And another 3 weeks bites the dust… Wow. Week 6 was our lightning round for Round 3 of Building Virtual Worlds. We got Week 7 off from BVW just because why not I guess! And then now we’re onto Week 8, which is the beginning of our storytelling round. I’ll be caught up at where we currently are in the semester, finally, phew!
Since my last post, I have managed to not quit cold turkey on life drawing and actually attended all 4 sessions, which ended up being super fun and led me to hang out more with my current circle of friends! The instructor also said I improved since the first session (I hope I didn’t give sleep up for nothing!) and I’m hoping to keep up the habit by maybe drawing 20 minutes every day or so just because why not. There was a spice competition that happened at the ETC. I finally made it to Kennywood amusement park only to not have any guts to go onto any of the rollercoasters. During my week off, I finished the netflix series La Casa de Papel, which is a Spanish TV show about a big money heist. It was a thrill to watch, the plot is just really awesome, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen something that pull my heartstrings like that. And the cast in the show is simply gorgeous, from the way they speak Spanish to the way they act and have their own personality.
Round 3 was actually rather interesting. By interesting, very chaotic, lots of disagreements that doesn’t necessarily ended up working out. Sometimes teamwork doesn’t exactly work out like how you desired to. I tried to spin everything in a positive way since a lot of things were behind me, but I felt like being honest would be liberating because I have been feeling stressed about hiding my issues.
Since it was a lightning round, we had to quickly decide on a lot of things, such as which platform we want to use, what kind of games we want to do, etc. After a “quick” discussion we decided on Kinect, a platform that tracks body part positions. We decided that we are going to a temple run inspired game in which the player needs to pose accordingly in order to utilize Kinect’s functionality. The original plan was to have three different set-up of scenes, including a countryscape, cityscape and a forestscape. Accordingly, I wrote three parts of music that I thought was upbeat and fitting for the game and was done with that on Saturday. I was told that we “might” do a multiplayer game that will involve two players playing in different scapes. Sure, but I am already half way done writing the music at that point, and I decided not to change anything yet.
Now, I decided to take Sunday off since I felt like I deserved a day off, and also David was heading out of town on Monday. I was walking around the Heinz History Center (which is pretty interesting if you haven’t been yet) when I got a text confirming that we will be doing two players playing in different scapes. Sure, I decided that I could merge the two soundscapes that they are doing together, since it is only three combinations. I will utilize elements from the music that I already wrote, right? Seems simple enough and still fun trying to finesse those elements. So here goes another 3 clips of music, and this time, unified tempo and a drumbeat before the melody comes in, and after the melody ends for 20 seconds each. I confirm with one of the programmers that I will be doing that at noon, when I learned that we will not be doing the multiplayer thing anymore. Sure, I thought, but I’ll perfect the music that I already wrote. Our artist makes a cut scene at 6 PM, I thought it is super cute but I can’t possibly book a slot six hours before a project is due in the sound booth, so instead of writing my own music, I found some sounds in the randon library. As this is happening and as the artist is teaching me how to use Photoshop again, our programmer lets us know that only one of the background music tracks gets to be in the music. Well, I thought, this simply doesn’t make any sense having sheep barking in the background music that I wrote for our country scape while this person is running through woods and cities. Well, turns out our obstacles that our guest needs to be going over are sheep, so it sort of make sense – right? I didn’t know that the obstacles were going to be sheep. Confused, but not wanting to make the programmer already more stressed than he is already, we went into the final demo.
I thought I did a pretty darn good job knocking out music quickly until I met up with the TA who was generous enough to be offering a feedback session for us. He immediately pointed out the problem with the random sheep noises (I got to admit, they were just noises in randon that i didn’t single out when the sheep spawns on a map) and how that will confuse people, as well as several problems with the videos that are on my portfolio currently. I did went into the workshop fairly confidently and left fairly discontented. I think I did need a wake-up call to be scrutinizing myself more. Which added onto the pile of self, daily scrutinizing that already happens on a daily basis. Vital, maybe not healthy but yes.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Here’s a video of the demo. I will try to fix some musical elements for a better version on my portfolio.
So I went into my break from BVW in a fairly distraught state, not only because of my experiences with my music but also witnessing one programmer calling the other programmer that did the majority of the work all kinds of names, after the demo and after everything is due. It was hard to hear for sure and it was difficult because it reminded me of what I might have been able to do, to be more there, to have communicated better, to have spoke less Chinese while we are communicating. If I had one more week, I think this would’ve turned out to be a much better project, but also so does everyone else’s. I felt like I was at fault for not pushing certain things but I am also trying to not drive everyone crazy. I will try to work harder to finesse this balance next time, which brings me to talk about round 4 soon.
ETC also does this thing where we have to rank our teammates at the end of each round. You can’t rank two people in the same place – someone needs to be last. During mid semester and in the final, each student will get a code name. The rankings that each student got will be released, but only in the form of code names instead of real names. Getting rankings for things has been something that I haven’t experienced since high school, where everybody’s ranking in every single subject will be known to everyone. It was interesting to see, because some people are consistently in the bottom and everybody was trying to guess who that person is. Ironically, I scored bottom 10 on Hours Works, but did fairly okay on Efficiency and Quality of Work. I guess it all make sense, kind of. I came to more peace with it towards the end after people has walked me through how the ranking works, and also after looking more closely to it.
