Upon receiving the project I was very unsure of what I was supposed to do both conceptually and on the programming side. I just couldn’t get my head around how I could relate to the film with a piece of clothing that would be creative but also sensible and user friendly. During the brainstorming process I went through a variety of ideas and ultimately I decided that I definitely did not want to recycle my entire short film as I thought it would lead me down a very boring one way street of retelling the same story and it did not leave me much room to explore and expand upon my ideas. Instead I decided early on that I wanted to convey the same message as the film but from a different perspective. In our short film we had four gangsters as the main characters. We portrayed them as hardcore criminals and in general, just bad men. But the film did not show how they strayed so far from being innocents to becoming murderous tyrants. And this is where my idea was born. I wanted to show the audience that we all can fall victim to the same path as these men have taken. To do this I decided I would place 2 videos over the top of each other, one video playing a dark scene of crime and drugs and the other playing a video of innocent children. On top of this was played audio with children talking about their aspirations in life of what they wish to accomplish and achieve. The track ‘bad world’ was also played over the top to generate a mood of sadness which is also what our short film tried to convey. With the press of a button on a petal you could browse through different audio tracks and different contrasts of children and crime over the top of each other. In the end I did decide to use a small section of our film that was during the cemetery scene when the gangsters were discarding roses towards the grave of their loved one that was murdered. This was done because just like in the short film, it represents the loss of innocence, each rose discarded shows that the 4 gangsters have given up the last thing that gave them any sense of humanity.
When each petal is pressed on the rose it shows a snap shot of each rose being dropped at the grave. This all relates back to the final video that is displayed when the 5th petal is pushed. The video show a man in a body bag being zipped up over his head. At the same time, a video is faded over the top of petals that are falling the ground along with a rose that has been stripped of all its petals instead of children playing. This is done to show that the lifestyle they lived has evidently killed them, just like in the short film where the gangster’s lifestyle of crime killed red riding hood, representing the gradual decay of human life. The metaphor of the rose is used throughout the film for the exact same reason as the videos of the children. It contrasts something as horrible as death with something as beautiful as a rose which also relates back to the underlying themes of red riding hood in regards to rebirth and the loss of innocence. I encountered many problems along the way to the completion of my project that I had to overcome. The main problem was with MAX MSP itself. I never had an idea in concrete and because I didn’t have a solid idea to expand on, it was very hard to start programming what I wanted to accomplish. I originally started with a clock, so that when the second hand ticked it would create connections at each second and in turn activate something on MAX MSP. Evidently I didn’t have enough connections to do this and I realized that it wasn’t very interactive or relevant to my short film, so I decided the best idea was to go with the rose as not only did it relate to the film but it was easy to use, straight to the point for first time users, and allowed me to program what I wanted without the constraints of a ridiculously designed item of clothing that had no purpose. From here I started the video side of my presentation using MAX and Jitter. Originally I wanted to run 4 different windows within 1 window using jit.scissors but this used a lot more CPU power and every time I tried to run my program it crashed my laptop so I was forced to simplify it down into one jit.window. Because of this I had to make major changes a day before the presentation but overall I think I managed to convey the idea I wanted to even with one jit.window being used.
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