After our Math class I hung around for a little while and copied my resulting 2x22gb files to one of my team mate's external drives to help save her the tedium of syncing up the files herself, as that's just pointless drudge work. My other two team mates didn't seem too fussed on getting copies, they had either synced everything up themselves already or had not yet realised what a tedious time waster that task is. I really kick myself for not using some form of dual clapboard, it's something I'd have just done automatically normally. I then went home to work on the files.
Being 22gb they slow down the system tremendously, and I haven't yet worked out a decent workflow. I did re-render lower quality proxy files @ 2gb each but I don't know how this would fit in an After Effects Dynamic Link workflow. Well, I have some ideas, but perhaps they aren't completely compatible with experimental post production, better for a predefined script where one knows what they are hoping to achieve.
Tuesday, I've stayed home to piece this thing together. My team was to do the same, although 2 members decided to work in class. I find class even more distracting than home personally.
What I'd also have done is thrown ALL files into Adobe Media Encoder first to make them all the same format. I didn't do this at first because I felt re-encoding meant dropping quality. I'm encoding to dv codec, but there are tons of variations of this codec and I'd have to research the whole subject further but it at the moment it seems probably more than good enough for this project.
As a one-time Mac operator, I'd have a workflow where I pre-flighted and normalised files and organised them before even thinking about starting actual work, but that was for print, I haven't fully worked out a good workflow for video editing, and I guess I've sort of approached this with a different mindset from someone working in a production environment.
[a few days have passed, so back to past tense]
Wednesday I had my film pieced together after a sleepless night. I dropped the Dynamic Link-as I go workflow because render times were just too painful. Instead I decided to put the film together then did all of my After Effects work. I also realised rendering out avi files in After Effects sped up the process rather than linking AE files in Premiere. I'd moved back to my windows machine because that has a true x64 version of Premiere installed so potentially ran faster. I discovered that our group was not presenting this morning but tomorrow which was handy because not only had we not made a DVD but I was the only person in the group who'd managed to finish the film.
That night I pieced together a DVD menu video, authored the DVD ready for the rest of the group to drop in their files in the morning, made a video of our concept and us using the equipment and wrote our concept as a small speech for presentation. My team worked on getting their videos finished, and stayed up all night.
Thursday when I got in in the morning, everyone else in my team had issues getting their film completed, 2 members managed to have files ready right at the last moment but I couldn't author them to DVD on time. Despite that our presentation was fairly solid, it was great to have notes to read from.
Once that was over we all went home to finish (start in some cases) our Literature Review and also final bits and pieces for this project, to hand in on Tuesday.
Our Math's lecturer walked us through the basics of Matrices and transformation. The Maths component is something I'm really interested in learning about although I found this lecture quite frustrating for a number of outside reasons. It takes a lot of concentration to understand our Maths lecturer as English is not his first language. This of course doesn't bother me, but that in combination with the fact that half of the class are not interested in maths means that it slowly gets a bit noisy. Which only makes it more difficult to understand. I briefly considered telling my class to shut up or leave I was so annoyed, although this might not have gone down very well. The concepts that we covered were not even difficult and I was familiar with them, and as soon as it seemed we were about to move to the next and more interesting level (rotational transformation of a matrix) it was time to vacate the lecture theatre.
We did however reconvene in another room but did not go back to rotational transformation but a pile of exercises creating golden shapes. This I found tedious but stayed in case we suddenly covered new ground.
I'll look up rotational transformation myself, If I'm right, this is an incredibly interesting topic and one some of my class mates (if anyone in the class reads this... you do??) apparently interested in building 3D games in the future would do well to try to understand, as it's the basis of 3D space in those games.
