Lauren Bisignano – REFLECTION

At the beginning of this assignment I really set ambitious goals, hoping that with the 4 weeks we had to work on it and with everything I’d learnt about and seen done in Max, I would be able to execute something I was really happy with. I decided to take an idea from another group’s project from Assessment 1. I really liked the idea of playing around with something and making your own decisions, and decided i’d have my own take on the concept.

I certainly set myself more work than I thought. I intended on filming a whole bunch of mini videos correlating to all the questions my work asks, but with trying to do 3 other assignments at once and struggling to find time and motivation, I didn’t quite achieve all that I’d hoped. I really wanted to create a long lasting/interaction sustaining piece of work, and I think if I’d organised my time better and put more planning into this assignment I could’ve been closer to reaching my goal. I definitely think if I’d had better organisation and thoroughly planned out filming times, what I’d film, where I’d film than I really could’ve shown my full potential.

I knew of these issues throughout the final days leading up to the due date, and evidently you can see I had to make up for lack of video content by using Adobe Illustrator to make quick little clock/timers for one of my questions.

Despite the flaws in my project, I do think I’ve certainly improved and succeeded in some aspects. Although the technicalities to it are quite simple, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I managed to make something more technical on my own, and was able to source audio files, film my own videos, organise and make the patcher, and just generally navigate my way around Max a lot easier than I have in the past. The concept is evident, yes it’s not all that great, but I know I succeeded in creating a simple version of what I wanted. If I had the opportunity, in future I would definitely like to see how well this assignment could be done with more effort and time.

As for the group project, this time around we were certainly more prepared than we were with Assignment 2! Charmaine was super helpful and definitely the strongest team member, she found on image and divided it up into about 36 pieces, all equally shaped. The pieces were just rectangular, making it more difficult compared to that of the regular jigsaw shaped pieces, which you can kind of see which ones fit with which. We decided on this 1. because it was easier, and 2. because it makes it more difficult for players. We intended on having a reset button for when players finish the puzzle, but discovered that unfortunately wasn’t going to work with how Presentation mode works and it would mean that we’d have to have pieces moved by keys rather than by the mouse (which we wanted. Camille very thankfully gave us the great idea of having it reset automatically on a timer. This added bit of fun, although it was tedious work, was really fun to see in action. As infuriating as it is, it sustains the interaction for a number of minutes as each ‘round’ only lasts a minute, and then the pieces reset to their original places. I don’t know that any of us have even been able to complete our own puzzle, so it’s definitely sustained our interaction!

In general, these assignments and this whole semester showed me how broad the creative process is. I had never heard of Max before this semester and hadn’t really ever had interest in this kind of software, but after 12 weeks of learning how to use the program, I’ve definitely learnt a lot about a whole different form of Media to what I was used to. This class allowed me to really trial and error my creative ideas, and it also allowed me to gather insight into so many other concepts and ideas created by my peers and tutor.

Here’s what my final solo patcher looks like: