As of last class, I was happy with the physical appearance of the shapes and illumination of all the panes so I decided this week to test a few different things while I continued drawing the animations for Hard Times.

My original idea with this project was to turn the paneling into an infinity mirror by putting one way film on both sides, however after testing it with some scraps I had I found that the multiple rasters blocked a lot of the light and made it way too busy to focus on any one pattern. In the future if I wanted to make it into an infinity mirror it would come out better if there were only vector shapes (no rasters).

I also experimented with using Adobe Illustrator instead of photoshop which made it much easier to do certain designs, however I found that my workflow in photoshop was a bit faster so I decided to stick with it for now.

As for the actual animation drawing part of the project, I am still making progress, however it is still very slow. It is a slow cycle of drawing a single animation, playing the song back, adjusting the animation, repeat… until I like how it looks, then moving to the next one. I have gotten to the point that I can start copying sections of animations, but it will still take a lot of time to clean up. I am hoping that because MQP presentations are over I’ll have more time this week to finish and polish the song by our final class. I also need to clean up a bit of the wiring to hide the arduino and power cables.

I also switched to using time as a marker in addition to the spectogram because certain sounds are very difficult to locate visually.