My project concept is a simple metaphor relating to its input device. I plan to use the flex sensor as my my input which will play several short movies or gifs once bent. The metaphor is “bending the rules”, so the  movies will be of rules or laws being broken or out of the ordinary things occurring.  The actual input will be the flex sensor attached to either some paper with “The Rules” written on it or something entirely different to convey “the rules”.

For research, I think I’ll have to find more images that can convey the metaphor. I’d like to have many different short movies to play at the same time, but I only have a few right now.

The whole project should come together easily based on what I’ve learned so far. I will probably have to create/edit some movies to make them work, but I don’t foresee any huge problems.

The main video and audio is a loop created from part of Filmcow’s YouTube channel’s video, John McCain and his Vegetable Friends. Other clips are from other Filmcow videos, specifically Charlie the Unicorn 3‘s musical piece, Charlie the Unicorn 4‘s musical piece, and Bino the Elephant‘s opening theme. When I was still putting the Max Patch together, I first tried some Max filters on a clip from the TV series, China, IL, seen in this link. The clip itself had a lot of nice movement and since pickings from other Filmcow videos were slim, I kept it in.

The input for the video is from an Xbox 360 controller. The A, B, X, and Y buttons are mapped to play one of the four videos in the colored keyed out regions in the McCain video as long as they are held down.

 My interactive drawing consists of a character in a cave painting surrounded by intricate designs. By touching the black designs, most notably the larger black sections, the user triggers animations to play of the designs growing.

Inspiration for the art and animation comes from a short segment of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) animated series, linked below.

I’ve loved this miniseries since it aired, so it was fun to work with this particular  style.

The designs and animations were done in Photoshop to mimic the style

Max patch layout

Geometric Abstraction

Interactive Animation

Thus far I think my ideas were pretty simple, but I like how they turned out. The Interactive Animation gave me the chance to include some better art.