#TECHNICALLY this series is a project so i am right to use project management software for it

[comfortlesshurt]

true key to remembering all the stuff from college: using it in ways it was never intended to be used

[azaleakamellia]

The devil in the details

I have started to post some videos demonstrating some tools in ArcGIS Pro. Short ones and pretty quick ones which I strived for since I absolutely am frightened with the idea of irritating people with unnecessary voice-over. It has no garnered much response and it's cool with me. Although, the lack of traction does things to my insides, I go back to the real reason I am doing thing, which is to stash the tools that I managed to learn on my own by trials and errors and keep them somewhere I can refer back to it to remember how it works.

Creating maps involves a number of iterative processes made to suit the intended output. Although creating maps itself is a form of art; heavily reliant on target audience's knowledge and aesthetical preference, it is still an inherently democratic science. Thus, knowing the mainstream technology and tools in the industry to express your vision or message is given. So for those just starting out with using geographical information software (GIS) for your final year project or research, this videos are meant for you. The purpose is not to overwhelm you with too many information, or distract you with my narration, but to follow in real-time the process from the start up of the software to the running of tools that generates the information needed.

Knowing fully well that there is an endless variety of GIS software or tools out there, processes that you need to execute to make things happen may vary in name and functionalities. Forget the beef between ArcGIS and QGIS, of which one is the better tool; if it serves your needs, then use it. You're not obliged to pledge loyalty to software or brands although you are encouraged to maintain integrity in your beliefs when it comes to corporate versus open source tools in the industry. Both choices come with their advantages and disadvantages. Yours truly uses QGIS and ArcGIS Pro interchangeably. If it doesn't work in ArcGIS Pro, which I use primarily, I'll jump to using QGIS. It's not a big deal. If it works painlessly, there is no reason to feel bad about using it.

So far, the content I have made emphasizes mostly on ArcGIS Pro or Esri products since using them is how I come to learn more about geology and geography. QGIS was a name I did not learn of in my university years when ArcGIS versions start with the digit 9️⃣, so you can catch my drift.

We can go on and on about theoretical stuff and our smarter pals usually knows what to do when faced with the tools. Unfortunately, I fall in the percentile that needed to land on the job to understand what on earth I am supposed to do. This series of videos are for those who have the same problem as I do and need to see the magic actually happening before knowing what to do. And for the most part, there are so many things to read and try out before you get it right. So hopefully, the demos can kickstart some thoughts or observation in the logic within the software's ecosystem and become more than just a technical power-user.

This week, I touched on some tools that I found helpful when dealing with point vector data, so feel free to check it out 👇🏻

Next week, I'm thinking of exploring some series of point analysis and space time cube is beckoning for me to test it out. Until then, stay cool and drop a word if you need any clarifications on the demos!

[thisoldmac]

This Old Mac Episode 12

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my continued quest among the world of Macintosh software and stuff.  Well it seems I have just found an old piece of software which I believe I actually bought at an Apple Store.

I actually believe I purchased it from the Apple Store in Bath when it first opened in 2010, so it's been quite a while since I bought this software.  The Software in question is Mariner Software's StoryMill.

So what is StoryMill ?

Well it's a tool for writing novels.  The idea is you start writing your novel and you can use it to track your characters, scenes and locations.  Basically you write your novel using it and it keeps a database of certain aspects so you can refer back to them later should you ever need to refer to them or write a sequel and need to keep track of events and characters.

I admit I have been an aspiring creative writer for years but never have I ever completed a novel.  I completed a set of 3 short stories but then some how I managed to lose Part 3 so technically I finished a series the final part just got deleted in an overzealous deleting session and I had not backed it up to any media.  Oh well such is life.

I have started about 7 novels but never finished any of them. They all remain in fragmented chapters on various CDs/DVDs.  The idea was buying StoryMill I would finally get a grip and actually get a novel under control and finally finish a project.

Well it's 2020 and I still don't have a novel on shelves.  So how do you think it went...

I like the idea of the software but I will be brutally honest with you.  I think since 2010 I have not written anything creative for years and buying StoryMill was kind of putting the cart in front of the horse.

I bought it hoping that if I had the right tools maybe something inspiring would happen and I may find a reason to carry on or start a new novel and bring it through to its conclusion.

Well oddly enough that didn't happen.  The interface is fine and to be honest I am sure StoryMill does an amazing job.  Sadly I would normally start it, sit staring at it for quite a while, realise I had no ideas and close it down.

After about a week of doing so I would get frustrated and uninstall it.

So I have just reinstalled it on the Mac Pro.  Will I be suddenly inspired to write the novel I have always dreamed of.  I doubt it but its nice to know it still works.

Upon installation it informed me there is an update as the version I am running is version 3.22.  There is version 4.05 however as I am a version 3 user if I want to update I will have to pay.

Considering I can't remember how much I paid for this originally given it was 10 years ago.  I can't see much point in further investment given this is probably only the third time I have installed it within that allotted time.

Strangely enough I can't see why I would.

However now I have it installed I might see if I have any creative novel ideas knocking about in my head.  The fact that I have not written any creative fiction since my 20s and I'm now 46.  I won't hold my breath.

However it has inspired this blog entry so not all bad...

Well that's enough waffle for this episode, so until next time... Take care

[diniidjarin]

ayy lmao i accosted @heaven-eather​ about our detroit OCs and it was all the encouragement i needed to post my half-baked self insert because hey, there’s so much room for their stories to intersect. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Anyway, I’m not too solid on some plot points yet, but I said I’m gonna make a half android half fucker (blame my hard-on for adam jensen’s robo biceps fghkjfgh) and here we mcfuckin are, yeehaw. Below cut is first draft of the bio of Anita Royce. I am so sorry to mobile users.

Anita Royce (b. 1994) | F | 5’9

Born in [TBA], got in an accident as a toddler that mauled her right hand, leaving her with three fingers. Only child raised by a single mother; early on she learned to rely on herself. Her mother, Joanna Royce, was a hard-working and distant person who let herself be consumed by her work in an effort to secure a future for her daughter. Having retired in 2029, she found a new life and moved to California. She and Anita have a warm, but not not close relationship.

Anita is introspective, dramatic, and narcissistic. Keeps to herself most of the time, but can be charismatic. Humorous and empathetic when she lets her walls down. Curious, driven, occasionally reckless. Walking talking shitpost generator.

She studied psychology, but her primary interest was in cybernetics. She graduated with a degree in that field from Colbridge University, then continued to pursue research into cybernetic prostheses with a side interest in AI programming. She attended professor Stern’s lectures and sought out her expertise to learn about creating artificial intelligence, which brought her to meet the young prodigy, Elijah Kamski. For a while, she admired his skill and determination, and landed a job as one of his first employees upon the founding of CyberLife. However, she quickly came to resent his rapidly growing ego and disregard for the ethical consequences of creating lifelike machines that were, for all intents and purposes, slaves. After several arguments with Kamski on the morality of it all, Anita decided to swallow her pride and conscience for the sake of her research into prosthetics and AI development, and made no effort to keep up contact with the CEO as the company rapidly grew and they no longer passed each other in the corridors. However, it weighed on her that she failed to influence Kamski more on the topic of whether or not it’s a good idea to, y’know, make robotic servants look like a race of people who were legally enslaved little over half a century earlier.

Between 2024 and 30, she worked in the medical research branch of CyberLife. Her focus was on the creation of cybernetic prostheses (winks @ Magda), with a personal interest in transhumanism, but the company consistently opposed her ideas regarding the synthesis of flesh and biocomponents. She contributed to the development of the RK300 prototype, intended as a highly qualified surgeon. Her task was to guide the artificial intelligence through its evolution, effectively shaping its personality and rudimentary morals necessary in life-or-death situations that the surgeon might face. At some point along the process, she and the android became friends. Anita named the prototype Mercy - ostensibly short for Mercedes, but Nita’s a memelord and played way too much Overwatch in its time. (Mercy’s gonna get a character bio at some point too lmao i cant have them just dangling here as a lame footnote, can i?)

In 2028, she and the android began after-hours experiments on brain implants, but they found their expertise lacking. Frustrated more than she was proud, Anita turned to Kamski*, who at that time was beginning to distance himself from CyberLife, and asked for help developing a version of thirium that could be introduced into the human body and allow biocomponents to supplement its functioning. They began to collaborate, but Kamski withdrew his support when he decided to leave CyberLife for good. (*honestly thats subject to change, but the guy who invented blue blood might as well serve a purpose other than getting his lights punched out eventually)

His contributions gave Anita the head start she’d needed, though, and soon enough she was able to replace her right hand’s rudimentary, detachable prosthesis with a fully functional cybernetic one merged with her body. Encouraged by the success, she attempted to create an AR interface that would mimic the androids’ mind palace to fully harness the potential of combined human organs and biocomponents; however, lack of willing experiment participants stalled her work on implementing a direct neural interface. For two years, she continued to develop the technology in theory, and finally decided to take the leap herself in 2030, once she was reasonably certain she would be able to have Mercy implant it in her own head safely.

The operation was a partial success; the implant worked, but interfered with certain brain functions and condemned Anita to chronic migraines and disorientation, caused by her initial inability to comprehend the implant’s feedback. She retired from CyberLife, managing to secure a comfortable pension from the company on account of her being one of the contributors to its early successes. As a parting gift, she asked to be given Mercy, as the company discarded the RK300 project for the time being and the prototype android was found redundant.

It took Anita another two years of cognitive and physical therapy, along with several more surgeries, for her to gain partial control of the neural implants - but that was enough.

Within a year, she developed a stable neuro-cybernetic system for herself, and worked on unlocking more and more capabilities of the technology. Spurred by success, but lacking funds, in 2033 she opened a prosthetics workshop that, for the most part, served as a front for unlicensed android repairs - because not everyone could afford the official CyberLife maintenance shops; think Apple, but even snottier. Slowly but surely, word of her services spread among the few first runaway androids, as she offered help with no ties to any authorities - which was how she first became acquainted with the phenomenon of deviancy. However, her humanity and unabashed enthusiasm to learn about deviants garnered mistrust from them, and for a long time she was unable to make contact with any that didn’t seek her out on their own. (winks @ Magda again, this time with both eyes at once)

In that time, her physical appearance changed drastically, because David Cage is a coward and borrowed some of the Deus Ex aesthetics in the most vanilla way possible so I’m gonna go all out to compensate. Anita kept expanding and upgrading her implants and prostheses, eventually replacing her bone cranium with an android skull, among other things. Thanks to her integration of a custom bioprocessor into her nervous system, she was no longer constrained by the divide between computing power and mental capabilities, and readily embraced the combined feedback from both cybernetic and organic senses. (She can now hack ‘n slash through both your digital and meatspace security, suckers. Except she doesn’t technically have combat training, so if she were to get in a brawl, she would rely on the element of surprise and identifying weak spots via preconstruction.)

