Midterm Analysis: Part 1

The midterm on Wednesday night at SBU was quite entertaining. Our objective was to showcase some of our pieces of work, ranging from our documentary films to Google SketchUp videos to textures of time. The pieces of work were then displayed using a protector on various sections of the campus. In order to help us complete this task we combined our work with some of the Max patches given to us by Professor Baldwin. The group that I was working with decided to project underneath a spot near the Staller Center. It was the perfect area given the amount of light that was remaining. We immediately opened up a Max patch called Mind of Michael Angelo and began projecting an image of a student, Matt, and his friend, Steve, who were performing various tricks. The result was an awesome display of vertical and horizontal lines representing the images of both performers. However, both performers were doing the tricks a bit too fast for the program to pick them up properly. What we ended up with was a time lapse and the tail image of their last move. It was also cool to see the contrast between the perfectly formed right angles of the Melville Library and Staller Center in the projection along with the curved lines that were being formed by Matt and Steve.

Afterwards when the sun began to set we started projecting our eye candy videos at various points around campus. It was interesting to witness how far the images could be projected and I discovered just how strong the lumen levels need to be in order to achieve this. As we finished up I realized that we had no real crowd the entire night. There were a lot of students walking by who stopped to look at our work for a few seconds, but just kept walking afterwards. I wish we could have gotten a bigger crowd and wish we could have had a bit more time at night to showcase our documentary films on Staller or the lawn in front of Staller. Overall I had a good time and learned a lot. Can’t wait for May!