On the Monday afternoon after the lecture and the Tutorial the fabricators in our group went to the 3D lab to finish the trolley. It only required the camera mounts to be added and there were also less people in the lab so it didn't take very long. I'd seam wielded everything partly because I wanted to make sure the rig was as strong as possible and partly because I just enjoyed wielding. We wheeled it back and on Tuesday afternoon we discussed painting it. Tuesday morning the whole class assembled for presentations of concept. While the Fabricators had been building the rigs last week, the CAD operator and Producer worked together to research and refine our concept and produce a presentation. It was a great separation of talent in our group too I felt, because our fabricators were quite practical people while our presenters are great conceptually. Obviously we are all capable of either and can produce examples of this but I felt our various strengths had been played to somewhat. There were a couple of excellent presentations in particular, one group really nailing the conceptual side very well and will probably also do the same with the practical results, I felt our group was also conceptually strong and I was fairly proud of their presentation - though visibly nervous which is understandable, it was nice for me to be able to sit back and watch all the presentations without worrying about going up myself.
So that afternoon we divided up again, 2 of us to cut a piece of tube that was going to house a lens fitting - a door peephole as a makeshift fisheye lens, while the other 2 bought some spray paint. That afternoon we were going to paint the rig bright red in the 3D lab until we discovered that it was closed for the afternoon.
On Wednesday morning I went to the lab and painted it myself. The paint was quick to dry (20mins) although it might have wanted a few hours to be properly hard. I had intended to bring masking tape and newspaper in with me but didn't (due to forgetting and also due to already having a lot to carry in on the bus...) however the 3D lab had some sort of plastic cling wrap for masking. It wasn't clingy enough though and I got a bit of paint on the tyre. Grr. The paint did a great job of sprucing up the look of the thing and making welding less obvious (we'd decided not to grind it afterwards).
We mounted the cameras and went for our test drive. The process was quite enjoyable even though we received a lot of odd looks and a few comments from passers by, which always mortifies the younger team members in particular. I was the first to push the rig along as we ventured down Queen Street, up to Albert Park, Down Lorn Street and towards Britomart. In Britomart as we descended to the Train terminal and not to anyone's surprise we were stopped by security. This of course gets my - like any resident Aucklander's - temper going, even more so as I felt a telling off coming by the security guard who thought we were all under 20 so could be easily terrorised. I was waiting my opportunity to pounce when a nice manager came along and explained that the Council has instructed them to keep camera's away without prior permission (even though it's a public area) because they want to charge people who do film there (scum). So with that we agreed to go elsewhere.
Outside, one of the cameras which was mini-dvd based had run out of space. Our team member mucked around with it trying to get the test footage off to make space as we hadn't even reached our ultimate destination yet (the wharf) and accidentally erased the whole disc.
After some despondency we got it together and continued to the wharf to film. We got a bit of that footage when the same camera ran out of battery power.
That night I transfered all footage to the computer.
Thursday morning we had an After Effects tutorial. It was mainly housekeeping which is important but possibly lost on some of the class, who were looking forward to knowing how to apply effects to footage - even though that part is relatively simple. In the afternoon we shot more footage and once again I transferred it that night.
Friday we shot even more footage. We'd had a few issues with cameras and we felt the sound wasn't particularly good either. It was an enjoyable day though, we walked around Albert park and various streets. We had the 2 cameras on the rig, plus another camera documenting us and I'd bought my still camera along to document the documenting.
That night I worked on syncing the footage up. It wasn't as simple as it should have been for a few reasons. One was that the mini DVD camera had a loose battery and that had come off a few times. This caused write errors on the disc and also sync issues. Getting the files off the disc wasn't straightforward. Also, power had run out a couple of times and we wound up swapping cameras out meaning footage was spread on multiple cameras. Last of all, so simple and I can't believe I didn't think of it, I should have insisted we write numbers on card and put in front of the cameras at the beginning of shots to number scenes and also produce some sort of sharp sound in order to make sync via audio. Like a clap board. It wound up being quite painful and time-consuming determining what came from where and then getting files synced. I had waved my fingers a few times in front of the cameras at the beginning of shots and had I not done that it would have all been even worse. But there were times that we stopped a camera (it appears) and forgot to do that. Plus it wasn't really enough to sync perfectly, just to get footage roughly in the right place.
