A Week of Early Mornings
Monday
In my Media Literacies class, our current project is writing a science fiction news article based around this fictional world on the moon called "Luna City." ASU is hosting a theatrical festival called Emerge. It's described on the site as:
- Emerge, the festival of futures, interweaves art, science and technology to explore the future in evocative ways. Since its inception in 2012, Emerge has pushed the envelope of performance, technology, and critical thinking by building, sharing, and experimenting with visceral experiences of the future.
Our news articles are centered on a headline assigned to us somewhere between the years 2040-2175. My headline was "Adaptive Post-Scarcity Economies" and I wrote about the way artists trade their art experiences for membership services that are all but becoming obsolete.
I had a meeting get cancelled so I used the extra free time to head to the film school. I needed to check out some equipment for my documentary production class because our crew was going to be filming interviews the next day.
When I get to the studio, I find out that the equipment pool check out system was getting rebooted and that I wasn't going to be able to get anything til Wednesday. I told the worker that we had the interviews set up for the next day, and if there was anyway for us to get at least some equipment, I'd really appreciate it.
She told me to come back at around 9:15 am the next day and she would see what gear she could get approved for us.
I worked on homework for the rest of day mostly
Tuesday
I normally wake up at 10 am every morning, but I had to wake up at 8:45 am in order to bike over to my car and make my way over to the film school. I rolled out of bed put on some clothes and a hat, and took off to my car.
The other members of the crew had a lot of their own gear , but I felt like we still needed the following:
- Canon 5D Mark 2
- Tokina 24-70mm
- 2 TASCAMs
- 2 XLR Cables
- Lav Mic
- Boom Mic
- Boom Pole
It took longer to get all of the equipment than I had anticipated, so I had to go straight to my class which meant that I didn't have my computer or notebooks or anything else with me. It was fine though because we went over a demo in my AR class, and then we just talked about projects and watched a few demo patches in my Media Installations class.
After lunch, I biked over to me car so I could bring it over to the other side of campus to unload all of the equipment where we were going to start filming. After dropping the stuff off and driving back to my parking garage, I biked back to where the crew was already starting to meet.
We set up the cameras with little difficulty, but the audio was giving us a hard time. After figuring it out, the two different teams broke up and my team started shooting the interview with my co-CA Alyssa. There was one location that was near a bunch of trees and the mics kept picking up the birds that were calling from the branches, so we had to wait a bit for them to fly off.
After we wrapped our interview, we walked over and met up with the other team in the Secret Garden on campus. I shot a bunch of b-roll and managed to get a couple really good clips that I hope end up in the final documentary. At the end of these interviews, I asked if we could take a photo of the whole group and the two dogs didn't really care about the photo so they both ignored the camera completely.
Wednesday
After checking the film equipment back in, I had my Media Literacies and Composition class where we talked about emerge and then tried to make Twitter bots. I said tried because my partner and I could not get our fake email accounts to work when trying to create a new Twitter account. Our teacher told us that we were going to revisit the bots and try to get them to work better next class, so we decided to give up and try again Monday.
I started working on my coding assignment and spent 4 hours trying to get some buttons to move the box away from an image target. Essentially, for augmented reality to work the virtual thing, a box, needs to know where to go in the scene, what the camera sees. For this assignment we were going to be using a printed version of a profile picture (AKA: selfie).
I tried using that first one but computer vision is a really picky thing and there wasn't enough information for the program to create a map of the image. I switched to the second one because I figured it would have plenty of different elements to grab onto.
I was right.
But I couldn't figure out how to make the box move when I pressed the buttons I had on the display. At around this point I checked my email because I needed a break. To my surprise, there was an email from Universatile Music Events about guest list spots for the Keys N Krates show tonight. I had all of my work done, and was already planning to do my soundwalk assignment at 1:00 am, so I went.
The concert was awesome
By the time we got back from the concert it was 1:15ish and I did my soundwalk, turned it in, and went to bed.
Thursday-Saturday
To be honest, I didn't have enough time to write these days and I'd rather continue writing about the current things happening rather than trying to remember and piece together a story. I feel like I might as well sacrifice some days here so the future life updates can be better.
Sunday
I watched an incredible video about an artist JR that was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. JR says "I went from 'I exist' to 'they exist' and I realized the power of that." I think this is beautiful and felt the need to share it.