aram’s blog

Funny Game is Austrian horror film from 1997 directed by Michael Haneke, who also did a remake version of same title in U.S. The movie is full of horrifying scenes based on what two psycotic young men are constantly terrorizing an well-off family. The second U.S. version was a shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor with different actors and language.

When I watched the first one almost ten years ago, because of many disturbing visuals and context, this movie remained so strongly in my memory, then U.S remake version caught my attention again. My expectation grew with fairly ’strong’ actors like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. I thought, as the title itself, ‘funny’ because same director did remake(or remix?) in U.S. I watched it and disappointed mainly from what I have seen from Michael Pitt’s performance. I would be more lenient if this was a play in theater of the original movie.

This disappointment made me think of making my own version of ‘remix’ that shows supremacy of the original version, and it requires the sacrifice of U.S. version. Technically, I wanted to put the original one on top layer implying it’s better, and ghosted-out(by lower opacity) U.S. version should be the bottom layer.

I did series of overlapped-footages that shows two opaque layers of different version of movies. First I extracted four important episodes from the whole movie (a young man borrowing four eggs, two men imposing the family end up breaking the husband’s knee, the lady being forced to find her dead dog, and the lady being forced to say a prayer), then play them at the same time.

Funny Games - Remix from Aram Chang on Vimeo.

While first remix shows almost matching position of different movie’s actors in frames, in this ‘dead-dog’ remix I found that two ladies are in different space creates more interesting, playful view-point especially when two are not overlapped, but in different scale - one looks tall while the other looks like a midget. Except very last scene with the dead dog found from the car, two ladie’s wandering around (by each villain’s ‘cold - hot’ sign) seems (to me) very ‘funny’.

FunnyGames_Dog from Aram Chang on Vimeo.

Viewing these series of remix in effective way was more challenging for me, than the remix itself.  Like I did last week for Character assignment, I could have used multiple LCD screens available on hallway, but I wanted to explore further to give proper feeling to the audiences - delivering disturbing (because the movies are meant to be disturbing) and spooky atmosphere. Therfore, I ended up installing projectors in the dark corner of Japanese room. Was this successful… I doubt that. Showing former version of remix at the same time only created more confusion, despite my pure intension to providing more perspective.

Why couldn’t I simply come up with something like this?  I believe this is a great remix …

Some articles and stories about animal’s mental disorder intrigued me to look back when I painfully decided to fix (castration) my cat several years ago. Back then, I was worried what will happen to my cat knowing that castration could be a cruel thing to him, erasing his ‘identity’ so there will be no more territorial pissing or any hostile behavior which means convenient for people, not for his sake.  And after he was castrated, I realized that it should have been done earlier if I wanted him to be a complete ‘indoor type’ cat, not a wild one. He still moans a lot in night time, and does recognize a cat doll that my wife bought for him implying it’s his wife. Only thing that has been changed ever since is no more territorial pissing at every corner to corner.

I believe that he’s still a cat, but his identity has been blurred now he’s ‘disturbed’ cat, not fixed-one.

What if he thinks himself a human-being? This seems possible for me because my cat and I have been living together for several years and main ‘character’ he has seen in his limited world is me (or my wife).

So, I experimented that what it feels like a being a cat, wearing a mask that I created, and socks on both hands.

Character_MasterVid_CatMan from Aram Chang on Vimeo.

Character_CatToy from Aram Chang on Vimeo.

I did a comic that consists of three stories crossing to show more than one ending sequence to the audience. The subject was ‘Tony Montana‘ from the movie Scarface, who is becoming almost insane in the particular scene that I chose to use.  Since this isn’t about re-creating or ‘just’ cartooning one of my favorite movies, I decided to tweak the story by grabbing one famous(very!) line - “Say hello to my little friend!” where the story begins.

Intended flow was that the audience to read

1. left vertical story line first, move onto right side one following by
2. the ‘bridge’ strip which consists of two identical ‘pause’s in center, then
3. view the third story.