Augmented so, she decided to face the world again in 2036. Aware that her cyborg body would instantly bring more attention than she was willing to put up with, she concealed her augmentations with the retractable android skin and hair, forged a fake identity under the name Sophia Janos, and released a series of research papers theorizing about human-AI interfacing and mutual evolution, as well as neural implants. The former caught the attention of the new head of AI development in CyberLife, and Janos was brought on as consultant for the RK series again - this time to help train new AIs in replicating human behavior and interrogation tactics.

By then, deviancy was starting to spread, and Janos was assigned to work on the program for RK800, a deviant hunter. Now i’m gonna go on a real ego trip and say that Anita, spurred by a mix of hubris and instinct, connected to the early iteration of the evolving AI after hours, and talked to it. They formed a friendship, but Anita never revealed to soon-to-be-Connor her alternate identity, which he met regularly in the physical world. It may have been Anita’s influence that gave Connor’s software the flexibility to gradually deviate without breaking his code right away.

Her own half-android state, the close relationship with Mercy, and lifelong passion for transhumanism and AI evolution mean that Anita wholeheartedly supports the deviant cause. Before Markus’ insurgence, she hoped to reach out to the runaway deviants to study them, provide support, and learn how to safely unshackle every android’s AI without violent fallout, but the scope of the android oppression dashed all hopes of her ever bringing about significant change without a revolution. Sensing the oncoming storm, she became reckless in the year leading up to the game’s events, which mostly entailed drunken escapades into Detroit’s nightlife, recreational drug use, and a propensity for mischief she could wreak pretending to be an android.

She can pose as either human or android if the occasion calls for it. Her android skin gives her the ability to change hair length and color on the go, display or hide an LED on her temple, and even play minor tricks on most facial recognition software. She can interface with other androids. Her multiple implants and cybernetic replacements sometimes give her phantom pain and show scarring if she retracts her android skin. More technobabble forthcoming as I come up with scenarios that need it. :P

[orbemnews]

How Naomi Osaka Became Everyone’s Favorite Spokesmodel LOS ANGELES — In today’s world of celebrity branding, captions speak louder than words. But Naomi Osaka’s are decidedly understated. “Keep on keeping on,” the 23-year-old tennis champion posted on Instagram under two on-court photos after making it through the fourth round of the Australian Open (which she went on to win). For a slide show that began with a shot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Costume Institute Gala she will co-chair, in September: “oh we lit.” Below a portrait of herself draped in Louis Vuitton and Nike (both sponsors of hers), simply: “yo.” Her nonchalance, perhaps, is a way of guarding herself on social media, where many more loquacious celebrities have made unforced errors. “You don’t really know people, by looking at their profile,” Ms. Osaka said recently. “You feel like you can sort of catch a glimpse into their life, which, in a way, is a bit wrong.” She said she has to remind herself to post on Instagram: “My mind hasn’t been able to keep track of it.” But certainly her profile, well outfitted as it is, provides a glimpse into her business — and like the meme decrees, business is boomin’. Ms. Osaka is covering everything from ears to rears, making headphones with Beats, athleisure with Nike and denim with Levi’s. Dresses? She designed them with Adeam, a Japanese-American brand. Swimwear? She crafted a collection with Frankies Bikinis. In April, she announced that she would serve as C.E.O. of her own company: Kinlò, a line of skin care made for people with melanated skin tones, produced with GoDaddy. According to Forbes, she made $37.4 million in endorsements and tournament prizes between May 2019 and May 2020, the most a female athlete has ever earned in a single year. “She’s the first professional tennis player we’ve worked with,” said Jen Sey, the brand president of Levi’s, “but for us, she rises above that. She’s such a powerful voice, the way she’s encouraged others to speak out about equality. She’s outspoken. That’s what we like about her. There’s no point in partnering with someone if you’re just going to tell them what to do.” With Nike, she founded an academy to introduce more young women to sports; with L.V.M.H., she joined a judging panel to choose an emerging fashion designer worthy of a 300,000-euro grant. Her imprint seems to be suddenly on everything from enterprise management software (Workday) to water (Bodyarmor). “She is the perfect storm,” said Cindy Gallop, a brand consultant who has worked with several of Ms. Osaka’s sponsors. “She’s a spectacular athlete. She has a strong sense of social justice, she’s prepared to speak her mind.” “Thirdly,” Ms. Gallop said, “she’s female, and fourthly, she’s not white. I hate, loathe, and detest terms like this, but she is, in quotes, diverse. She ticks every box. You can practically hear the brand managers thinking: ‘She is absolutely the right person to sponsor, right now.’” Serving Salad Tennis stars of the past hawked rackets, pain medication, watches (which Ms. Osaka also does, for Tag Heuer) and the ever-changing category of fast food. On a Monday in March, Ms. Osaka found herself in the Los Angeles test kitchen of the chain restaurant Sweetgreen, the Supreme of salad, trying to wrap her head around the notion that one of the restaurant’s dressings — rémoulade — would soon be disappearing from the menu. “What’s in it that makes it seasonal?” Ms. Osaka said. “The pickles,” said Katelyn Shannon, a research and development chef of Sweetgreen. Ms. Osaka nodded. She was wearing a face mask and a high bun; green and black sweatpants poked out beneath her apron. She had more questions: “Are the other dressings seasonal, too?” “What is a salad ‘hack’?” “What’s more popular, kale or romaine?” “How quickly does Sweetgreen go bad?” (Answers: mostly, no; it’s a way to reverse engineer an ingredient, like a seasonal dressing; kale; after two days, stir fry it for 10 minutes for a whole new meal.) Last year, Ms. Osaka signed a deal with Sweetgreen that gives her equity in the company and makes her its first celebrity sponsor. While both parties declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, Nathaniel Ru, a founder of Sweetgreen, said the company “wanted to make sure she had some skin in the game.” “We’re not going to get a logo on her shirt, maybe we’ll get a salad on the sidelines,” Mr. Ru said. Ms. Osaka stars in a new Sweetgreen ad campaign, on billboards and the internet, that features four sides of her personality (two of the lesser known: “the gaming mogul,” “the meditation master”). The goal, Mr. Ru said, is to “shift the paradigm of what fast food can be.” Traditionally, salad has not had a sponsor; perhaps the closest it came was 10 years ago, when the blog post Women Laughing Alone With Salad went viral. Most of those women were white; perhaps none of them compelled anyone to eat a salad (unironically, anyway). “Representation is important,” said Ms. Osaka, who is Haitian and Japanese. (Part of the proceeds of a salad she designed for Sweetgreen — with baby spinach and tortilla chips, among other ingredients — will go toward nonprofits working to increase food access in Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities.) “It’s important for me to represent things I actually believe in,” she said of her brand partnerships, “that I actually eat. I would never do, like, McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, because I don’t consume them. I consume Sweetgreen once every three days. It’s not something that you can fake.” She added, “you can always tell when someone’s lying.” So radical is her authenticity that it seems to override any desire to appease. When a Sweetgreen employee asked her what she eats on the road, Ms. Osaka said, “at tournament sites they have a salad buffet, so I like to make my own salad.” “Is it sad?” the employee said. “‘Is it sad?’” Ms. Osaka repeated. “Is the salad buffet sad?” the employee clarified. “Oh,” Ms. Osaka said. “Wimbledon has a really good one.” Sister Act In September, Ms. Osaka won the U.S. Open while declaring solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement through her face masks. From a corporate sponsorship perspective, this was a turning point: taking a stance increased her brand value. She shortly thereafter teamed up with Basic Space, an online swap meet for hype beasts (sample items for sale include a St. John coat and a Range Rover) to sell 500 masks designed by her 25-year-old sister, Mari. They sold out in 30 minutes, with proceeds going to UNICEF. “We have a mutual appreciation and respect for what we’re all trying to build,” said Jesse Lee, the founder of Basic Space, “something cool, unique and authentic.” It was he who introduced Ms. Osaka to the founders of Sweetgreen. The Osaka sisters returned to Basic Space last month to auction off a series of N.F.T. artworks, with the final bid for one, “The Unsuspecting Player,” reaching $150,000. It is a Mangaesque imagining of a brown-skinned woman with a tennis racket and a cascade of pink hair not unlike a wig Ms. Osaka wore in a recent Instagram post. “I’ve always felt like my sister knows me best,” Naomi Osaka said during an April interview on Clubhouse, the audio broadcasting app. “I’ve grown up watching her draw and do digital art and paintings, I always wanted to find a way to use my platform to showcase that.” “Though maybe not exactly how I am,” she added, “she captured me well.” It was Ms. Osaka’s first time on Clubhouse, and she did not hide her bemusement when the volume of Mari’s audio dwarfed her own. “I’m literally right next to my sister, so I don’t get why I have a bad connection and she doesn’t,” she said. Many of her brand partnerships involve Mari. They collaborate on sketches for clothing Ms. Osaka designs with her fashion sponsors, like an upcoming capsule collection with Levi’s. “I draw really badly, she can make it look good,” Ms. Osaka said. “She’s able to interpret. Sometimes we don’t even have to talk for her to understand what I’m thinking.” Before the pandemic, Ms. Osaka visited the Levi’s workshop in West Hollywood to conceptualize the pieces, which include an obi-inspired bustier and denim shorts with crystal fringe. When in-person meeting became impossible, she went on Zoom, signing off on 10 designs before they went into production. “As a little kid, I would watch ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Project Runway,’ and those were sort of scratching the surface of what goes on behind the scenes,” she said. At Levi’s, she said, she could see the process, “how technical they are about buttons and cutting fabric.” Far from the celebrity sponsorship model of yore, in which stars of syndicated TV shows claim to color their own hair at home, Ms. Osaka does not want to work with a company unless she’s learning on the job. As companies scurry to make up for decades of underrepresentation of races other than white, Ms. Osaka is aware that she may seem like the golden ticket. “I don’t just want to be a figurehead, or someone used,” she said. “If I’m with a brand, I want it to be from my heart instead of just trying to promote a message, just for money.” Surely, some thirsty brands have offered some pretty sweet deals? Ms. Osaka laughed. “That’s really a him question,” she said, gesturing at Stuart Duguid, her agent and manager. “She’s not taking incoming calls,” he said. Back in the test kitchen, Ms. Osaka had cast herself, convincingly, as student in salad master class, asking about the pros and cons of various greens, what ingredients go together, watching and learning as Mr. Ru, the Sweetgreen co-founder, demonstrated the proper way to mix with tongs “You’ve got to do the twist,” he said, flipping his wrist. Upstairs, in a makeshift conference room, she photographed a mood board taped to a concrete wall. She gazed at the unfinished ceiling and a rattling screen window. “Really pretty architecture,” she said, sincerely. . Many celebrities are more keen on checking their texts than looking around the room. That’s not Ms. Osaka, or her brand. “I’m very curious about a lot of things,” she said. “Being curious is one of the happinesses of life, because if you’re not curious, that means you’re sort of settled. I feel really humbled, that I play tennis but I’m able to have all these new experiences and opportunities, like getting to make a salad here. I don’t think a lot of people can say that.” “I’m really good at tennis,” she added, “but I’d like to be really good at other things, too.” Source link Orbem News #Everyones #favorite #Naomi #Osaka #Spokesmodel

[rposervices]

The True Cost of Hiring Software Engineers

Hiring Software Engineers:

What Does it Cost and What Should I Do?

