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 …

aram_simonstabs_3

I changed my direction to finalize ‘fivefingerfillet’ game for my final and possibly ITP spring show exhibition after 15 minutes meeting with Amit. In order to enhance current piece of work, it appears to be challenging to create more ‘playful’ interface with simple-minded approach - make it ’six-button game’.

I’ve been skeptical of having knife thing even if it’s not harmful, finally decided to get rid of it. Instead of knife, I came up with ‘legs’ mounted on the whole body of system, then each leg would be moving up and down when player presses push buttons on top. They will still can provide similar feeling of ‘knife’ stabbing from top, but only with sound and movement.

One important rule about scoring is not just pressing different buttons fast, but pressing combinations of two buttons fast. For example, each space between fingers could be named as numbers from 1 to 6, then 1-6, 1-5, 1-4… will be the scoring combo.

Also this game will be connected to video of ‘bishop shows his knife skill’ part from the movie Alien2. Seeing the movie clip, players will be encouraged to produce faster speed to make Bill Paxton scream.
(more…)

A graph is a collection of elements, usually called nodes, linked together by edges(sometimes called brances). It is a common structure for mapping connections of many related elements. This is partly because the visual representation of a network shows the sort of connectedness that makes sense to someone familiar with the data, whether as a free-form map of associations written out on paper (sometimes called a mind map). - From Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

I decided to show a collection of words by using of “Mind Map” type of graph layout. What I will propose is not a big leap from the quote from the book above, but I believe it’d be a good ‘review’ of this semester doing next steps of data visualization that I have done this midterm - Tree Map.

Contents that I am going to use are up in the air for now, mainly because I want to focus more on the structure of how each element relate each other(e.g. nodes) on either Eclipse or Processing. However, after I presented overall concept, plan and thoughts for my final, Dan gave me a good ‘tip’ and examples of what could be the good ‘contents’ that fill the mind map - participatory platform of collective thoughts(or soul) from audiences. Similar to many mind-mapping software, mine could have blank area that user can fill whatever word that strikes his mind, keep gathering them, and finally shows them in networked map with minimal graphic touch on

Thanks to Maria, my classmate of A2Z, now I have a little sense of analyzing codes samples that I will need.

Inspiration and related links are below.

simple graph demo

Maria’s midterm

My idea for final project goes back to very first idea from early this semester. ‘A clock for visual impaired personnel’, I came up with a ‘touchable’ clock idea with several sketches and prototyping model. Since I was not fully prepared for user-testing at that time, colleagues guess of ‘what time is it?’ went all wrong, even the prototype was broken by someone’s pressing too hard on the surface.

Yes, I learned a lot this much hard-way, this experience was even more worthy enough to immediately come up with next ‘obvious’ corrections such as durability, softness of fabric, and most importantly(from Amit), prototype should have ‘function’ that creator intend to show even if it’s hard to realize. - mine was to make people ‘feel’ the roller underneath the fabric.

Now I am researching the roller from data sheet of ‘massage chair’ manufacturer in order to figure out technical difficulties when it comes to ‘minimizing’ it to the size that can fit into palm-sized clock.

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?

• Lack of electronic parts ordering/surveying experience
• Difficulty to trouble-shoot any coding issues - collaborating required
• Tendency to get stuck in fabrication - smart 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.

• A clock. typical one. should be palm-size or slightly larger but not too gigantic.
• Roller. Possibly be customized. Survey required.
• DC motor (or Servo motor? )
• Power supply or battery bo

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 roller should be working with the cover fabric mounted on top of the clock.