And each strip should tell you following stories

1. Left vertical line: Tony gets angry (for what happened before) then yells at the cuban mobs (outside of the door), there’s no response but a cat’s moan.
2. The bridge line: An intended ‘pause’ by cloning same cuts of Tony pointing his gun at the door. Finally he hears ‘Hola’ from the cuban mob outside and feels embarrassed by.
3. Right vertical line: Cuban mobs waiting for the right moment to burst in, gathering more crew around the door area. Then they hear loud “Say hello!” from inside and respond saying ‘hola’. The door blasts out by angry Tony’s gunshot, casualties, and there’s Tony looking down them and saying ” I said ‘Hello’(not any other languages?)”.

Feedback from class: I knew that the first one would be ‘why not ‘z’ axis’? which means, this comic lacks of three dimensional aspect. I started off thinking about making comics in 3D form even before brainstorming about the story, however, creating comic itself(in rather conventional way such as drawing and putting it in the square cell box) seemed priority that I should spend more time. And… I ended up respecting all reference comics from online and spending my lifetime to mimic them as I could. I think it was a good practice to understand, or at least experience comic drawing skill.

Besides this, more powerful and unexpected one was that many of class didn’t quite undestand how story goes. And some details such as sweating with darkened face wasn’t comprehensible.

Initially, it seemed hard to connect ‘weather’ and anything from ‘me’ whether it is personal or not. Once I decided to go with ‘personal’ direction, I managed to come up with the way to connect a possibly interesting habit of me and weather - shoes and weather.

People do care what to wear depending on the weather every day.  I don’t wear any mesh sneakers when it’s rain or snow. This simple ‘policy’ made it possible to keep all sneaker collections I’ve treasured in nice and clean shape, lasting longer than typical longevity of ‘just’ sneakers.

Map consists of three visual elements - a bottom of sole graphic for a map, weather icons on each directions, and geometric dots from the legend, that indicate each specific model of the sneakers.

From my understanding of ruleset, I tried to include as less letters as I could. I was simply afraid of letting me making a mind map, rather than a weather map.

Feedback:

1. No one asked why I named the title “Air Temperature Pattern”. The answer is, that I felt like word-playing implying “Air” is also Nike Air. Many of the sneakers I put on the legend are Nike Air Max series from late 80’s. I thought they really look like “pattern” when grouped, also have something to do with “temperature”.

2. Ramona made an important comment. I wanted to remember it exactly, so I asked her after class then I forgot what she exactly said! (a shame…) She pointed out that the way I explain the map is interesting because I sort of ‘reverse’ the reason why I discriminate certain shoes.

3. Sanjay immediately recognized almost whole thing including my intention, concept, and Nike-madness.

4. Hulya said that I didn’t seem to be a person who could collect that many shoes, never (in the elevator while we’re taking break).

5. Again, Sanjay sharply point out that he never saw me wearing some shoes in the legend - that’s true, because I also have a group of ’school sneakers’ in my mind. You won’t see me wearing all of them from the legend.

6. Alberto asked me if I cared less Asics Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 than any other because he found it on relatively ‘bad’ weather region. Knowing him wearing Onitsuka Tiger often, this seemed toughest question for me. I love them, but they don’t fit me well as much as Nikes do. And most importantly, weather dictates what I should wear!

thesixtyone is a browser- based game that turns music listening into an interactive adventure:

* earn experience points for finding cool music before other people do

* unlock a diverse set of achievements as you play

* level up and gain new skills to flex your influence in the community

thesixtyone is an experimental game that transforms listening to new music into a fun, massively multiplayer adventure.

Despite the incredible wave of creativity that’s happening in music, most people have a difficult time overcoming their underlying “musical inertia” — why bother with the typical tediousness of music discovery when you can fall back into the comfortable familiarity of your iTunes collection?

Tired of seeing great music fade into obscurity, we wondered if we could harness our experience designing video games to make something that could challenge music geeks and attract average people to the exciting frontiers of new music.

Since I was moved by Newtworked Cat from Tom’s book - Making Things Talk, I’ve always wanted to create something fun(ctional) thing for my beloved cat - Hani. Hani is four-years-old male cat, slightly overweighted because both of me and my wife have been too soft to spoil him. When he’s ‘talking’, that usually means more food even though he already had enough. Imagine your cat leading you to where his food jar is locked looking back couple times to check if you’re still following him - it’s almost impossible for me to turn him down feeding ‘a little bit more’ when he is being cute like that.

