom and control.  

The Loop is not only the connection and separation of the person and his or her own shadow, played out again and again, but also an artistic approach: a loop of taking images, sounds, and movement from the physical world into the virtual and back again, recursively transforming them through interaction and reaction.  When motion capture animation that makes an avatar dance is mimicked by a person in the installation and performed by the 2D puppet, and the live video feed can be seen on an object in the Unity environment--that is just one example of the many loops in ShadowLoop.

In Plato's time, only someone like the prisoners in the cave who have never seen the actual world are fooled by the shadows; the media representations of that age were not the increasingly realistic and convincing simulations we encounter today.  Our shadows are no longer only on the wall but among us, challenging what it means to be, and what it means to seem to be.

For me, as an artist, this project has run the gamut from oft-practiced media forms like digital video to learning shadow puppetry in two courses at the Puppet Showplace Theater expertly taught by Artist in Residence Brad Shur.  It combines 2D and 3D puppetry, and frames the avatar as a puppet in both gameplay and virtual worlds.  

The installation uses two Kinect sensors, a Leap Motion sensor, a Wii Balance Board, Unity3D, Osculator, Osceleton, Main Stage, Syphon, Touch OSC, MadMapper, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP and Animata to projection map video images of live action footage of shadows, the Unity gameplay, machinima captured in the virtual world Second Life, video of a shadow puppet performance of Plato and His Shadow, music by Moby, and audioreactive imagery.

Thank you to the Berklee College Office of Faculty Development for the Berklee Faculty Fellowship (2013-2014) that made this project possible.  This project continues research begun with a National Endowment for the Humanities Enduring Questions Grant for "What Is Being?" (2010-2012) and extends questions first posed with a Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship (2008-2009). 

Special thanks to my teacher Brad Shur, Artist in Residence at Puppet Showplace Theater, my dear friend/colleagues Shujen Wang and Michelle Glaros, Stacey Fox who is my go-to for all things new media and old, and at Berklee to Jerry Smith, Chee-Ping Ho, Chris Jo, Liberal Arts Chair Simone Pilon, Liberal Arts Assistant Chair Mike Mason, Professional Education Division Dean Darla Hanley, Dr. Richard Boulanger who led the Reboot Workshop on Max/MSP last summer, the cohort of colleagues in that workshop, and my students: Chelsea Southard who worked on the earliest version last summer, current students Alex Cote, Rachel Dziezynski, Zach Lucia, and especially Richard Ludlow and Michael Johnson who patiently helped me with MIDI and OSC.  Special thanks to my husband Richard for being a terrific partner who nurtured this project in every way, including technically and practically.

Although not meant to stand alone, there are three videos that comprise some of the images in the video projection mapping: "Dancing Shadow," filmed at LEA26: Dragon Curves by Mac Kanashimi,  "On the Lam," filmed primarily at LEA7: Machinima Open Studio Project built by Chic Aeon and also at Apollonian Empire built by Ilan Ellisson, Dark Moon built by Nepherses Amat, Aero Pines built by Cindy Bolero, and Action Surf Sk8t built by Bob Pixel, and "SlowLight," with video of shadows.  Music for all by kind permission of Moby.