I set it all up in Premiere Pro but didn't finish. On Saturday we were to meet up and copy the footage for everyone to use, but I hadn't finished tidying it all up so the nightmare has been shared with the group. The files are also really big, totalling around 60gb. I could have compressed them down with out any noticeable drop in quality - this is after all a 1s year project not some commercial production but I didn't do that.
I also experienced once again the difference between working on my windows machine and on my MacBook Pro. I tend to favour my desktop PC because it sports 2 monitors and more hard drive space, but more and more I find windows pops up issues that you just do not get on a Mac. So I moved my work to my MBP (connected to one of my monitors) and ethernet connected to my PC's storage. I like the UI much better anyway, Expose is a killer app and always has been for me ever since it was first introduced in Panther. This time is was a codec issue, but I have some odd windows services that like to eat CPU time. Anything made by MS usually.
Right now as I write this I'm typing on the PC while the mac renders a complete timeline of one of the camera's footage. Once that is done I might start chopping that up in Premiere and then using the dynamic link feature to flip backwards and forwards to After Effects. I've had to pre-render the timeline as a whole because After Effects didn't like the format of footage produced by one of the cameras. It's a bit of a mish-mash and if I was to do this again I'd probably set up a process of conversion to one single format first.
Back to an Art lecture, we explored the difference between Art as a representation of what we perceive as the truth (what we see) and Art as an abstraction of truth. That is, when art stops becoming a representation of reality and it becomes it's own reality. We explored realism and expressionism and reproductions on truth. It was actually an interesting concept but I'm not doing it justice here. I guess I don't fully comprehend it to the level of being able to break it down into a solid explanation, which is what I'm a fan of doing. As I said right at the very beginning of this blog, if you can't explain it simply, you don't really understand it. Some of the concepts we touch on are a bit up in the air and it's up to us to pursue the subject further using what we've been shown so far. The plan for Math & Art was to spend the entire Monday on the subject but so far we've fallen into the trap of finishing up class then going back to the studio to do more of our Cinematic Flaneur Project. If I ever find the time I will come back here to explain the concept more fully.
So on the Saturday after the Academic writing course, 3 team members met up, the fourth had work. - I never thought I'd envy someone who had a weekend job, how things change.
The plan was to work in Solid Works and build different parts of the rig, though I wasn't sure how easy this would be. We discussed a couple of issues first though. One was whether we could in fact capture infra red footage. Examples that our team mate had found on the net of DIY Infra Red capture just didn't look that interesting. They really looked like pure Black and White rather than heat capture when inspecting the image closely. I hadn't been able to test the cameras yet and did not have the materials required. Also someone in our team had discussed the ideas with family members, and they found it difficult to relate our thermal imaging with the grouping of people and wondered what the point of it all was, which then lead her to not quite believe in the idea so much either.
Seeing as this was possibly our most conceptually aware person not really believing in the idea and the fact that we had no real way at that point in time of determining that what we wanted to do was technically possible without spending a lot of money to get decent results (our research into DIY thermal imaging was not inspiring), we decided to discuss other possible ideas again. It seemed a bit late to be doing this but if we could come up with something better and easier to execute then it was possibly worth it.
After some discussion we bought back the idea of reversing the brief and capturing slightly compromised footage and relying on the audio capture more. One camera pointing skyward and one to the ground. We drew up a little trolley that one could push along that had both camera's mounted to it.
Once we had done this our CAD operator insisted that this would be easy enough for her to draw on her own and we all went our separate ways. I lamented the loss of the original camera rig that I was looking forward to building but it wasn't such a big deal.
On Tuesday we had a printed copy of the plans, there were some details missing but this didn't bother me personally as I felt I was probably going to wind up altering things during production anyway. The idea that one can plan something entirely in Solid Works first is all well and good but it didn't strike me as practical for our group when we'd known the application for less than 2 weeks and our CAD operator has never studied engineering, but I've been building things all my life and had often not worked from detailed plans but from in my head. I like the proper workflow, but it just wasn't going to happen here. The plans were bounced back from the 3D lab with a few comments and so we had to address them. I got out my visual diary and re-drew the plans with added dimensions that would be needed. The second round, we also had the benefit of a Tricycle that we were taking the wheels from. Our CAD operator had found it on Trademe for $5 but had not been able to measure it when making the drawings because it had yet to be picked up.
