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FF – Day 1 – In Closing

Did John Say's Video Game Op. for the beginning of the afternoon block. John's done some great game work but I have to be honest this one was making me sleepy. The Wii Remote peaked my interest as I am in the process of working with OSC and Making Things. I found myself drifting off thinking about what kind of development I could do for my shiny new PS3 and the controllers. Are they truly USB? Could I connect them into the mac and use middleware to talk to flash? Interesting things to ponder. Most of his presentation was about statistics and casual game play. The MIT work with including the blind into the world of gaming was great.

Caught Dave Schroeder's Designing With Sound presentation. Having experience as an audio engineer, I thought this would be an interesting presentation and didn't know what to expect. I was hoping he would do more with the code end of it. Examples of x/y/z effects. Maybe some stuff on the 909 sampling project and doing real-time synthesis in flash, but it was straight up sound design. There were a couple key things he brought up that I'd like to share with you. Many of these are things I new before, but didn't really appreciate as formal terminology and practices.

Types of Sounds:

• On screen – What you see is what you hear in front of you
• Off screen – You hear something outside of your viewing area
• Non-diegetic – A voice over explaining something

Sonic Relationship:

• Sympathetic Relationship – Sound equates to what you are seeing
• Contrasting Relationship – Another and often totally different sound replacing what you would expect to hear
• Abstract/Emotive – The sound, usually a score or passage that sort of captions the visuals. Like a Michael Mann montage

Another interesting thing he mentioned is how the pacing or tempo of the audio can change a persons focus on the visuals. People tend to group things together and what you hear will draw you to movement that matches the audio. Very cool stuff. He also made it clear that planning is key, the power of audio to detract from the visuals, and how to strip down your sound work.

Finally the Film Festival. Kudos to Seb Lee-Delisle getting two mentions and to Carlos for getting the 3D category. I have to say there was some amazing work shown. I have to be honest though. I would have picked different winners for some of the categories.

I wanted to meet up at the after party and say hi to Andy Zupko, but I'm beat… I also had to debug something at the office. Lovely.

All in all it was a good day. No light bulbs went off, other then seeing some great work being done by others. I'm hoping tomorrow and Fr are more code intensive. I was inpsired to do a Papervision 3D sound visualizer using the line class Andy did. Something very organic. I think I'll make it my nod to the Flash Forward experience. So on that note… off to work I go… and bed… T.B.C.