Squelchy (World War Zen)

Squelchy (World War Zen) is a toy that puts the user into the weird, squishy, distorted headspace of a stressed mind. I wanted this project to be more abstract than my previous ones, prioritizing evoking visceral emotion in the user. I want the user to be able to experience this project in almost a trance-like state, watching the hands, textured using photos of my own hands, flock and move and twist in unnatural yet believable ways. The relentless black background puts the user into my imagined mindspace, empty except for the confines of the spinning cube. The hands evoke a sense of humanness as well as the sensation of physical touch. The user is able to generate individual hands as well as spawn groups of hands. They are able to let the hands drop and regenerate them over and over again. The user is also able to turn around to generate heads that fall and crunch against each other.

The entire experience is overlaid with audio clips from this quarter (distorted using granular synthesis). Sometimes I record moments I want to remember — conversations in cars or at the end of parties or when someone is playing guitar in my room. This project immerses the viewer in my current jumbled, distorted headspace, feeling scattered and replaying my college experience as I round out my last fall finals week.

Reflection:

This was by far my favorite project and the most representative of my creation style and goals. I would love to continue working on this and refining it with multiple scenes, smoother transitions, and more audio capabilities (Right now I feel like I’m definitely pushing memory limits, so I need to figure out how to optimize that). I’d love to turn this project into a kind of beautiful nightmare dream/mind sequence. My audio isn’t the most refined, but I’m proud of where I’ve gotten with both audio and visuals. Creating semi-realistic motion definitely felt like a stretch a few weeks ago, and I’m glad to see how far I’ve come in actually realizing exactly what I was envisioning in my head.

Camera Controls:
1: Camera 1 (spinning box camera)
2: Zoom out Camera 1
3: Low view camera (falling hands)
4: Head camera
H: Turn head camera around (to turn and face the heads)

User Controls:
Space: Generate individual hand
G: Generate 100 hands
D: Drop hands
R: Delete all hands (refresh)
J: Generate falling head
F: Spawn heads inside box

Project Files:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14ydcWTmlUhlIOaWMQjK2n57nI7UJCWFl?usp=sharing

Milestone 2

Milestone 1

TO DO :
- add motion
- add realistic hand texture
- camera rotation
- sound synchronization