Done (ish)

Hallelujah. Finally sent everything in after a long and frustrating day dealing with a bad internet connection and massive file sizes. At a few minutes to midnight, the countdown for the large file sending service I was using read 2 hours and some; after waiting 2 hours and some it read 1 hour and some, so I went to bed and let it load overnight. I hope everything made it to where it needed to go. There is a lot that I wish we could have captured in the animation, like the more discreet movements of the agents or the objects in the ritual like kero cups and the tills, but I don't have the technical know-how to understand whether that was ever really feasible (or how many more dozens of hours would have been needed to accomplish those tasks). I'd like to continue to fine-tune the ritual model, but perhaps what we need right now is a bit of time to think about it and recharge for next semester. It's been a tremendous learning process and I'm really grateful that I was pushed out of my comfort zone and forced to learn new software and new ways of thinking. This whole thing has encouraged me to think about the way I use different technologies and to recognize their flexibility... almost anything can be done if one has the patience and the chutzpa to go for it.

Final Countdown

This is it. I've been e-mailing with Pengfei, Emily and Diana about coordinating the final put-together, in which the objects and people (grafted with the mo-cap movements) are imported into the CAROSA map, and then the entire animation is carried out and made into a .mov file that I will then edit in iMovie and to which I will add the voiceover/music. The goal is to send the final product in by 4pm Tuesday. It's scary because it feels like there are lots of balls in the air; each person is responsible for crucial steps of the process. Here's to hoping everything goes smoothly. I've got the audio ready to go... with luck, the whole thing will be just under 6 minutes long. One of the biggest issues right now is fixing bugs in the skeleton/mo-cap part of the animation (in other words, ensuring that the agents in the model are performing the actions I did in the mo-cap suit). I'm not a religious person, but if I were, this would be the time to pray. I'll invoke Jediism for now: please oh please, let the force be with us.

Screen capture of the model as is (courtesy of Pengfei Huang):

Mo-Cap

This morning I suited up to do the motion capture for the model of the ploughing ritual. I had written a list of all the discrete movements that might take place during the ritual, from drinking chicha from a kero cup to slicing the throat of a llama, from drunken staggering to rhythmic dancing. It was a process not unlike filming a movie; there are takes, someone yells "action," and sometimes one must do away with inhibitions. A friend who is a DMD major was working in the room where we were doing the motion capture and there were a few embarrassing moments (like when I mimed a man drunkenly urinating).

We are well on our way, I think, to having a really cool model. Brigitte is working on putting together the "schedules" of all the agents participating in the ritual (we will have to cap the total number at 20, which is fine but not quite the crowd I had envisioned); I've been researching and writing the script for the animation as well as writing voicover text for the final product. I'm looking forward to hearing Bauer's responses to my questions. Perhaps he will be able to clear up some of the remaining confusions about the ritual, particularly regarding the two different fields and the observation of the sun on the day of the ritual.