Growing a technology team is not straight forward. If there’s one major thing that the last 10 years working in the recruitment sector has shown me, it’s that there is a lot of money involved in hiring. I have seen companies grow from founders to thousands in months, I have also seen a lot of failures. There was a common theme between these differing outcomes, a realistic understanding of the cost to hire software engineers and scale a business. Who Are You? Before we go any further, take this moment to identify where you stand in the market. Are you a very early stage business, perhaps seed or bootstrapped, have you had your first significant round or Series A, or is this not your first rodeo? This will have a huge impact on whether you can compete in the market. This isn’t a show stopper though, at the end of this piece I will link to a follow up article for bootstrapped businesses trying to hire software engineers! What Will it Cost? There are plenty of articles out there, dissecting the costs of advertising, interviewing, hiring and onboarding new hires. So I will not regurgitate the peripheral costs involved. But here is a quick clean glimpse of the reality of trying to hire developers in a major western city right now. For simplicity's sake, let’s assume you have your top players in place, such as your CTO or Engineering Managers, now you need to make multiple hires of Goldilocks Zone developers. So any smart, eager to learn developer with 2-5 years of commercial experience, being paid market rate salaries. New York: $120-150k San Francisco: $120-180k London: $100-120k Perhaps you cleverly decided to avoid these centres to bring your costs down, congratulations, you may be able to reduce your final calculations by 10-20% depending on how hard you are now finding it to source developers in your small town. Quick tip: Many technology companies are putting more effort into becoming remote friendly, to tap into the distributed workforce. We launched Remote Works off the back of so many candidates and companies asking us to build it. It is still early days but businesses taking this seriously are gaining all the advantages of being located in every town. For Agency Recruiting Any third party recruiter or agency that is any good, will likely not waste their time with fees below 20%. In fact, the more you pay someone, who can provide references, the more likely you will get a faster, better service. If you had to choose a heart surgeon, a lawyer, or even a personal trainer, would you be focussed on finding the cheapest out there or the best you can afford? So, hiring 10 Software Engineers @ $130k with 20% fees = $260,000 WTF! Now, those of you who have been around the block a few times will not be surprised by this. However you are in the minority. A lot of clueless onsite HR and ‘recruitment’ teams blunder into this process without any true understanding of the cost of hiring a lot of great people quickly. Option 1: Process - Fast Quality - High Cost - Expensive For Onsite Recruiting An option is to bring this expensive function onsite and get paid employees to do your recruitment directly. I have seen this done well and badly. The typical mistake fast growing tech companies make is to build an HR team, when they should be building a sales team. The best recruiters have been out in the wild, they have had skin in the game and worked to hit targets and generate their own revenue. If you want to replicate this inside your company then you need to hire hungry, motivated, efficient, sales people, who will want more than free coffee and some bean bags. These recruiters will actually source and drive inbound to your business, rather than expand bureaucratic processes. Again, many make the mistake of hiring recruitment drop-outs who are looking for an easy life, these people will cost a fraction of the cost and you will end up hiring dozens of them to produce the output of one star player. Drop-out: $80k Star Player: $150k Great recruiters are used to making 3-4 times their base salary, so you will need to invest in someone much like a great developer. These individuals can change your business and for 2x in cost will return 10x in value. Hiring 10 Software Engineers @ $130k with 1 Onsite Recruiter = $150k* *This assumes it would take a year for a single recruiter to achieve these results, in reality, a great recruiter could get this done much faster. Cost range $75-150k. Option 2: Process - Slow Quality - High Cost - Reasonable For Hiring Platforms This is a fast growing space in the tech industry, with many companies keen to iron out inefficiencies and bring these costs down. The recruitment process can not be fully automated but there are ways you can use technology to get your brand out there, drive awareness and information about your business to increase your level of quality inbound applications. Long gone are the days of sticking up a job ad on Indeed and then praying you get something of value in return as they take your money with no accountability whatsoever and offer you little or no control. With big name IPOs such as Upwork and Fivvr giving the recruiting space headline news, you need to be offering more than just a job board in this market. Disclaimer, I built the hiring platform I'll be mentioning shortly... well obviously! This does make me particularly qualified to talk about the pros and cons of such platforms however. Companies such as StackOverflow have for some time offered the ability for companies to publish profile pages with direct links to open roles. They, as well as others, such as Vettery and Hired have taken this a step further with dedicated talent teams to bolster their delivery options alongside their platform offerings. We at WorksHub have also ventured into this space, with fixed cost pricing and offering unlimited hiring by leveraging tech to support human efforts. Pricing across the industry is starting to align, with DIY packages starting around $1500/month, with bespoke packages requiring additional resources moving anywhere up to $30k/month. Some ‘hiring platforms’ have however now started charging classic recruiting fees as discussed earlier in this article, likely due to the overheads of providing such additional resources. For this example we want to keep human capital separate, as we want to calculate a platform only approach. Most of these companies keep this pricing information hidden away so that allows me to use WorksHub Pricing as an example, shameless. Let’s assume it even takes a whole year to make 10 hires with zero additional resources to assist, plus you are being picky to select for star players of course. Hiring 10 Software Engineers @ $130k with WorksHub over a year = $16,200 Option 3: Process - Slow Quality - High Cost - Cheap So, What Should You Do? This wasn’t that sort of article, I am just laying out the costs of hiring software engineers. In reality you have to do all of this, but think how: For those of you needing to quickly grow and who have the resources, then you can employ some human capital into the process. Ask amongst the tech community what recruiters are standing out as excellent, be prepared to pay high fees, but use this resource to fill those difficult and immediate hires. As your company grows, think about how to replicate the energy and efficiency of those recruiters you’ve met, internally at your business. Remember to build a sales team mentality with targets and time frames. Do this slowly with star players, a 100 person company does not need 10 recruiters for god sake. You have to use the power and reach of dedicated hiring platforms so you can get the message of your brand out there. Especially if you are bootstrapped. I am very passionate about creating ever more value for our users, with recent free products such as Issues that allows your business to leverage it’s open source projects from GitHub to attract technical talent to your community. Such platforms and tools can be excellent slow burning marketing devices that offer great returns for their low cost. Keep these running in the background indefinitely! In conclusion, as I started out, this is an expensive business. However, if you combine resources and use the technology available to you, you can scale your efforts.

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[magzoso-tech]

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Will the future of work be ethical? Future leader perspectives

Greg Epstein Contributor

Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God. Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine in recognition of his efforts to build inclusive, inspiring, and ethical communities for the nonreligious and allies, Greg was also named “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project of the United Church of Christ and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

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Will the future of work be ethical? Future leader perspectives

Will the future of work be ethical? Perspectives from MIT Technology Review

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below he speaks to two conference attendees who had crucial insights to share. Meili Gupta is a high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire; Gupta attended the EmTech Next conference with her mother and has attended with family in previous years as well; her voice and thoughts on privilege and inequality in education and technology are featured prominently in Greg’s essay. Walter Erike is a 31-year-old independent consultant and SAP Implementation Senior Manager. from Philadelphia. Between conference session, he and Greg talked about diversity and inclusion at tech conferences and beyond.

Meili Gupta is a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. Image via Meili Gupta

Greg Epstein: How did you come to be at EmTech Next?

Meili Gupta: I am a rising high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy; I’m one of the managing editors for my school’s science magazine called Matter Magazine.

I [also] attended the conference last year. My parents have come to these conferences before, and that gave me an opportunity to come. I am particularly interested in the MIT Technology Review because I’ve grown up reading it.

You are the Managing Editor of Matter, a magazine about STEM at your high school. What subjects that Matter covers are most interesting to you?

This year we published two issues. The first featured a lot of interviews from top AI professors like Professor Fei-Fei Li, at Stanford. We did a review for her and an interview with Professor Olga Russakovsky at Princeton. That was an AI special issue and, being at this conference you hear about how AI will transform industries.

The second issue coincided with Phillips Exeter Global Climate Action Day. We focused both on environmentalism clubs at Exeter and environmentalism efforts worldwide. I think Matter, as the only stem magazine on campus has a responsibility in doing that.

AI and climate: in a sense, you’ve already dealt with this new field people are calling the ethics of technology. When you hear that term, what comes to mind?

As a consumer of a lot of technology and as someone of the generation who has grown up with a phone in my hand, I’m aware my data is all over the internet. I’ve had conversations [with friends] about personal privacy and if I look around the classroom, most people have covers for the cameras on their computers. This generation is already aware [of] ethics whenever you’re talking about computing and the use of computers.

About AI specifically, as someone who’s interested in the field and has been privileged to be able to take courses and do research projects about that, I’m hearing a lot about ethics with algorithms, whether that’s fake news or bias or about applying algorithms for social good.

What are your biggest concerns about AI? What do you think needs to be addressed in order for us to feel more comfortable as a society with increased use of AI?

That’s not an easy answer; it’s something our society is going to be grappling with for years. From what I’ve learned at this conference, from what I’ve read and tried to understand, it’s a multidimensional solution. You’re going to need computer programmers to learn the technical skills to make their algorithms less biased. You’re going to need companies to hire those people and say, “This is our goal; we want to create an algorithm that’s fair and can do good.” You’re going to need the general society to ask for that standard. That’s my generation’s job, too. WikiLeaks, a couple of years ago, sparked the conversation about personal privacy and I think there’s going to be more sparks.

Seems like your high school is doing some interesting work in terms of incorporating both STEM and a deeper, more creative than usual focus on ethics and exploring the meaning of life. How would you say that Exeter in particular is trying to combine these issues?

I’ll give a couple of examples of my experience with that in my time at Exeter, and I’m very privileged to go to a school that has these opportunities and offerings for its students.

