After reading a few of the stories posted to this LiveJournal site, I chose to write a 55 word story. Here goes:
The teahouse owner shuffles to my table and announces, “the Maoist rebels have arrived.” He bows, palms pressed together, then disappeares. I glance towards the trio of soldiers huddled around the fire chanting propaganda from a book. The youngest looks at me, shifts his rifle to the opposite shoulder. I slurp my soup, waiting.
Our assignment this week was to read Smith’s Six Word Memoirs and then write one of our own. Here’s mine:
Don’t Google Your Way Through Life.
Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Help Me Get to the Subway
As the character in the video tries to get to the subway, he reaches three places where he can choose between going left or right. He holds up a brightly colored ball in each hand, each representing one of the choices. The user then holds a ball up to the video camera to designate which way the character should go. The camera reads the color of the ball and the story continues accordingly.
If the user chooses the wrong direction, the character gets beaten up and the game restarts.
The story was created using Processing and video.
I started by filming all the video. I had the actor walk to the subway and when he got to three separate points, he held up the two balls. Then we had to film him going the right way and going the wrong way. When he went the wrong way, I had two actors beat him up. It took about an hour to film.
Once I had the video, there were two different pieces of code that I needed. The first was to jump between video segments. After reviewing the available code online, there were two choices. I could either have different videos start and stop or I could make one long video with all of the choices and program Processing to jump to different points. The latter seemed to make more sense.
The next piece of code I needed was for the video camera on my computer (or an external video camera) to register the different color balls and jump to the different parts of the video based on it. This was the most frustrating and most difficult to figure out, but Shawn was a huge help during his office hours.
Once I had the code, I had to test it. Obviously the hardest part was the different lighting conditions, which affected how bright the pixels were on the screen.
I expanded on this idea in my final project for the semester, “Project Run Away.”