It was really good that we all went out to eat together in round 4 in the beginning. It was cathartic to hear how everyone else had some of the same problems and how we are currently on the same page, and also some expectations that we want from each other. Everything felt like it was more in order compared to the last three rounds for now. Round 4 is storytelling round. We are trying to do a spy story that takes place during the cold war, with a red and blue side. Our platform is “The CAVE”, which is a room that has three projector screens that brings the guest to an immersive environment. I haven’t written any music yet, but I have listened to more spy music today than the rest of my life perhaps. It is still early in the round making process, but not early. I will start composing more music later today, and I am fairly excited after listening to soviet marches incessantly.
Okay, that’s enough talk about BVW. I have also been really enjoying Visual Story actually. Maybe some people view it as a nuisance where we do have to get out of the ETC to film stuff, but I genuinely enjoy it. It is one place where my OCD editing tendencies isn’t frowned upon, and I could experiment as I like with the videos. So I created a video with the music that I haven’t used for BVW to do one of our solo assignments, which is a montage editing exercise:
Visual Story Montage Edit assignment. Background Music composed by me. Footage provided by EditStock.
We had to do another team assignment this week (the professors and the upperclassmen originally led us to believe that it would be a 48-hour assignment like years before). We came up with the idea and shot the footage during the weekend, and the editing of the video spanned out to the week, with each of us taking on a scene to edit, except for Zoltan and Jim who edited one scene together. Ram worked on the script, Issac worked on some more green screen effects, and Jim designed the logo for Zoltan games. I did some final mastering on the video and added some background music tracks. I thought it was much more fun to edit because using someone else’s work is less frowned upon, and it is more about knowing where to put thing instead of having to create all of your own things, although that is fun too.
Filming on main campus. My mom told me to take more pictures of the main campus while I’m there so there it is.
Jim filming for Visual Story assignment while on the 58 bus
Robotics Institute @CMU
Team Assignment – Final Video!
So all the things that I mentioned briefly without going too much in detail in the beginning of this blog post… So ETC’s Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) held a spice challenge. In order to win, the participant has to finish the hot food fast enough. Our winner is the tech TA Shawn who “casually” started flipping through Wechat while he is eating, and claimed he eats the double spicy ramen that is used in the second round of the challenge “for lunch all the time”. Kudos to you kid, and all the other Indian kids that says 88,000 SHU (Scoville Hot Units, which is the hotness of the ramen, which I think is approach my limit) is nothing. We also had another TA who said that he puked in the bathroom from eating the ramen and was crying when he is done. Well, I guess he’s not going to eat that jar of spicy sauce that he got as a gift.
The winner’s gift. I bet if a droplet is given to me in any of my classes I will immediately wake up.
That’s right, I decided that it is time to bring some color back to this blog. During my week off, I decided it is time to go fulfill my milk tea crave since I’ve gotten to Pittsburgh, so I hopped on a cab with two of my friends and came to the Kung Fu tea truck by UPitt and sat around Schenley park. I sent my mom a picture, and she jokingly said “looks like the prisoners are allowed out for air today huh”.
Kung Fu Tea. I firmly believe soft and chewy bobas are good for you, like Guinness, but better.
So David and I went to the Heinz History Center, which tells a lot about Pittsburgh’s history from around the Civil Wars (maybe even before that) to their steel industry times to nowadays, the sports team, the glass industry, the artifacts throughout Pittsburgh that told stories. The History Center is named after the great grandson of the guy who founded Heinz Ketchup apparently, and there is an exhibition featured in there for the upcoming 150th anniversary for the brand. It was pretty cool to see their development worldwide for Heinz, including in China and elsewhere.
Exhibition at the Heinz History Center – big ketchup bottle
Glass exhibit @Heinz History Center. Guess which way we need to go from here.
Last but not least, Kennywood was a blast! They have a special Halloween themed night, and I mind you not it is not meant for the weakly spirited. There are a bunch of people who dressed up as clowns and associated Halloween characters that will try to spook you while you’re walking through a thickly fogged tunnel. A good amount of haunted houses and outdoor places are set up for tourists that might just make it through the night…
With Shuqi & Evelyn, my artist friends from ETC! The merry-go-round is giving off a spooky vibe with the fog around it.
Sky Rocket Roller coaster – reminds me of the Cyclone in Coney Island
Last but not least, I found a good way to keep myself sane in the bullpen is to get some plants to brighten up my workplace! I got an orchid from Aldi, as well as a succulent plant from Home Depot. I think they like the bullpen! We also often have very pretty sunsets around the river where we see Birmingham bridge.
My orchid and el Día de Muertos succulent!
Sunset at the ETC. One more reason why we should move our eyes away from the computer occasionally.
I’ll probably bring an update when this round is over! A storytelling round should be fairly interesting for a sound designer. With the feedback from last time, I think I’ll be able to construct music more effectively from now on. Fight on!