We resubmitted the plans on Wednesday and there were still minor issues but we were given the go-ahead to work in the 3D lab. When we got there we discovered that one material specified in the plans did not exist as stock (20mm round tubing) so we went back and discussed the options. One option was to replace it with square tubing, but our conceptual group member (AKA CAD operator) had issues with that as over the past couple of days we'd built a concept up and she didn't feel that square tubing fit with the whole theme. I wasn't sure it really mattered too much myself, mainly because I didn't want to go and pay for round tubing when we had perfectly good square tube for free. However our Assistant Fabricator had a solution, her mother worked in a steel mill and she was able to get about 4m of 20mm round tubing for nothing. We just had to wait a day.
On Thursday The Fabricator (me) and the Fab Assistant came in at 9am when the 3D lab opened, hoping to beat everyone else in the class as it could get rather packed. We also did this on Friday. It took 2 full days to do most of the fabrication. I found the process a bit painful. The Lab was full most of that time with the other BCT students and much of the time was spent waiting to use different machines. If the lab had been empty I think I could have churned out the trolley in half a day. And at much better quality. I'd told my team that I could build anything they threw at me and basically talked myself up a bit as that seems to be the modus operandi to get people to have confidence in you (which I find very painful to do as there is a huge gulf between those that say they can and those that actually can yet big talkers always seem to win). When in the lab this made me change my behaviour a little bit for the benefit of onlookers. It's difficult to explain but I guess my normal approach would be to build something (and get it right) in ways that onlookers might flip out over because it would look like I was too gung ho. Because I was in a controlled environment I was more methodical and second-guessing my normal approach. I don't feel that this made me any better but actually worse. There are a couple of parts in particular that don't look like the work of someone who knows how to build things. We reinvented the frame as we went mainly for extra strength and it might have been handy to have a large piece of paper to plan it on at 1:1 scale to use as a template, but we wound up doing it by eye so it's not perfectly square. That said, the result works. The front wheel is a bit wonky but I'm not sure it's noticeable to most casual observers. The wonky nature is a result of being interrupted 3 times while trying to wield it together. Well maybe I'd have messed it up anyway, but interruptions really didn't help much.
Oh yeah, special mention to my co-fabricator, she was both skilled and great to work with. A++ would trade again.
Today we had our first Math lesson in our Mathematics and Art Paper. A new lecturer and we were introduced to some open source software written in Java called C.a.R. C.a.R stands for Compass and Ruler, it simulates whatever you can do with a compass and a straight edge along with more advanced functions. We learnt the 5 axioms of Euclidean geometry which are basically 5 "common sense" rules that no one tries to prove (heavily paraphrased for simplicity):
A line exists between 2 points.
Any line segment can be extended.
A circle consists of one fix point (the centre) and one point that is constant distance from that fixed point.
All right angles are congruent.
Any point outside of a line can only have one line going through it that is parallel to the original line.
From there we constructed parallel lines, right angles and intersections using only a ruler and a compass. Except we did it in C.a.R, not with an actual ruler and a compass. I'd have found an actual ruler and a compass much easier actually. This is all basic technical drawing that I learnt in 4th form. Although in my head a stronger connection was made between this geometry and radians, which is something I ignored when I was at school, not being interested in maths in the slightest. I'm interested these days.
We also touched on the Golden Ratio which is the idea that 1.618....(an irrational number) is an easily calculated and plotted geometrical construction that also happens to look visually pleasing. As such lots of ancient buildings are built to this ratio.
