Open Share Overview
Part One – Refinement
The role of this self-driven project is to provide you with a period of reflection and development for your studio portfolio before Summative Assessment. You will be given the opportunity to refine a previous project for exhibition, and produce a 3minute showreel of what you consider to be your best work this academic year.
Throughout your time at the GSA we aim to help you develop your self-initiated troubleshooting, planning and refinement skills. This project offers you the learning time and space to implement practical methods that will become second nature and support your creative process by Y4.
When developing one of your previous pieces of work you should aim to spend this time not solely concentrating on whether it technically succeeded but prioritise the importance of staging and communicating the context of the work. Alongside this you are expected to compile three of, what you consider to be your strongest pieces of work, in to a video showreel for submission. Take on board all you have learnt in the documentation skills workshop to stage your works, tell the story behind your ideas and articulate your process.
Part Two – Exhibition
The second part of this project involves a cross-year Exhibition of your selected piece. This will involve you working in designated teams to make this happen. You should consider location, scale of work, power requirements, lighting, titling when curating the exhibition.
Each team will take on one of the following areas of responsibility:
1. Promotion/publicity raise awareness and publicise exhibition.
2. Installation management – organising materials and lighting.
3. Distribution of technical equipment.
4. Curating team to design the exhibition space.
5. Documentation of the setup and final show.
6. Navigation and signage
You should consider not only negotiating within your team but also communicating what the needs of other teams are in order to bring everything together.
Deliverables
The core deliverable of this project is to clearly communicate your project reflections from the past academic year. This should be presented in the following ways:
- Refine a previous piece of work.
- A 3 minute showreel of three pieces of work that follows the template mp4 format. (Links to an external site.)
- An exhibition which showcases your newly developed piece of work.
- A supporting statement (following the template) (Links to an external site.) to accompany your exhibited piece of work.
- Learning Journal documentation of your reflections and summarisation.
Documentation Workshop 01 - Mon 2pm 15/04
This workshop was a recap of what is expected in documentation videos like how to add captions and what they should include. For this project we need to choose 3 projects to document and create a 3min video showing the development, process, meaning and final.
Refinement
My reason for wanting to present my work at the exhibition in VR:
Documentation
Which products do I want to include possible options:
- Imagined Environments
- Getting Into Unity
- Mixed Reality
Imagined Environments:
Final 20 seconds can be the final video I submitted as my final. I am considering including some research of translating earphones and maybe a set scene of me or someone else watching Netflix with subtitles and the captions would further explain some of the research. I could also include some of the editing I did like fixing the mask frame by frame and adding effects like depth of field. All of this should form a 1min summary of the project.
Getting Into Unity:
Show footage of the damage plastic has created on the planet, then film a few second clip of the bins in the house and the ones outside showing my inspiration for the project. Then add screen grab of the furniture Facebook page. Screenshots of the code for the items and the layer out furniture. Then hopefully if I get to use VR I can add some footage of someone trying it along with some screenshots of how the final looks.
Mixed Reality:
Screen record scrawling through Brexit news and articles and add captions about why Brexit is a personal matter. add some images of the process and some development trail videos. Finally add the bus and maybe another solution and stage the final outcome along with some clips of what the app looks like on the screen.
Tue 23/04
Tutorial with Paul at 12pm – moved to 1:30pm
Currently trying to research how to make my unity project work in VR using Oculus Rift. A few people in the studio have recently done this for Design Domain so I decided to ask them for some advice, but there are some differences. I have a MacBook Pro and they have Windows and I need to us a controller whereas they only needed the VR to look around meaning that I might encounter a few more obstacles. I have also been looking at forums but many questions have been posed in 2008 and I’m not sure how accurate they will be with the newer versions of the program. Right now I am moving my entire unity folder to a pen-drive so that I can build it on the PC.
I’m still a little bit confused about a few things like making the controller work – will I need to edit the code? – because I haven’t ever done this before but I will work over the next 2 days to try and figure it out.
https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/latest/concepts/unity-build-pc/
The above article portrays how to build the unity project so that it works in Oculus. (Use this when building later).
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OculusControllers.html
Above explaining input joysticks working in Unity.
https://forums.oculusvr.com/developer/discussion/6110/unity-or-xbox-360-controller
A forum page discussing how to make an xbox controller work in Unity. With a fourther link to this page:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Xbox360Controller
Navigation- TEAM WORK FOR EXHIBITION
Yesterday Me, Tasha and Innes got together to measure the studio and create a map of it for the curatorial team so they can start placing everyone where they will be on the day of the exhibition. We also asked Paul if there was any way we could get the floor plans of the building which he was able to get for us.