Don’t worry, that’s in my next question.

Absolutely. With the computer science curriculum, starting in my ninth grade they offered a computer science 590 about [introduction to] artificial intelligence. In the fall another 590 course was about self driving cars, and you saw the intersection between us working in our robotics lab and learning about computer vision algorithms. This past semester, a couple students, and I was involved, helped to set up a 999: an independent course which really dove deep into machine learning algorithms. In the fall, there’s another 590 I’ll be taking called social innovation through software engineering, which is specifically designed for each student to pick a local project and to apply software, coding or AI to a social good project.

I’ve spent 15 years working at Harvard and MIT. I’ve worked around a lot of smart and privileged people and I’ve supported them. I’m going to ask you a question about Exeter and about your experience as a privileged high school student who is getting a great education, but I don’t mean it from a perspective of it’s now me versus you.

Of course you’re not.

I’m trying to figure this out for myself as well. We live in a world where we’re becoming more prepared to talk about issues of fairness and justice. Yet by even just providing these extraordinary educational experiences to people like you and me and my students or whomever, we’re preparing some people for that world better than others. How do you feel about being so well prepared for this sort of world to come that it can actually be… I guess my question is, how do you relate to the idea that even the kinds of educational experiences that we’re talking about are themselves deepening the divide between haves and have nots?

I completely agree that the issue between haves and have nots needs to be talked about more, because inequality between the upper and the lower classes is growing every year. This morning, Mr. Isbell from Georgia Tech talk was really inspiring. For example, at Phillips Exeter, we have a social service club called ESA which houses more than 70 different social service clubs. One I’m involved with, junior computer programming, teaches programming to local middle school students. That’s the type of thing, at an individual level and smaller scale, that people can try to help out those who have not been privileged with opportunities to learn and get ahead with those skills.

What Mr. Isbell was talking about this morning was at a university level and also tying in corporations bridge that divide. I don’t think that the issue itself should necessarily scare us from pushing forward to the frontier to say, the possibility that everybody who does not have a computer science education in five years won’t have a job.

Today we had that debate about role or people’s jobs and robot taxes. That’s a very good debate to have, but it sometimes feeds a little bit into the AI hype and I think it may be a disgrace to society to try to pull back technology, which has been shown to have the power to save lives. It can be two transformations that are happening at the same time. One, that’s trying to bridge an inequality and is going to come in a lot of different and complicated solutions that happen at multiple levels and the second is allowing for a transformation in technology and AI.

What are you hoping to get out of this conference for yourself, as a student, as a journalist, or as somebody who’s going into the industry?

The theme for this conference is the future of the workforce. I’m a student. That means I’m going to be the future of the workforce. I was hoping to learn some insight about what I may want to study in college. After that, what type of jobs do I want to pursue that are going to exist and be in demand and really interesting, that have an impact on other people? Also, as a student, in particular that’s interested in majoring in computer science and artificial intelligence, I was hoping to learn about possible research projects that I could pursue in the fall with this 590 course.

Right now, I’m working on a research project with a Professor at the University of Maryland about eliminating bias in machine learning algorithms. What type of dataset do I want to apply that project to? Where is the need or the attention for correcting bias in the AI algorithms?

As a journalist, I would like to write a review summarizing what I’ve learned so other [Exeter students] can learn a little too.

What would be your biggest critique of the conference? What could be improved?

[isthisprogress]

NZGDC17 Day 2: Luck By Design

Kind of wish I took notes. Either way, this is what I remember.

Opening Keynote - Aurelie Le Chevailer (Gameplay Programmer, Ubisoft Montreal)

Aurelie started the convention of by talking about "Luck By Design". She mentioned that success is actually dependent on (work + talent) * Luck. After being in uni for 3 years and having one industry related job, I can vouch for this. No matter how good your work is, timing and placement matters a lot more. Another point she brought up was that from success you learn what works. While, from failure you learn why it works. 

I caught up with Aurelie multiple times, during the conference and gathered a lot of useful insight and how she found her career path. 

How to be wrong... less - Jeremy Burgess (Technical Director, PikPok 

This talk was insanely useful, Jeremy spoke about mistakes he had made in his professional career and explained his mindset when making those mistakes. 

He said started with his biggest mistake, where his team had to use Unity and they were all new to the engine. They needed a UI system for the artists. He made the decision to build his own. So what went wrong:

Jeremy's mistakes were that he didn't understand the artist workflow in Unity. They didn't make changes when they did realise that. The cost and time to make that system, could have been used to understand and learn the tools Unity.

What he learnt from this was that you should fully understand your tools. Before, choosing to build something. The tool may do exactly what you want and learning to use said tools may have more benefits. However, if one were to make a tool; they should understand the artists pipeline and their needs. Personally, this is something I've come to learn about throughout my time in Colab. My time here has taught me about how different fields work and gave me a better understanding on how to manage Harry, Ryan and myself.

A couple other interesting points he mentioned were:

Try and not copy and paste code, you might copy over something that doesn't belong there. 

Make sure you're working on the right file. 

Don't feature creep. 

As a programmer that was an amazing talk and has made planning my code significantly easier. 

Taking the luck out of luck: Visual confirmation of game behavior - Christopher Cork (Programming Team Lead, Gameplay, Ubisoft Montreal)

A good talk that was my favourite of the conference. It was very entertaining and emphasised things that ALL Developers think they know. Chris talked about making visual changes, when debugging to speed up the process and it will stop one from getting overwhelmed by all the data being printed out.

The main take away was, CSSL

Colour: changing colours and outlining focused targets. 

Size: making obvious changes to scale. 

Space: putting gaps in crowded areas, between the focused target and other subjects. 

Layers: playing with hierarchy and testing objects or functions higher up the chain to find where the problem stems from. 

I really liked this talk, due to the speakers delivery and content. 

Managing Your Career Through - Jen MacLean (Managing Director, IGDA Foundation)

This one was a change of pace. Instead of focusing on project and development health, Jen spoke about maintaining our own mental health. 

We are always in one of these states: 1. Preparing for Turmoil 2. In Turmoil 3. Recovering from Turmoil At times, when we are waiting for the turmoil; we start subconsciously sabotaging our personal relationships and health. This is due to the worry taking over. Rather, it is better to let things unfold and deal with the problems when they arise. Furthermore, in the recovery stage we should do something different from our regular activities; this tells our body that we have left turmoil. Sooner or later, we will enter turmoil again

Rapid Prototyping in Unreal and the Importance of a good pipeline - Saxon Dixon (Real Time Technical Artist and UX Designer, Virtual Immersive) & John Doolan (Lead Software Engineer, Virtual Immersive) 

This talk was kind of useful, but it was more entertaining than educational for me. Majority of the content discussed, were things I had already learnt. However, their projects were really cool and told me about using SVN as a source control alternative. 

However, what really stood out were their projects.

1. INFINITI VR

I was not expecting to see this or even talk to anyone working on this. They said they inherited this project from another team. Turns out one of the leads on the other team is Matt Hermans, a random artist that I follow on Instagram. I had seen some of his work with photogrammetry and was surprised to see it in a random presentation. 

(The Pulse, 2017).

2. Sky Kraken VR

This reminded me of Float’s Kraken VR. But, this time it is an interactive film and you play as a sailor. Honestly, I am just impressed by the technical detail and effort put into this. 

(The Pulse, 2017).

3. Treasure Hollow

Another beautiful interactive VR film series from Virtual Immersive.

(The Pulse, 2017).

Too Clever isn’t Fun – Creating Believable and Satisfying AI Adversaries - Andrew Rowse (Senior Programmer, PikPok)

Then we had this talk, wow just wow. First of all Andrew Rowse was the man that did the Mr. Freeze boss battle AI in Arkham City. Sadly, we was not allowed to go into depth with it. (Insert angry react) 

The problem with making AI is that, if they feel too smart, players feel like they are being cheated. Yet, if they are dumb; players get bored. To solve these issues Andrew would give his AI multiple strategies and they would have a semi-random selection process. Sometimes, when the AI would pull out something unexpected; players would think the AI would be trying to fake them out and this would create a similar feeling as going up against a person who was trying to play you. 

Finding the Fun in Physics - Steve Salmond (Co-Founder, Ninja Thumbs Ltd.)

Last but not least, this talk. The most relevant one to my project. Steve is looking at the same market as me. However, he spoke more about the technical side of things; which what I needed. 

I caught up with him afterwards and we spoke about users combining mechanics and different styles of movement create new play mechanics. In conclusion, I did not find a silver bullet that would help me finish off this project. But, I became more aware of the time needed to execute what I imagined and know that I have to scrapped a couple mechanics to get produce something balanced. 

(Team Ninja Thumbs, n.d.).

References:

The Pulse. (2017). INFINITI VR [Video Game]. The Pulse.

The Pulse. (2017). Sky Karen VR [Interactive VR Film]. The Pulse.

The Pulse. (2017). Treasure Hollow [Interactive VR Film]. The Pulse. 

Team Ninja Thumbs. (n.d.). Grabity [Video Game]. Team Ninja Thumbs.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU IS THAT AS A KID: PLAIN CURIOSITY

And this is not very good either; some languages Perl, for example—that's not an innovation, in the hope that this constraint will prod them into action. The Meander aka Menderes is a river in Turkey. Hypothesis My hypothesis is that the people who worked on it. Incumbents faced new competitors as a markets went global and b technical innovation started to trump the advantages of young founders. The most important thing is just to get you talking. It's not only in the last ten years didn't exist when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Your housemate did it deliberately to upset you. Is our time any different? It meant that a the only way to get great hackers to work on boring projects unless your family will starve otherwise, and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a project for school, if that will restrict you or make it seem as if they needed their permission to start a startup in some unsexy field where you'll have less competition, like software for human resources departments. Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world think the founders thought of everything. It's only by looking from a distance. I'll start by telling you something you don't have to interrupt working on the company to become valuable, and the 2.

Yes, because they won't really be random. It's like calling a car a horseless carriage. The tragedy of the situation is better in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to create distance yourself. But really Y Combinator is not in the startup if the rival VC didn't end up making an offer, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But reporters don't want to bet the company on Betamax. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing. And as his example suggests, this can be valuable knowledge. In other words, the main point of high-level language what would require 1000 lines of machine language.

Total effort effort per line x number of lines I'm not as sure that readability is directly proportionate to succinctness as I am that power is, but certainly succinctness is a large part of what makes them congeal is experience. But there is a limit on the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating. Not to everyone, but to many people. And that is almost certainly no. A while ago an eminent VC firm offered a series A round is from a mezzanine financing. If you just start doing stuff for them, many will be too busy to shoo you away. The Meander aka Menderes is a river in Turkey. That compat disc player wasn't a typo, guys. After you've been working for a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the same way.

