Final Entry: Post-Showcase Debrief/Reflection
It’s official. The visual music project is now complete. The live coding music performance was a big hit throughout the building on the night of the showcase, and my work recieved much praise from my public audience. I have to admit the biggest thrill was the split second in the dark room every time Lorena first started playing, and the visualizer lit up the room, and I heard the gasps and oohs and ahs one typically hears while watching a fireworks display. My work bringing that kind of wonder was one of the driving forces behind working on this for a full year.
Finishing off the debrief, the only issues that came up were fine tuning the the levels of the animation and my live timing with the performances during the first two performances of the night. The biggest laugh of the night, as Lorena and I have reflected, was how we had maybe three to four performances planned, to be spaced out by maybe the half hour depending on the crowds we got into the room. Instead, people kept pouring into the room, performances overlapped with each other, and we ended up going through our performance at least eight times. At one point the crowd overflowed into the hallway. The night could not have gone any better.
There was a pleasantly surreal feeling of seeing my year-old vision in real life. It was exactly as I pictured it, and I later found myself lucky in that regard, as I later heard the war stories of classmates making compromises to meet deadlines, some even changing their entire ideas halfway through. Now, nearly two weeks after the show, I find a surprising bittersweet feeling with the project now completed. I miss what once instilled an absolute terror in me. While I’m more than glad that it is finished, I miss working on it at the same time, having been doing it for so long. In reflection, with the kind of work I want to be doing, projects like this included, I suppose I’ll have to get used to this bittersweet reaction. I’ll be working on projects, like films and games and other media projects, for months or even a year, and I’ll get attached. I know because it’s how I’ll make myself driven to do my best work rather than go through any motions.
Anyway, to conclude this train of thought on something more on topic, the number one response the project received was questions and ideas about public use for this idea, and what my future plans for the project were. I’ll conclude with the same statement I repeatedly answered them with: My immediate plans are to have an edited voiceover video of the performane uploaded in the near future, to get thr project out into the world. As for the future, while I will certainly step away from this project for a while (I’ve worked on it for an entire academic year), there is not a doubt in my mind that I will return to this with fresh new ideas for expansion and further public implementation. For now, though, it’s pretty cool as is.
