A night to remember

Ok so, having collaborated together as to the structural and conceptual whole of the piece, yet designing and coding our own individual parts, there came a time when we would have to put all the different parts of the piece together. And what a night it was...

Yesterday (Wed 8th Feb) I met up with Marina and Ruari and we went back to their place and set my computer up next to Ruari's in his bedroom. Still attempting to integrate webcam capabilities by using a hidden networked laptop, we attempted to set up a LAN between both PCs, however, the machines decided not to play fair.

Whilst at their Totnes house, I finished the design of the Desktop, complete with faux-ELIZA questioning and left it to lead into Marina's beach scene. Marina spent much of the day and evening having technical problems which prevented her from making any real progress with the design of the beach section. Slow-running computers and corrupted source files severely hampered her progress, until I finished my work and let her finish her design on my (faster) PC.

During this Ruari was completing design and coding on the forest finale, creating surreal images and intense error-ridden passages.

An interesting aside; in programming the Director projector (Desktop) to load up Marina's Beach section on conclusion, I also set Marina's to play the soundscape Ruari had written. Unfortunately, once the Beach director file finishes and loads up the Forest, the sound stops. As the Forest is too large to import into the Beach Stage, we're going to play the soundscape on Ruari's stereo in the studio, starting it by remote control once the user begins the Beach section.

However, I tested the application whilst listening to the soundscape through headphones and had a very eerie, subjectively terrifying experience, so when we have the space set up we're going to see if having the speakers really loud, or having the user wearing headphones is the best way to experience the sound.

Ruari eventually fell asleep (at about 4am this morning) after finishing the forest segment. Marina and I continued to test the timing and progression between sections until we were happy with it at approximately 6.30am!

We slept until 7.30am, now we're at Dartington waiting for SPU - sorry, Sound and Vision to open so we can begin to set up the studio for the performance.