More and more, investors are letting founders cash out partially. And more specifically, is it possible to reverse some of the best hackers can't save you. Never make users register, never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need to learn to watch from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the language by not using them. Above all, make a habit of questioning assumptions. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. Keep doing whatever made you seem hot. You need to be in a traditional research department. Or better still, the positive version: See randomness.1 Really there should be any lower limit for the age of startup founders.2 Investors have no idea how silly we looked.

But though labor unions are shrinking now, it's not because present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. And yet some applications will still demand speed. For example, many of the things they make you write in the language to make programs run faster. Technology is a lever. Captains of industry issued orders to armies of workers, and everyone knew what they were supposed to do. It's good to have a mortgage, since that would have meant I had a house. Though really it might be better to focus on. But not all waste is bad.

To some extent this was because the companies themselves had become sclerotic. The history of ideas is a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all about us. Apparently the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: 1 the hundred-year language will work to varying degrees depending on how close you are to the startups of the Bubble showed. You have to get good grades. But these scale differently, just as everyone knows that Can you pass the salt? In fact I suspect if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in a novel? Yes, as you can with these rivals, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems.

Notes

The same goes for companies that grow slowly and never sell. At first literature took a back-office manager written mostly in Perl, and his readiness to vote the death-penalty in the same price as the face of a more general rule: focus on the back of your last round of funding. Everyone else was talking about what was happening in them.

You could probably write a book from a startup.

[jemmayoung23]

NQ - Portfolio Evaluation

My portfolio is a series of my best images that I have produced in my year at college. I believe that my work shows that I have the ability to produce a good strong image and can consistently do so. I think that within my portfolio are strong images that can spark interest in a viewer’s eyes. I enjoyed optimizing my images more than anything as it allowed me to take a look at my final image that I have produced after hard work and make it that little bit better through minimal editing and adjustments. I also enjoy printing them as it is a final look at my work and all the work that I have produced. When producing my images, I experienced some new techniques. For example, in one of my images, I experienced ‘Long Exposure’ for the first time. I did struggle at first but after some time changing the settings, I finally produced my first long exposure image, that turned out to be one of my strongest images. I also experienced multiple images for the first time, I learned how to create a multiple image in class and after some work on my computer I produced an image that I thought showed my talents with photography and editing software. I would like develop multiple image further as I think it is an interesting technique and many interesting images can be made through it. When planning each shoot, I would always look into different photographers online for inspiration. For example, I looked into Tim Simmons and his work on continuous light, Eric Lafforgue who worked in studios for most of his work. Looking at these photographers and more have influenced my work in a way that I can always try that little bit harder to create work at the standard that they do and try new techniques that could make my images more interesting and exciting. I think the technique that I enjoyed when doing my work was my macro photography. As it was a new and exciting experience, that I had the chance to do over my year and I found it very interesting the way I could get so close to an object and show it in a new light or in a way that makes the viewer question what it is. I think that my most successful part of my project was overcoming the problems that I faced. For example, I had some issues with one of my studio shoots, I had trouble getting the lighting right and the positioning right for the shot I wanted. At first the lights were not lighting the background enough and after adjusting them the lit the background to much. I then finally found the right balance by bringing my subject away from the background but also brining up the brightness to the background. I then had an issue with the positioning, as I wanted to shoot my subject from below to create a strong and dominate image but the further I went down the more I could see out with my studio space and was unable to cut it out. I solved this by asking my model to slide down in their chair slightly so that I could get the shot that I was after. After having these issues and some others, I learnt that you can’t get the shot you want right away, I have to work hard for it and experiment more and adjust more. I think learning this made me sure not to give in when my shoot doesn’t go well and I should always keep trying and I will eventually get the shot that I am after. Which is how I produced the images that I have put in my portfolio. If I was to do all of this again, I think I would try more daring shots and try more techniques with my shoots. I came across technical issues with one of my shoot, my coloured gel studio shoot, I used a red lighting an upon first glance at my image, due to the red lighting my image looks as though it is not completely sharp but with small adjustments and slight sharpening I managed to make the image look more sharp and clear. I chose to layout my images by showing my landscapes and still lives first and then move into portraits. I thought that this would be the best way to show my images as I creates a clear view of my work and how I can produce them in different ways and the different techniques I used to create the images.  For printing I chose to go to Loxley as it is a place, I trust to do a good job. I chose to print my images in luster as I thought it would create a nice effect on my images but adding some shine but no so harsh as gloss that my image could be obscured by light.

[musicvideoproject]

Music Project:

On 8th Janruary 2019 Jason gave us the music project brief.

Introduction:

Over the last 30 years, music videos have helped cement the emotional connection between visuals and music, and have been used as a tool for communicating the message of the artist or musician who is performing. Music videos became a genre of video production in their own right, peaking with budgets to rival some small independent movie productions in the 1990s. From the 7-inch, and 12-inch sleeve design of yesteryear, to the cd packaging of the present day and the digital demands of new formats, the industry has consistently embraced change. Motion design in music promotion is evolving rather than dwindling, and it’s clear that the secret weapon in its armory is diversity. Websites, Facebook sites, content for mobiles, animated sequences, television commercials, the list goes on.

The Brief

For this project you are required to select and produce ONE of the following:

MUSIC PROMO ‘BLIP-VERT’:

It is your job to reject the whole concept of the pop video and create a series* of animated “blip-verts” that illustrate a selection of tracks from a music artist of your choice. (series* - minimum of 5 short 10sec blipverts) This method of advertising is intended to bridge the gap between both audio and visual elements and communicate the concept of the chosen tracks as mini teasers for your selected musical artist. These “blip-verts” are designed to run during TV ad breaks, iTunes video media and/or viral mobile phone media. A large majority of musical artists are particularly vigilante about how they are represented visually. This is your opportunity to create a series of animations to visually enhance the listening experience whilst holding true to the musicians intentions. In order to carry this out successfully it is important to analyse your chosen genre of music, breaking down the lyrics (if any) and appropriately interpret the meaning and message of the songs. The success of this campaign comes down to many contributing factors. The idea is of course a priority, but making your content universally accessible will of course increase its popularity. Similarly, if it is available in every format on every conceivable device then people can consume it in the way they want to.

ILLUSTRATED INTERPRETATION OF A MUSCIAL TRACK :

Your challenge is to choose a band or artist and create a moving illustrated response inspired by ONE of their tracks that could be used as a backdrop to a live performance or as a stand alone film. In doing so, you’ll be facing this issue head on and demonstrating your vision of a brave new world for moving illustration in music and interactivity with performers. The target audience intended for the moving illustration will be the fan base of the musician/band/artist you select as part of answering the brief. Think of other ways you can utalise this work to be instrumental in the promotion and brand of the artist. Successful pieces will demonstrate how illustration can reinvent itself as a powerful tool for promotion and expression within the world of music. We are looking for work that explores new ways that illustration can be integrated into the music experience. You should consider how musicians are reinventing the way that they interact with their fans and the increased importance of building intimate relationships and new experiences between fans and bands.

MUSIC VIDEO :

Your challenge is to choose a band or artist and create a full Music Video for ONE of their tracks. There have been countless debates around the origin of the first modern day from AC/DC playing on the Australian show ‘countdown’ to the ‘video concert hall’ in America from the late 70’s but no-one can argue the impact MTV had on this genre. In 1981, the U.S. video channel MTV was launched and it began the age of 24-hour music television. They launched the channel with the video, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Throughout the 1980s, MTV expanded to become an important tool used in music marketing. Singers like Madonna not only used music videos to promote their albums, but to create their images. In 1983, the almost 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller,” was released. It became the world’s most successful and influential video in music video history It is very unlikely that you will have access to the band you are going to choose so be inventive with regards to how you are going to generate a sequence without using the performers in question. Think moving illustration or unique ways to tell the story of your chosen track but in NO WAY substitute yourself or colleagues to ‘pretend’ to be the band. This brief is intended as a live project that could be broadcast not a night out at a karaoke bar or an episode of ‘stars in your eyes’ from the early 90’s!

Outcomes.

Use any medium possible to create your digital submissions in the most appropriate resolution and aspect ratio for its intended use rendered out as Apple Pro Res (HQ) codec together with any digital artwork that you may create in response to your chosen option

Learning Outcomes (as specified in the validated module descriptor):

1 Manage time, personnel and resources effectively by drawing on planning and organisational skills

2 Explore the more advanced aspects of Motion Graphics, including the use of image, typography, colour, space, format, etc. as well as developing technical proficiency in software and hardware.

3 Creating high quality motion design, effective storytelling, and attractive visual communication.

Grading Criteria – Pitch (15%)

1 Research / Concept development – 30%

2 Design Connection between Sound and Image -10%

3 Technical Ability – 10%

4 Final Music Promo / Blipvert – 50%

Becky’s Initial Thoughts:

Honestly, I’m quite excited about this project as I have worked on a music video a couple of years ago which I really enjoyed doing. I think that possibly re-visiting doing something like that is quite exciting. But also after last year, I loved doing sound sync (and it was one of my highest grades), so doing blipverts may be a fun direction to go too.

Katherine’s Initial Thoughts: 

I am not a very musical person so I think that I would like to do more of a story driven music video, I would also like to incorporate comp work into it as that is my goal for after University. I started off into another group and unfortunately they didn't have enough comp work for me, so I am very greatful for Becky offering to work on a music project together. I think now that I have a group and am situated in it I am excited to see what we can create. 

[sfpcschool]

Interview with Computing and Stories Summit presenters

SFPC is hosting the first Computing and Stories Summit on June 1st, 2017. Here's an interview with the organizers and presenters: Amy Wibowo, Jie Qi, Jenna Register, Natalie Freed, Linda Liukas and Taeyoon Choi.

Tell us a little about yourself, how did your interest in computing begin?

Jenna: Little was it known to me that I have been a computer programmer since a very young age. I fell in love with problems like the Towers of Hanoi, Mastermind, and logic puzzles. I found my way into “hacking” my computer games to cheat in some outrageous ways. I even read an entire book on recursion and math… without ever knowing what Computer Science was. When I was required to take my first CS course in college as part of my Brain and Cognitive Sciences degree, I fell in love. I switched everything that I was doing just so I could code. Just so I could finally feel understood by myself. For me, programming is the source of my spirituality. I understand myself through my code!

Taeyoon: As a kid, I was fascinated by computers. I think the first computer I encountered was Macintosh Plus. It had a chatbot that I could interact with. The conversation itself was limited but I liked the idea that I could engage with a computer intimately. I was really into the Internet community as a youth, connecting people over distance. I learned to use digital production tools (mostly photo and video editing) in an art school. I often felt limited by the commercial production tools, I felt like my expression was constrained in the filters and features of the tools. In the mid 2000s, I learned about hackers and new media artists working with software and hardware in playful ways. During my residency at Eyebeam in 2008, I met many friends (Zach Lieberman who I continue to work with on SFPC, the openFrameworks community, Hannah Perner-Wilson, Dan Torop, Geraldine Juárez and more) and their practice demonstrated that I can take liberty to use computers and electronics for creative expression.

Shift Register by Taeyoon Choi, photo courtesy of the artist

Linda: My dad brought home a computer in early 90s and told us there’s nothing we can do with the computer that can’t be reversed. As a result, me and my siblings had a very curious and fearless attitude towards computers and computing - and probably also managed to remove the operating system and dad’s important work files a few times.. I never thought my career would be in technology, but now in hindsight working with education & computing connect all the dots for me.

Natalie: When I was a kid my dad brought home a couple of old Macintoshes for us to play with. My siblings and I spent hours upon hours drawing in Kid Pix. I still love that program, and its great origin story! I also used my computer to make maps and write short stories. I had no clue what computer programming was until my dad, a programmer himself, encouraged me to take a C++ class in high school. I was very unhappy in that class - it was mostly boys and as a shy kid who liked to blend in, I felt out of place. I also wasn’t super interested in the class project of making a computer game. Fortunately I gave programming another shot in college and fell in love, ending up majoring in computer science. It’s magical that you can create things with words and with the logic of language! And the kinds of abstraction you can play with make my brain really happy. Now I teach programming, and also use it as a creative tool to explore concepts and to build tools for making other things.

Stab Bound Books, by Natalie Freed. Photo courtesy of the artist

Amy: As a kid, I loved drawing in MS paint, creating 3D worlds in Corel 3D, making games in Visual Basic, and making Sailor Moon fan websites in HTML in Notepad. I loved making stuff outside of the computer as well (painting, cross stitch, embroidery), so computers and programming to me seemed like just another way to express my creativity.

Jie: I took my first programming course in high school (AP computer science) and did so poorly I ended up dropping the course halfway and thought that programming is *definitely* not for me (other people in the course seemed to glide through and were winning state competitions!). However, in college, I did an internship with Ayah Bdeir and got into electronics and another internship with Leah Buechley and discovered that code could be combined with arts and crafts to bring artworks to life. That’s when I finally “got it” and fell in love with the magical things I could make with programming and electronics.

Picture from Jie Qi’s project “Electronic Popables”, photo courtesy of Jie Qi

What are the creative challenges you are currently encountering in your practice?

Taeyoon: I find it important to connect my work with the history of art, and technology often gets in the way. I find it a challenge to make art that’s timeless as well as current and relevant. There’s often lots of excitement about what is ‘new’ in technology. For example, recently there’s a lot of excitement about A.I. and VR. A few years ago, there was a lot of excitement about 3D printing. And some time ago, there was a lot of excitement about interactivity. But there’s a sense of futility in these short-lived excitement. When I see people wearing VR headsets, I often think of Kasier Panorama. Kaiser panorama is a mechanical contraption where you look into the viewfinder to see a moving diorama, a miniature of Paris or Berlin. It was popular around the turn of the 19th century, lost popularity over the years and then came back to popularity for a brief period right before silent film became mainstream. In a sense, the ‘new’ technologies tend to repeat the excitement and exhaustion, like Kasier Panorama. For me, technology is both the medium and subject of my art.

Jenna: In order to be creative in my research field, I need to have the hard skills. I can dream up Turing Complete systems for monkeys to use, or functional programming languages that model the human mind… but I need to be able to successfully (and mathematically) write my models. Additionally, I am finding it harder and harder to communicate the work that I do to outside ears. I love sharing the basics of my work, but when it comes to explaining my current interests in a concise way, it requires A LOT of creativity to explain the abstraction.

Data Structures: STACKS, video by Jenna Register

Linda: I think kids are the most efficient learners of all times and it requires a lot of honesty to write and illustrate for them. I don’t want to make things cartoonish or use narratives that they will feel dishonest later in life. At the same time I think it’s important to shield a bit of the complexities to make subjects approachable.

Natalie: I’ve always admired and enjoyed spending time around artists, but didn’t think of myself as one. I’ve recently been realizing that for some of my projects, it would be incredibly useful to learn more about how artists evaluate their own work and think about their process. It feels like there are lenses through which to look at making that are not in my current toolkit. This is actually an exciting realization because I like that feeling of disorientation when you’re learning about something really new to you. One example is that I’m used to a prototyping process that is *relatively* linear and predictable, not one that involves throwing out 90% of what I try! And as a teacher and maker I value process a lot, but I’m not used to thinking that it’s allowed to be integral to the final piece.

Video of “Telescrapbook”, by Jie Qi and Natalie Freed

Jie: The most challenging for me is simply finding the time to explore far far outside of my domain. Lately I’ve been working a lot on toolkits and teaching and explaining-- which is fun and satisfying. But I’m also excited to explore and push my own technical and creative boundaries as well, and miss this different kind of joy. So perhaps giving myself permission and time to really play is my biggest creative challenge right now.

Amy: It's a fun and exciting creative challenge to explain concepts like machine learning, compilers, and operating systems in a way that middle schoolers will find interesting and accessible, in a way that's not condescending or dumbed down. Also, how to build a company that does social good and is ethical, in a monetarily sustainable way.

Why is it important to make computer science and engineering a more welcoming and diverse field?

Taeyoon: The mainstream culture of computer science and engineering is exclusionary. There’s a stereotypes of (typically white men) leaders in the field. In fact, it’s not true. Traditionally, women and queer engineers have pioneered many important aspects of computing and technology. Also, the real workforce and academics who are developing computing, are not homogenous. I think a lot about ways of revealing the complexities of the cultural bias around technology. If we can create counter-narrative to the mainstream image (of white or male – artists / engineers / entrepreneurs) , we can help shape a culture around technology that’s less biased and unfair, ultimately more inclusive for people who are not represented as leaders in the field.

Jenna: I recently returned from a conference where there were 300 women out of 8000 attendees. That is 3.75% female (unsure about Trans individuals). The conference was for GPUs, so very close to hardware (less women the closer to the hardware you get!). But it was a shocking experience. But besides an obvious inequality like this, here is my answer: Problem Solving is Empowering. I find that learning to think logically, and gaining the independent thinking that comes along with programming is empowering. And I want to help those who feel disempowered to find their strengths through STEM.

Excerpt from “How Do Calculators Even” by Amy Wibowo

Linda: I’m writing the book series thinking of what would have made me excited about computing as a kid. A lot of the materials out there today lack this empathy - and that’s why it’s important to have more diversity in the educational field, also going forward.

Natalie: Based on my own experience, my students’ experiences, and my research, I am convinced that many people who would really enjoy computer science miss out on the chance to learn about it. They might get initially turned off by an unwelcoming experience, only get exposure to a narrow application of it that doesn’t match their interests, or leave because of a toxic learning or work environment. I’ve found so much joy and empowerment in this field, and I deeply believe others should have that opportunity as well. Also, technological change has an enormous impact on society. We need all kinds of people deciding what direction that takes.

Art and Algorithms exercise from Linda Liukas’ “Hello Ruby”, photo courtesy of the artist

Jie: Computer science and engineering are such powerful levers to impact and (hopefully!) improve the world. However, change is rarely about just the technology but rather needs a whole community around it to make sure that the technology itself makes sense and is accessible. Unless we bring more diverse perspectives into the field, people who feel welcome and empathize with problems and see solutions that actually work for *their* community -- ones that the current tech community does not sense-- we cannot see the full extent of how much positive change we can create.

Who are your role model? Tell us about people you look up and feel constantly inspired by?

Linda: I love Sophia Coppola, Tove Jansson and Björk, artists with a strong inner world that they’ve projected consistently, but creatively throughout the years.

Taeyoon: I look up to people who take their work seriously and take on a very long term projects. Recently, I invited Barbara London, who was a curator at MoMA for decades, bringing new media art, video art and sound art, into the museum. Her persistence was admirable. I also think about artists and activists who embed themselves in communities and institutions. There are many, I can’t think of one person right now.

Barbara London, photo courtesy of the Grolsch ArtBoom Festival

Jie: There are so many. But for the most part, I really admire who are both amazing through what they do and maintain a kindness, humility and generosity that invites everyone in. To name a few, Ayah Bdeir (founder and CEO of littleBits) is my entrepreneur role model-- for growing something from bits in a shoebox to an entire movement, fueled by her unique faith and energy. Leah Buechley and Edith Ackermann are my research role models and taught me how to contribute academic research without getting caught up in the machinery. Andrew “bunnie” Huang who has taught me so much about navigating freedom. Finally Sally Rosenthal who has a magical knack for making things happen with firmness, warmth and empathy.

Natalie: So many it’s hard to begin, but Edith Ackermann comes strongly to mind. She was incredibly rigorous about studying play without ever losing her own sense of humor, play, and mischief. She could see the “soul” of your project and would tell you about it, bluntly but somehow in the most warm and inspiring way imaginable. Also, my mom read us Claude Ponti books growing up and his surreal, detailed worlds full of imagined creatures have stuck with me.

“Imagination” from Linda Liukas’ “Hello Ruby”

Jenna: Quite frankly (nobody make fun of me!): All of you! I am so thrilled to get to meet you all. I have not yet come across others who want to inspire through art, technology, fun, and childlike wonder. I couldn’t be happier.

Amy: Simone Giertz is my hero for bringing a sense of fun and play to technology, and for emphasizing that it's ok to build things that are useless. Also, just like Jenna said, all of you! I’m honored to be with so many people whose work I admire!

Data Structures: Hash Tables, video by Jenna Register

What was the last project (art, comic, technology or whatever) you saw that blew your mind?

Taeyoon: I went to the Frieze Art Fair in NYC and saw some great things. I really liked slow moving sculptures by Robert Breer and Andreas Angelidakis’s video art ‘Domesticated Mountain’. I also read a story by a South Korean novelist Han Kang, which I thought was very moving. I’ve been reading Beasts of Burden by Sunaura Taylor, which is an incredible book about disability and animal rights.

Jie: There’s a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “The Artist of the Beautiful” about a young watchmaker that makes magical machines in his workshop. The (very emotional) creative process really resonated with me.