What I've been pondering so far is how Art in the Maths and more widely the Science world seems to be regarded as what I'd call design. There seems to be some attempt to connect the two worlds but it assumes and old definition of Art. I'm really not sure how one can give any mathematical meaning to post modern art unless one was to look at chaos theory or... something. Also everything I have read so far talks about beauty. To me art is not necessarily beautiful by any definition. I don't just mean aesthetically although it seems to me some of the simpler connections are only talking about aesthetics but I also mean in terms of unifying anything. Anyway, while art may once have been about aesthetics, it's certainly not always the case now. Aesthetics is more of an applied art like design, and usually for commercial reasons.
On Tuesday we were to have our concept ready but we hadn't really decided what exactly we were doing. There was a bit of mild conflict (for lack of a better word as there wasn't really any conflict, we were working through our ideas in a thoughtful manner) about what we were trying to say with our film. One of our tutors talked through it with us and in the process I suddenly realised the huge difference between a concept and a technique. One of our group members in particular is very conceptually inclined and our other two members range between conceptual and technical. They are very thoughtful and often raise good points. I'm lean more toward the technical side. I really didn't quite understand the conceptual side until that point, aside from realising that upon presentation of say, HDR footage, saying "because it looked cool" when asked why we did it would not be all that acceptable.
Actually it's a bit disingenuous to say that I don't understand it. It's more that I tend to think that it's all too easy to present a concept and be all arty about it and have up in the air descriptions but in reality it means absolutely nothing. I'm of the opinion that one should if pushed, be able to turn a concept into something with concrete descriptions that anybody can understand if needed or, it's probably not that valid. This is what I found difficult about the Serious Fun project, we started talking about the "falsity" of the cat actually being code... There was something behind it but that language got on my nerves and I wasn't prepared to describe the concepts until I could describe them better. But there was not enough time to get to that point. I realise that I'm probably a bit too much of a solid thinker at times and I'm working on being more conceptual and and creative in a more "artistic" way, but I still cherish my solid foundations though, it keeps me grounded instead if flying into the wind with concepts that I think are art but really mean nothing. If I can join the 2 opposing approaches then I think I'll be... rather clever actually.
Anyway our conceptual thinker is also pretty intelligent and all her previous projects have turned out well so I have a lot of respect for the bits that I didn't quite get and while we discussed our thoughts with the tutor I had a bit of a eureka moment about the whole concept verses technique thing. At this point I started trying to brainstorm actual concepts, but also tried to marry them with some of the techniques so that we could get our project moving to the next step.
I think it was the next day that we decided we all liked the idea of exploring how people group together and also spread out on city streets, and we could depict that with footage that contained a thermal imaging overlay. At first we wanted to explore how people tend to clump together but then realised that was caused by traffic lights and people would spread out to their own personal space as soon as they could.
On Wednesday afternoon, exactly a week after our SolidWorks introduction, we had an advanced Solid Works class only for the CAD people. - But I sat in. I was still having issues with the basics, I had wanted to practice during the week to be ready for the class but had difficulty getting the student licensing to work at home, which it turns out was an IT issue. I picked up what was going on but just lacked knowledge in the small details that allowed me to actually execute the processes. But I'll teach myself in my own time. I want to know it because I have a small personal project that I'd like to complete. I have to build some custom door lock brackets for my car. Once I'd have just fabricated as I went, but I quite like the idea of planning it in detail in Solid Works first.
Our group planned the camera rig, me drawing and all of us working on details. I was really quite enjoying it, just the dynamics and how our group worked together. So THIS is how groups are supposed to work!
On Friday afternoon a few members of the class had enrolled in a 2-day course on Academic Writing. As it got closer a lot of us were wishing we hadn't bothered as it was interfering with our studio time but I really enjoyed the first day. There were a few small details I learnt that I didn't know, like do not use abbreviations (like "don't" for example) ever. Other things I sort of knew but they were mapped out systematically so that they clicked more. We also learnt how to read actively which is really handy as for this literature review in Maths & Art I'll have to read 20-50 different texts. That is a lot to read if I was to try to read the way that I'd normally read a novel.
