thanks | download project | my rambling
Cody Sandahl, for writing the program that made all this possible, and doing it in just a couple of days.
Keith, Dean, Cody, Chris, Tara, Erica, Jenny, Viola, Dave, Benny, Sarah, Whitney, Chanda, & Phil for agreeing to ramble into a microphone
This program only runs on Windows 98/Me/2000/XP. Bug Cody for Mac compatibility. You also must have the DivX mpeg video codec and DirectX 8.0 or higher. Download the zip file first, and try to run April02.exe (the program file). If it doesn't work, try installing DivX and/or DirectX. (DirectX 8.2 comes installed with Win XP)
tfaa.zip (my project, 72 mb)
DivX codec (700 kb)
DirectX (from Microsoft's website: choose Direct X from first dropdown box & your operating system from second)
To play the soundscape, double click the April02.exe file. Each person you click on will interrupt the person before them & start talking. If you hold down Ctrl while clicking, each person continues talking even after the next person has started. Note: Try clicking on ceilings, tv monitors, etc.
My rambling about this project:
This project started out as a the soundscape for a completely computer-animated music video. It somehow ended up as an interactive piece where we listen in to the thoughts of people in an airport. Seems like a logical progression to me, but I will explain anyway: First off, in the music video I planned to have the main character talking about his life… basically talking to himself. His conflicting “selves” continually argue for/against any reasons for living. At the beginning of the video, I wanted the main guy to be walking down a street looking at other people. Then I decided he should wonder what the other people were thinking & what their reasons for living were. It then progressed to actually hearing each person’s thoughts on life as the main character walked by. I thought this was an interesting idea, so then I was just going to have the main guy sitting at the back of a bus listening to peoples’ thoughts. This would have been confusing though, because it would be hard to tell whose thoughts you were listening to, so the next idea was to shoot a first-person video where some character walks around and looks at people while you listen to his thoughts. When he focuses on someone, that person takes control of the first-person camera and walks, you hear their thoughts, they focus on someone else… etc. I really liked this idea, but it was too much video based – everything revolved around someone seeing someone else. So then I was sitting in the airport waiting to pick up a friend whose plane had been delayed. And I just sat there watching all the people walk by, & I found myself really wondering what each person was thinking about, where they were going, if they had someone to go home to, if they had a home at all, etc, etc. So that idea became the final project.
The final product could certainly be better: over 50 people walk past the camera in the three minutes of film I kept, finding 50 people willing (and able) to spout off random thoughts into a microphone is very, very difficult. With a little looking, you’ll notice that several people share the same voice as they walk around. Most of them at least have some pitch shifting, but a few are quite obviously the same voice talent. Also, the program displaying the video is not perfect… the boxes defining where you can click on people do not always perfectly cover their entire body.
That said, this is by far the coolest project I’ve worked on in quite a long time. Resident computer guru Cody Sandahl learned a new programming tool and built a program that could run video, let users click on people, make these people talk based on when, where and how you click on them – not to mention that he did this in well under a week. At least 15 people let me take time out of their day to talk to no one about nothing. And the MPs at the airport didn’t bust me for filming random scenes in the terminal. Out of that, we end up with this project.