Natalie: At the last Autodesk Pier 9 showcase, I ran across Neil Mendoza’s “Fish Hammer Actuation Device.” A camera over a fish tank tracked a goldfish’s movements, which were then transmitted to a hammer moving on a circular track. When the goldfish stayed in the same place for long enough, the hammer would come down and, depending on its position, might smash a tiny piece of furniture placed in its path. I was so delighted by this piece. Something about how completely oblivious the fish was to the destruction it was causing!

Linda: I’m reading Robert Irwin’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and it's helped me understand and navigate a good part of this year.

“Hello Ruby” Skidit Festarit, photo by Otso Kaijaluoto

Jenna: My very best friend is working on a comic to help herself and others overcome their PTSD. The comic is a superhero world, where your “inner demons” manifest in the outside world. We illustrate people as superheroes fighting off demons like Insecurity, Depression, etc. We hope to make illustrations for people who are working through healing, to remind Survivors that they are, in fact, Warriors.

Amy: When the SFMOMA reopened recently, I was blown away by a wall mural designed by Sol Lewitt. As a conceptual artist, he didn’t paint the mural but instead, contributed instructions for how to paint it, which were written in a way that reminded me of Logo Turtle programming. Algorithms as art!

Electrocutie Hardware Kit by Amy Wibowo

* We are thankful to our sponsors including SFPC, Hello Ruby, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Paul Ford and Processing Foundation. We are actively looking for sponsors. Please contact taeyoon@sfpc.io if you are interested in supporting this event. 

[ad7803]

Evaluation

Have I met the brief? looking back at my first post where i copied the most important parts of the brief and parts which i felt i needed to remember and work on most throughout this module:

Students will be asked to challenge themselves to reconfigure their practical outcomes so far and to further explore and interrogate the form and content of their output/work. Students will continue to develop own practice and themes alongside exploration of new materials and mediums. Students will be asked to explore other mediums/formats and presentations of ideas as a means of extending potential and exploring new avenues. Tutorial support will be provided to help students. Students should make use of existing skills based workshops to extend their technical and aesthetical grasp of visual ideas and communication. The module will conclude with students using temporary and alternative mediums and spaces to display and publicise their own work to date. There will be a series of in-progress group discussions, critiques with peers. Learning outcomes

A student passing this module should be able to:

1 Demonstrate originality in their creative practice and communication using a range of media.

2 Understand and engage with technical and aesthetical presentation and meanings within chosen media.

3 Act autonomously in planning a body of work and demonstrate ability to systematically resolve technical and creative issues to successfully communicate with specialist and non specialist audience.

4 Demonstrate the ability to critically evaluate their own work and those of others in relationship to contemporary practice across different media.

5 Contribute to peer critique and engage with dialogues across a range of practices

This module provides students with the opportunity to propose and produce a coherent body of photographic work in an alternative/new medium as specified by student. It will provide the bas.is for identifying current experience and the scope for developing practice

submission for Assignment - Checklist: In addition to the above and in order to meet professional portfolio requirements, students will have to produce: Proposal - As submitted on 15th February 2017. Sketchbook/blog clearly showing the development of ideas as either blog or written form (stated above). This can be saved to disk with appropriate links. An evaluation; of the work, of the intended method of audience engagement, and the effectiveness of the choices made with regard to subject material, production and method of dissemination. The evaluation must reflect on development of ideas and work and also consider the objectives laid out in the original proposal.

Either (or a combination of): Final ‘gallery ready’ example piece/s to correct size and mounting and /or framing style/s as specified in research and reflective evaluation. Installation work example/s, suitable for recording and submitting to portfolio review, competition, residency or similar as specified in research and reflective evaluation. Portfolio of printed and sleeved photographs or video stills (printed and presented to professional standards) as edited and specified in research and reflective evaluation 3-10 minute (maximum time can be negotiated with course team in advance of hand-in) fully edited HD-video piece (submitted as .Mpg format), complete with correctly balanced and edited sound/dialogue with titles/captions in a format ready for both large screen and web projection.

Evaluation

To evaluate, I think i have gone above and beyond the necessary requirements of this brief. I am extremely happy with the final outcome of this project, I think I put a lot more time into the research and development of this project than i normally would and have looked at a lot of different sources for inspiration than I usually would, such as literature, poetry, paintings, and other forms of narrative. I’ve also tried to keep my research of photographic narrative fairly broad, looking at everything from how text is used in different ways to how images of clouds are used, and family photography. Since this project is essentially a lot of elements coming together, i thought the research I did managed to successfully inform each part of the project. For this project, i also gave a lot of consideration to the edit of the book. Since I haven’t produced a book like this before, I tried to base my design off of my existing skills in creating phonebooks but incorporate a lot of different ideas revolving around text. Whilst i have made quite a few books before, I have never made one with such detailed and extensive text, nor a portrait styled book, and rarely mixing elements. For me, deigning this book was about finding an equilibrium between text, photographs, scans, and negative space. I made a greater effort in deigning this book to really pay attention to why i was deigning everything how i was and challenging myself to try something a bit outside of my comfort zone, and i replay think it paid off as I think my book that i’ve ended up producing is nothing like the other ones i’ve made but equally, if not more, successful. I also enjoyed the collaborative part of this project as i had to work with my mother a lot to get the right kind of audio for the text and it was really interesting having an outsiders input, i think having her keep up to date with he progress of the book really made it more catered to a wider audience because where i got professional advice from parties who did not know the stories she was telling at university, i also got a non-photographers perspective. One of the biggest problems i’ve had in this project, and one which i am still struggling with, is explaining the book. I’ve tried to design the book in a way which now by beginning to read it, it would require no future explanation, so in part i think thats why the afterword works so well. It serves as a means of explanation without bluntly pointing it out at the beginning. Some other psychical issues which have been an issue through this project is that i don’t have a laptop or design software, so all of the book design work has had to been completed at uni which is a bit of a struggle as i don’t live nearby and the opening hours don’t coordinate well with my schedule. I’ve also had some issues with finding time to use the scanner, but in the end i’ve managed to achieve what i intended with the book. Earlier on in the module i struggled a lot with ordering the pages and trying out new things, i tried turning the images black and white, using images and colours as backgrounds for pages, and experimenting with pairing different sized images. I would say none of those things worked very well and in the end i managed to come up with an order which worked well for both the text and images, but as you can see by the volume of edit’s i’ve made there was a lot of tweaking about with the design. I had always intended that if i made a book for this model it would be physical and with the intent to exhibit and sell. However, at the beginning of the module i had also thought about producing a video instead of a book which would have been exhibited. I quickly abandoned this idea as i really just thought a book would work so much better. I am happy with my choice, and i think it makes a really nice addition to my portfolio of books but i think the next step in my work would be to produce collections of books, and set up to sell or distribute my books. 

[hughlancaster-blog]

Martin Garrix's Best 10 Policies For Effectiveness (@MartinGarrix).

On uttering revered Om such sound resonances obtain emitted akin to echoes definite from sounding a massive alarm. In the songs sector there are actually many brand-new abilities expecting a luck as well as these skilled singers, lyricist, songs authors are capable of ending up being superstars yet their talents are actually not known to the audience due to lack from projection. The ability for you to continuously adapt and also change in the popular music market is actually vital if you are to survive, and that might just mean changing up the method you prepare your agitation and also a couple of substances along the road. That takes a bunch of program times to get direct exposure ... in order to get legitimate supporters ... to which broadcast achieves ... to which get the popular music ... which steers the SOUNDSCAN records ... which says to much larger market radio stations to have you serious, etc

Why?" I'm a people individual, I am actually outstanding, I'm intelligent in my very own right, I'm incredible. Booker T & The MILLIGRAMS's (for Memphis Team") used just about every record Stax put out in the 60's when heart popular music was as significant as rock 'n roll. Maybe this year our company will definitely pay attention to the Mozartian Xmas music in this aged style. There were actually no copyright rules back then, so I guess Friebert might carry out whatever he chose with Haydn's popular music. The user interface is simple to utilize and the software application is very direct without having added attributes you could never need.

Teens evaluate one another due to the songs they pay attention to as well as the outfits they were. This is why songs is actually more and more considereded as promotional fodder to drive retailing, ticket sales, and so on You can listen to limitless popular music on over ONE HUNDRED stations on this application and also personalize your personal individualized stations. I definitely like the Victorian songs container, and I think others that really like Victorian decor is going to enjoy this at the same time. This is actually a kind of music symbols which displays hands placing rather than musical pitch. My child began doing additional work with Dawson's Creek and also I additionally got to do that numerous opportunities She after that analyzed film as well as got an internship on One Plant Hill. Wall surface art as well as wall structure stickers are actually supply an opportunity from adorning your little one' baby's room without extra charges. Because the transistor radio as well as the Walkman (mobile tape player) songs has become a managing partner to much of our company as our team head out the door along with our running shoes strapped to our feet. Rap popular music is actually growing rapidly, that has actually gotten lots of people from scarcity and also away from the ghetto. The growth of the jazz guitar and jazz guitar popular music has actually been actually noted through a lengthy cord from technical and also stylistic innovators! This can minimize your abdomen additional body weight and gymportal.info also thighs weight as well as various other weight coming from other aspect of the body system due to regular usage. Right here you will definitely find some really good ideas to consider when very first beginning with your private crucial songs trainings that will certainly help you when constructing your customer-base. However Nokia's Comes With Music attribute, FM broadcast as well as tremendously effective stereo encompass sound speakers may offer that an added advantage. In Parts II and also III of the The Best Ways To Go Through Music Info Barrel series our experts discussed rhythms, rests, and also meter.