The Academic Writing course went through to Saturday afternoon, and after that 3 of our group of four met up to draw the Solid Works drawing, however something else happened instead. Which I'll tell you about in the next instalment.
Our second lecture for Mathematics and Art was an overview of Art History. We had been given some reading material in preparation for our literature review and it occurred to me that understanding the history of Art may be rather crucial to understanding any further reading on the subject. Once again a topic that has always interested me but I have never formally (or informally) studied it. I didn't really know how to start, it seemed that there were so many movements in the last couple of hundred years and any time that I've ever read descriptions of different movements it's almost like another language. And they always reference each other. How are you supposed to learn about anything that defines itself by reference to other parts of itself? It's like looking up in a dictionary the word "design" and getting "a product of creativity" then looking up "creativity" and getting "a part of design".
But it turns out that it's really not all that complicated and the hard bits are hard for most people and it all comes under a broad definition anyway. The very definition of Art has changed with the Post-modern movements, and I'm not sure where I sit currently opinion-wise. Art has been a trade, a science and a creative pursuit. It's also more recently been commentary. But Art can now be just about anything. I'd go further into this but I'm currently developing my thoughts on the subject.
I've been a bit shell shocked all week and consequently this is a week behind, so I have some catching up to do.
Tuesday was the start of Studio 2, the paper that follows Studio 1. We started with a small into and exercise replicating the bullet time effect best known from the movie The Matrix:
It's made by placing a series of still cameras around the subject being filmed, so each one takes a frame and triggers the next one to take a frame, giving the effect of the camera dollying around the subject at a speed that renders the subject almost motionless. The cameras are all pretty much green screened so they are easy to paint out in post production and the bullet effect is added. Use of this effect started a trend where everything from all the latest terrible MTV music videos to road safety commercials attempted to emulate it (using different and cheaper techniques I assume).
To do this exercise, we broke into four large groups of 12-15 and pooled out Macbook Pro webcams together. The lack of control of the webcams meant that results were not spectacular but we got the idea.
It was then on to our main brief.
To conceive, design and fabricate a piece of equipment that holds 2 (or more) video cameras and capture images in a way we otherwise couldn't and produce a unique image quality. The video is of an experimental quality and non-linear narrative, and based on observations of the city. We had to get into groups of 4 and decide on our roles: Fabricator, Fabricator Assistant, CAD operator and producer.
A friend of mine who I haven't worked with before found me and 2 other people and we formed a very promising group that I was quite pleased with. None of us have worked together before.
For the rest of the week we did research and brainstorming of possible ideas, reading supplied texts, and browsing suggested links.
We came up with a number of ideas, a few of my favs at the beginning were 3D capture, using the cross-eyed method. That is, capturing 3D using the usual 2 cameras, and then splitting the screen, with the left eye footage playing on the right side and the right eye footage playing on the left side. The viewer crosses their eyes and after a bit of adjustment can usually settle seeing the footage in 3D. Here are some examples. Other possible methods of 3D viewing would have been using the red/blue glasses or perhaps other methods that involve special displays, but that would be creating inconvenience for our audience. Another idea was to capture in HDR. This would require more than 2 cameras and possibly 2-way mirror glass or just clever mounting to minimise the difference in angle. We then would have a few options with the resulting footage. One is to layer it on a timeline in Adobe After Effects and be able to move between exposures depending on where the camera was pointing or to tone map it to a single and striking image. Some examples of HDR still photography are here. HDR is usually done with still photography with non-moving objects because it takes multiple exposures merged into one shot. Another option, purely because the brief mentioned that we could use existing skills was to run the HDR in a MaxMSP environment and give the viewer control over exposure. Another idea was to capture images in infra-red and/or UV as well as visible light and super impose in an elegant way. Yet another idea was what got dubbed drunk-cam, which was a variant of another group member's idea. Two cameras, one's movement controlled by the other, but the hinges would be loose so that the two images would be out of sync whenever the camera was moved. The idea was to capture film that cannot just be emulated in post production with one camera. We had quite a few more ideas, what was interesting was the different angles from which we approached the problem. As one can see, my ideas were all technical and about technique. Other group members, one in particular approached the problem from a conceptual point of view, which at first I had trouble understanding. This was actually quite brilliant because I felt that our group is composed of really bright people but with totally different skills and approaches, and we all have respect for each other's thoughts.