The official Floor Plan for Barnes 3rd Floor:
The Studio Floor Plan Me and Tasha measured and Innes created:
Finally the Map Tasha created on how to get to the studio:
Thursday 25th April
After a lot of confusion over creating a package, which turned out to be the most simple thing in the world, I will now hopefully be able to move my whole unity project onto the studio PC and make it work from there.
This is the comment that finally helped me figure out what creating a package meant and most importantly the word EXPORT which I must have missed the first couple of times I read this but finally I opened my application in Unity and exported it as a package.
Yesterday, I was testing out the Oculus Rift with the glitched copied version of my project but since the first scene was mostly code it actually worked quite well. I will upload a few pictures of the first tests.
Today I had trouble again despite using the package to move the project after trying several times me and Paul came to the same conclusion deciding that it is probably because we used different versions of unity on the two different machines. Mines has been updated more recently whereas the PC had the 2017 version. I will try again tomorrow even though I was in the process of just working through the problem and creating a different second scene similar but more simplistic.
Documentation ShowReel
So far I’ve started my Documentation with the Imagined Environments Project for this one since the final is an actual video I will be using some photos to show the process as well as videos as I feel like this will create a nice balance of stills against moving image. I am still not sure which order to place the videos and which projects should be first which is why I will leave the captions for later once I’m happy with all the footage.
Monday 29 April
I ordered a cable over the weekend so that I could make the project work today however there were problems again as the controller doesn’t work and the cable was only meant for charging. Paul decided to go and buy a new controller with a cable.
In the end I had to swap controllers and managed to make it work like I wanted using only 3 axis to move and jump.
Since my group is taking care of navigation we had to take care and take the old tape of the floor so we can put new signs up for the exhibition making it easy to get around the studio.
Many people also got together to paint the new plinths and the wall dividers.
Also with the help of the creational team Innes was able to add names to the studio plan file.
Statement
My final statement for the exhibition.
Wednesday 1 May - Continued Documentation
Continuing documentation. It seems like the video will be a little longer than 3 minutes but I think it’s important not to rush it so that it can be fully understood by the viewer.
After adding captions and some background instrumental music I think I am done and I am quite happy with the video as I have invested a lot of time and effort. I realise it’s twice the length it should be but I don’t believe it would have been as effective if I cut any more footage than I already did.
The Final Floor Plan:
EXHIBITION
Final Thoughts
The exhibition was really successful and I think everyone done a great job in their teams and their individual refinements. I chose Getting into Unity for my refinement because the concept is extremely current and important which gives the piece of work meaning. The reason I decided to put the work in VR was because it was a 3D environment that was dynamic anywhere the viewer wanted to look giving them a full 360-degree view meant that the piece could be experienced fully. I choose to have a controller instead of a timed out piece because I like the fact that the user has some freedom to explore the scene and then decide wether they want to jump or not (prior to this I had many people view the work just to see if it was a common instinct to jump off the platform or whether that wasn’t clear but luckily the way the platform is set up and the background being a cliff people kept asking if they could jump and out of pure curiosity or because it’s a false reality and it’s the only time you can jump off a cliff without dying creating the trigger to the second scene like this worked out to my advantage.) I had suggestions from tutors to stage this differently and time out each scene without a controller and to add a message about the landfills and what the project meant but I decided to go with giving the viewer some freedom and adding the controller as I have experienced many VR pieces that are staged and I was always aware that I wasn’t in control because I was supposed to look a certain way or I wasn’t able to move. I understand the advantages of this kind of work as it is very clear and every viewer has the same experience however I created the scenes so that no matter where you look or where you click, move or jump you would be interacting with the scenes on your own terms without knowing that I am pulling the strings behind the work even though I am because I planned the scenes out in advance, it’s like a false sense of freedom which I think is extremely effective as the viewer has a personalised interaction with the piece but only to an extent taking away the same message as others. I made sure my statement explained exactly what I meant and what the concept is so that the viewer could interact freely but still understand the concept. I made a lot of creative decisions during this process and I am really happy with how they turned out for the exhibition, as many people viewed and enjoyed the work.
This is the final documentation for OpenShare and it consists of 3 projects: Imagined environments, Getting into unity and Mixed Reality.
Marta Zofia Palacz 