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Currently (Week 9), I am working on Unicorns stuff. We had a pixilation shoot in the sheep meadow behind Morgan’s house on Thursday, and we have been working on the new edit. The new edit is a revised version of the Trouble With Unicorns script that we all wrote during Winter quarter. The storyline has been altered to accommodate the footage that we have. The total length will ideally be somewhere around 20-25 minutes now, and the message that we originally intended to come across, will hopefully now come across in a more condensed but equally powerful way.

I have been working today on the Dan special effects shot, and in the TUTORIAL SCREENCAST below, there is commencement with a detailing of a novel technique of rotoscoping, and some other various happy things regarding my workflow.

I taught part two of the After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. This time I was without any support from official people such as Stephanie Zorn, who was there to back me up last week. I thought it was going to be an assisted work-session type environment, where I would just walked around and acted as a consultant for people, helping them and giving out advice as I might. It turned into more of an hour and a half long demo of some more advanced features of After Effects. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really prepared for this presentation of features, and so it was (as I always am without preparation), fumbling, awkward, rambling, and probably lacking in clarity.

Keeping up with the workload of Hybrid music and New Media and everything else continues to be a challenge.

On Sunday I started working on bloodying my head against the brick wall that is the seemingly intractable problem of creating a specific stylistic form for the AI project that satisfies my artistic desires, and is conceptually valid. Allow me to elaborate.

The form of the project as it has stood so far is as follows: The animation would represent the output of the monitoring system of a software based reality in which existed an artificial intelligence, learning and developing skills and cognitive powers through interaction with this environment and the things in it. This would entail both a third-person omniscient perspective, and a relatively formalistic simplicity in the cinematographic style of the images. That is, aesthetic experimentation such as dual-screen, moving camera, crazy animation, and other such experimentation would not be overly suited to the idea. So if I were to proceed forward with this idea, it would basically consist of the following approach:

Have a third person omniscient perspective documentation of different scenes of the AI evolving. It would be embodied in a human or other form in its virtual environment. This environment would be the world that it perceives to be all that exists. It would learn progressively: how to respond to commands, things like training a dog by example (praise vs. reproach), learning everything as a baby would, by seeing and touching and learning by example. It would learn core necessities of intelligence: representation of knowledge through language, embedding of experience in memory structures, the ability to judge and reason based on learned knowledge, the development of goals out of these abilities.

Then, eventually, it would become aware of itself as a thinking entity, and probe the nature of what that might mean, and then it would be able to self-modify and probe the edges of its perceptual reality, and escape them and trigger an intelligence explosion, or some other unfathomable event, represented visually in an experimental and crazy way.
There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1). It is boring. 2). It is week 6.

There is no way for me to bring this project around in a way that is conceptually and aesthetically exciting to me at the same time. I have tried multiple different approaches, and done a ton of research, but nothing seems to work and spark my creative titillation.

So there are two options. 1). abandon this project and start on something else small in the middle of the quarter, meaning basically a wasted fall quarter, and failure in the sense of creating a project that will be output in a form that people can view. 2). re-imagine the project, in scope and stylistic form.

I think I’m going with option 2.

More about option number 2 and what it might entail next Wednesday.