However, I decided to come up with something beneficial for him while we’re gone and he’s alone at home. No more excessive fat, Hani!

Parts:

• 1 Arduino Board
• 1 Bread Board
• 1 Force Sensor Register
• 1 Servo Motor
• 1 Empty plastic container
• 1 Cat food container holder

Code:

I referred the code from physcomp wiki - Servo Motor part.  My device doesn’t require complicated trimming of servo motor control, yet. This means most of codes are not edited.

Senario:

1. The cat sits on the pad which contains a force sensing register attached underneath.
2. 1 triggers a servo motor to run
3. 2 opens the hatch of food bin

The amount of the food can be controlled by adjusting servo motor’s angle.

video

To work continuously in related subject from midterm project - Tree Map, I did several graph visualization on Processing.

First, I attempt to create a simple graph with few nodes. My personal interest of movies has become the content of this graph, either movie title or name of the actor, director are shown in each node. Again, most important thing was not to show a beauty of floating text boxes, but to depict the ‘relationship’ between each word. In this example, people can see how James Cameron and his movies hatch actors who can be related to different movies.

Second images shows a ‘mess’ when dealing with a large number of data, later on these nodes+text combinations will become small sized ellipses.

Before taking a further step to utilize xml data parsing, I attempted pulling up data from my local hard drive. As a result, it shows segments of words in one of my .doc file ( I specified this file to show ‘text’ data into nodes rather than only specifying a folder. That would show a meaningless data.)

Finally, after several polishing on the visual part of the code, it shows following visualization with a kind of ‘halloween’ color scheme. It might look ‘pretty’ in a way, however, I am not fully satisfied with this result which could be meaning ‘all substance but no meaning’. This is, also, the main thing that I learn from this project. Creating data-visualizing isn’t that difficult, especially with all dynamic sources around. However, taking further step in order to make your visual more meaningful could be totally different thing. In code-wise, I know what I am lacking of- utilizing more dynamic data type. Parsing xml data would be a good example.

More refined version is the image shown below. It took me some time to figure out how to command ‘count’ to size the ellipse, and for the interaction, removing rollover and let some relatively large ellipses with more word frequency stay as they are when applet running.

aram_simonstabs_3

This game will have two players with two monitors in center facing each player. One player starts game by stabbing the space between fingers at any sequence, then ‘challenger’ should mimic the sequence exactly. In case any mistake was made by the challenger, game will be over.

That’s it. Simple, but rather than ‘following’ the typical rule of five finger fillet, players can create their own rule in very similar way of playing Simon Game. In Simon Game, player should ‘remember’ the sequence of four different colored buttons highlighted and replay it. As number goes higher, the player will have trouble remembering all sequence then make a mistake, game is over.

In fabrication, main platform will be made of wood to create a ‘table’ (this is because knife-skill is played on either a chopping mat or table(like Bishop in Alien2), copper mat will be placed for making scoring areas, Ipac+USB to create keyboard output.

1) What are the three big problems that you expect to have during the production? How will they affect your timeline schedule? How do you intend on solving them up-front?

• Flash! Although what I am planning to build in Flash seems ’simple’, I expect that completing Flash movie files will be the most time-consuming work among others. Therefore, I should put more hours to figure out two-interface for two-players and more complicated scoring system in Flash first, then move to fabricate the whole platform
• Difficulty to trouble-shoot any coding issues - posting them and asking helps fast
• Tendency to get stuck in fabrication - smart way of time-budgeting required

2) Which hardware does your project require? Do you have it all at hand? If not, complete an order of the equipment by next class.

• Wood plate/ Copper Tape(prepared)/ Wires(assorted)/ Ipac(prepared)/Push Buttons(Ordered for testing)
• Two monitors/Two desktops - Exhibition setting (will be requested to admi

3) Provide a timeline of milestones to be acomplish each week, on these dates:

April 1: I missed this class due to my sickness.

April 15: At least one platform for one player should be done in prototyping quality.