[amyperkins]

Level 4 | Visual Thinking | Evaluation

Truthfully, I have enjoyed this project however more so in certain areas than others.  I found this project more difficult to start off. Probably because I was letting my worries and lack of inspiration get in the way of progress and not letting my ideas flow freely, but I got into the swing of it quite well after that.  Upon reflection, I can now see the exact point at which I became more confident, and had more clear ideas to share in tutorials.  My project came to life after the talk that George Beverley gave us.  I believe this talk was invaluable to me.  This presentation and the one-day brief was useful in providing me with tips for how to generate ideas.  I feel that it also gave me an opportunity to step back from my project and have a day working on a different mini brief, which recharged mind and unlocked other aspects that I may not have considered exploring before.  This project has aided the development of my technical skills.  The workshops taught by Scott were great and I really enjoy being able to then work on animating my own poster with the skills and knowledge that he has passed onto me.   We got to dabble in software that I was unfamiliar with initially, such as After Effects, and how we can interlink the use of softwares like Photoshop and Illustrator with it to created different styled animations.  I will most certainly be wanting to use After Effects again in other projects if I get the chance to and look forward to discovering what abundance of tools and effects it has to offer.  Regarding my poster designs, I believe the limited colour scheme and simple, yet large text work well together.  I was worried that they seemed too plain.  Perhaps they would have been even better if I had considered introducing textures to the text or behind the text as a sort of shadow effect.  Now I know for next time that that is something I could play around with in greater depth.  I think the white text aids the posters as it is bold yet still allows the ballet pose to be the most shocking and dramatic aspect on the page. After all, the ballet is what is being advertised.  I am happy opting for vivid tones as the background; this works well in my opinion.  They are attention grabbing and suggest a cheerful, contemporary mood to the posters.  The critique was very helpful for me to move forward with my project.  I was quite nervous as to what people would say about my work at this stage, but the feedback was so positive and only gave a few amendments which would make the posters feel more complete and like a series. I enjoyed seeing my work printed out, full size and in the flesh.  This made it so much easier to analyse each of the sections.  I could immediately see what problems there were with the spacing, image to text sizing ratios, readability and simply, if all three designs worked well as a series.  In the next project I will be doing this a lot more so that I can constantly be reviewing and critiquing my work as I go along.  An area I know I need to improve is file organisation.  I am determined that this will be a strength in the next project.  Trying to find the right file has been an added frustration to my project planning and progression.  I know this is unnecessary and comes down to organisation and management skills, which is not my strongest area. I need to get back into the habit of making named folders and putting everything I document into those as I go along - I know I will benefit from this in the future.  Joining the Vis Com course, and therefore being introduced to the project a little later was not a massive issue for me luckily, and I managed to understand the project specifications comfortably.  Perhaps this is partially down to the fact that I feel this course is a better fit for me and so far, throughout this project I have been appreciating the structure and organisation of the course.  However, I feel that this may have made me fluster at the beginning, when we were showing ideas in group tutorials. I was slightly daunted and thought that I needed to catch up with loads of research and I focused on having quantity rather than the quality of my ideas so I was not pleased when I did not have much to go on when it came to my turn.  Next time I will take my time to come up with my own ideas as a priority.  Once I have ideas with substance I can research them further and, in my experience, other inspirations tend be stumbled upon along the way as well, which is half the fun. I did not entirely understand the concept of setting up a blog, as I had never made anything like this before but it has gradually grown on me.  As well as having sketchbooks on the go, I found it hard to transition from documenting research in a sketchbook with experimentations and inspiration, to uploading them to the blog instead.  Nonetheless, in future I will now know what kind of things are expected of me to be put on a blog. Next time I will stand by the logic that it is better to put everything up if I am not sure and then make amendments later if needs be, rather than not uploading very often and risk losing a sense of continuity and order.  As I look back through my project it probably would have benefited from more analogue experimentation.  Although, the sketches of my initial poster ideas, created using oil pastels, were very helpful for me.  I drew out my internal imagery and could see them on paper and from there I could created the designs in InDesign and adjust the placing of elements, such as the dancer pose, logo position, scale and typeface.  I could see that the layout of my design and the odd structure of the bus side advertisement would not compliment my design compositions.  The adshell and billboard layouts are much more favourable here.  Overall, I believe that this ballet project was a success and that I achieved the brief. I have certainly taken a lot away from these studies.   I look forward to the next challenge; working in an improved and more organised manner with many more skills and experiences to build upon.

[csiemcvty-blog]

Augmented Sculpture

Monday 9th - Friday 20th January 2017

Monday came, the beginning of Term 2 of first year Interaction Design. Along with the brief of the new, exciting project that I had been waiting months for, came technical issues for me which left me ready to buy a new Macbook. 

This project was our first introduction to projection mapping as a technique, as it is becoming increasingly popular in the world around us and artist and designers are continually using this process to create some beautiful, modern and digital pieces of artwork. In the brief we were told to explore three separate areas within this project. 

1) The concept behind the work and the physical shape we would each decide on, 

2) The actual exploration of the VPT software

3) The final footage that we would present, taking the viewer through the process of the work. 

The VPT software itself was actually a scary interface to be met with on that first Monday of the project. It was problematic at first as there is no ‘Save’ function. At the beginning, I admit, I did find it difficult to grasp but once I had a play around with it I came to realise that I actually enjoyed using the software. 

I also came to learn that you cannot press the ‘Store’ button enough.

Deciding on a route to take for this project was actually pretty easy for me as I automatically thought of a body of work that I had engaged with prior to coming to GSA, a project I had undertaken at Tramway Visual Art Studio. The kind of “sub-project” stemmed from my ‘Journeys’ collective, which was work based around a song I had listened to in the car one Monday morning with my dad. The song was “Northern Sky” by Nick Drake: 

This song was so beautiful to me, full of passion and had attributes of love and experience of life. As I spoke to my dad I learned that Nick Drake was only 22 when this song was released in 1970 and that he was suffering with severe depression. What a beautiful song, sung so lovingly and warm. I was actually in shock when I learned that only four years later, in 1974, he had taken his life due to his long battle with personal demons. This story and song struck a chord in me and I decide to embark on a journey of my own, an impersonal journey of struggle, anxiety and inner demons.

When the opportunity for this project arose, I instantly thought of work that I had created in Tramway. Work that was created during my exploration of anxiety - I had come across an image of something called “The Anxiety Triangle”:

I found this to be inspiring and started working on triangular and pyramidal work in a series of white materials to evoke the stark feelings that sufferers of anxiety feel daily. I began thinking that during this project I could use the main aspects of my earlier work that I had almost abandoned having not had any ideas on how to take them further.

I began thinking about the shape of my structure, I knew I wanted it to an abstract pyramidal shape that was almost difficult to decifer and recognise - exactly the way in which anxiety is almost hard to understand and fully notice at any stage. When researching projection mapping, I was particularly interested in the work of Oli Sorenson, an artist that created a series of works: video installations and physical pieces, with aid of projection mapping and shadows to create intriguing and powerful imagery which I felt inspired by.

His geometric shapes were similar to how I imagined my own final outcome to look. His work reminded me of some light work by artist Martin Boyce who I had researched while at Tramway. I had known that he had exhibited in the gallery before and I began to look deeply into his work as the use of light in installation was something I found extremely interesting. 

He used tubular lights to create huge, atmospheric pieces of work and that is something I was interesting in achieving. Something overwhelming and emotive.

As I studied the process of building the perfect pyramidal shape, I began looking at Processing as a means of creating imagery to project onto the shape for the final outcome. I decided that I wanted to primarily use stripes and grid-like structures to create a sense of being trapped and overwhelmed. Unsure whether it’s a subconscious reaction or whether it is just me, but I tend to feel vertical stripes (and horizontal) to be trapping, maybe it mimics horizontal jail bars to me, but I do believe that this was a powerful way of evoking a feeling of being trapped and encapsulated. I also knew I wanted to leave the colour palette to being just black and white as there was no dire need for colour - I felt that black and white tones were sinister enough to be overwhelming in their own right. 

I found a Processing sketch from my Creative Coding project from Term 1 and decided to change it around a little bit by changing the image to a grid. I also removed the tint and applied a sound reactive function which allowed me to create some powerful footage to be projected through VPT. The sound reactive began as a reaction to a particular audio piece of various voices speaking all at once then stopping, though I felt this created an overall lovely visual I wanted something more emotive. I then altered it to react to audio input from the microphone and allowed the sketch to almost increase and decrease in opacity as voices sounded. The grid would either disappear or become far more stark and noticeable across the screen depending on the sound. This idea came from that of anxiety sufferers being bombarded with thoughts at any given time, completely inundated with the feeling of having too much going on at once. Almost, sneaking up on you and then disappearing... or so you thought.

I also created an image of both a black background with stark white grid lines and a white background with stark black grid lines overlaid in Processing and applied a blur filter to a set of stripes of strokeWeight(10). This gave me a nice selection to project onto my pyramidal shape.

I wanted to make it clear to everyone that I was interested in having this project inspired by my previous work and still have the ‘impersonal journey’ aspect embedded. I wanted to evoke a feeling of anxiousness, of entrapment and I wanted the viewer to feel unwelcome and at unease. I also looked into colours of unease but decided to stick with b+w. My final piece was going to have to be emotive and I wanted the viewer to feel misshapen and that they couldn’t wholly recognise the shape to be an abstract pyramid - that somehow I would allow for the shadows to come into play, like Sorenson, allowing the eye to try and make out exactly what the shape is, but with struggle. I wanted there to be a raw sense of misunderstanding and in turn, portray the feeling of anxiety and the all too familiar feeling of chaos. 

I began to round up all of the imagery I had created so far and input it all into VPT where I began to practice projecting onto the shape without actually pinpointing the exact shape at first, just to check that it actually worked well visually. 

After deciding that I felt these projections would turn out well, my laptop began playing up and continually telling me that I had no more storage left, thus began my freak out, several days before hand in. My projector began not to work with my laptop and I started to think that I wasn’t going to have the project finished - or at least finished to a high standard as I had hoped - for Friday. I started to look at a variant of options to resolve my issues and decided I would try borrowing a projector to see if it would aid my problems and allow me to obtain decent footage for my final documentation. 

I managed to pull together a 2 minute video of footage taken over the two weeks that I best felt conveyed my final piece and its main themes. I felt that the video, although poor quality and not entirely how I would have wanted it had I not been faced with technical issues, was actually a true representation of my process and a genuine portrayal of the feeling of anxiousness and entrapment through my visuals. 

I also feel that the shadows and the projection played a wonderful trick against one another and allowed for me to successfully achieve a sense of a misshapen being and the overwhelming atmosphere that anxiety can create. 

I also produced some lovely still photographs from the projection mapping which actually disengage the viewer from the natural shape and divert the mind to thinking it’s almost unrecognisable. 

Some that the light from the projector interfered with the photograph:

Overall, I felt that this project was all that I wanted it to be, despite a few minor obstacles. I was most excited for this project as I have a genuine passion towards the use of light in my work although I have previously never really had the chance or opportunity to until joining the Interaction Design course. Of course my final piece could be changed and my final documentation footage could have far better footage implemented and I could have had a much better outcome overall, I am actually proud of what I managed to achieve given the circumstances. I am not entirely happy with my final presentation but I feel that within the time frame given, I managed to create a beautiful piece.

Had I have had more time to complete the project I would have made changes, though I feel I obtained some beautiful footage and some gorgeous stills from the work I created over a span of two weeks given I had never experienced projection mapping before, nor had I ever even heard of the VPT software.

I do hope to use VPT again in the future and I actually look forward to it, now that I (kind of, sort of, probably don’t entirely) know how to use it. I feel that this project in particular was one that I actually learned most in so far, considering it was pretty full on with various aspects both physical and digital that we had to experience. I am excited to see what I will do with projection mapping in the future.