Weekly Reflection April 10-April 17

I can confidently say that at this point in the semester that I have a pretty complete and full-fledged project hashed out. I remixed everything and revisited the color correction on the shots to add the last professional touches to my work this past week. I now plan to bring it through further user testing in class tomorrow as I show a select few classmates the project and gather some feedback on some last minute tweaks that may need to be made before the showcase. Also, with the showcase coming up, I needed to think more about exactly how I was going to present my work. Last semester, for the winter showcase, I had the speakers and projector in the room with me, and I was able to bring attention from passersby with my midi controller and sounds I was making. I had a group of random objects with me (like a soda can with coins in it), which I instructed users to use to make sounds into a microphone. I then showed them how I crafted beats on the fly using otherwise unmusical sounds. Then, after they were aware of how things worked, I brought them over to another computer where they would put on headphones and listen to/watch my video trailer. This posed a few issues. Namely, people were sometimes hesitant to put on headphones for sanitary reasons. I came to the realization that I should actually loop my full project through the speakers this time around, use that music to draw people in, and then have periods where I pause the video and show them how I do it.

I found this article this week on finishing projects, which I thought was interesting. It speaks on how sometimes fear can prevent one from showing their project to more people (i.e. waiting for it to be “perfect” before showing it to anyone) during the development phase. The antidote to this is to actually be okay with showing it to everybody as often as possible. It can only help one’s work to constantly be gathering feedback and improving, and this takes eliminating fear to do so. One can actually limit their audience by “putting launch day on a pedestal.”