The project has a time table and the first week we were to basically research ideas. We also had a couple of interesting tutorials. On the Wednesday we were introduced to Solid Works which is 3D CAD software, I'd heard of it before and was looking forward to finally being acquainted with it. You can apply real world physics to your creations and do cutaway views and then sent the results to normal plans or even 3D printing. It seems like one could very rapidly produce working models although I stumbled a bit on some basics for a few different reasons, some out of my control so I'll be doing some self-directed learning at some point. I'm not the CAD operator in the group so I didn't feel too much pressure to get it right but I wanted to be available to help our group's CAD operator should she have an issues, it's quite an undertaking to build a model in software you've known for barely 2 weeks, which is how long we had to get that far.
The next day we had an introduction to After Effects, it turned out that this was meant to happen much later but it was interesting nonetheless. It turned our group off the 3D idea though as part of the tutorial was about compositing 3D footage together, which meant that now the idea was public domain. Also, a year ago doing something in 3D would have made for an exciting, novel and interesting project, now, with Avatar, 2D to 3D converted movies everywhere you turn and every TV manufacturer jumping on the 3D bandwagon, it's just not as mysterious. I was still mildly interested, but it definitely had lost it's "coolness" factor.
The next day we went to a re-induction to the 3D fabrication labs (not to be confused with the previous paragraph's 3D), this time in more detail. We were introduced to the cutting, bending, drilling and lath machines among other things.
I'd started to draw variations of what the camera rig should look like, taking into account the feedback I've had in the past of not being visual enough. Well not on paper anyway, I need to start drawing more what goes on in my head. This will also help me get my drawing ability back what I seem to have lost somewhat.
Maths and Art is one of our papers this semester and it looks to be pretty intense. It replaces Intro to Creative Technologies. Our first class, we were given a run down of what to expect and our assignments. I'm going to keep Maths and Art as a separate entry from the studio entries so that it can be documented properly as this paper is going to be quite an exploration.
The aim of the paper is is to develop an understanding of both Maths and Art and explore interdisciplinary creative practice between them.
We'll explore history and various contexts of art and basic concepts in maths.
We'll also be doing a lot of research - reading of texts from libraries and academic resources and honing our academic writing skills too. Aside from the lectures and tutorials (and own research), we will have a literature review - That is a culmination of our research efforts, an Essay - Our own arguments based on the review and a Practical Project which I can't really go into yet and I'm a bit hazy on it.
We also had an outline of the rest of this semester and it looks both daunting and exciting and interesting. This semester instead of 4 Studio projects, we will be given 2. They will be broader scope, and we'll be able to use previously learnt skills but we will also be learning new skills and software in order to complete the projects. There will be more to them but we'll have more time as there are only 2.
The 3rd paper, Design and Data Structures will be like the short but intense Programming for Creativity, this time we'll be learning C and writing an application for an iPhone. Because of this (and the fact that I'll be busy anyway) I'll hold off from further self-directed learning in that subject (I might revisit it at some point though). Instead I might dedicate my spare moments (not that I'll really have any) to some more PHP learning and mySQL, because I have a website idea that I want to execute, and I'd kind of like to either write the site from ground up or know enough to pull apart an existing CMS and customise it to my needs - I doubt there is a CMS off the shelf to do what I'm planning. Also I've been trying to watch one video a night (failing half the time though) from Khan Academy on Mathematics. The plan is to work my way through all the videos on various maths subjects and become rather good with maths.
Footnote. You have got to be kidding me! The sidebar puts this label "10" directly under 1. Yes I know how that works and why, I just expected better. Spoilt by current generation OS's (even Windows finally) that order numbered lists correctly. I need to fix it soonish...