s3898709

[s3898709]

Week 12

Reflection

Much hasn’t happened over the past week, so I want to spend this section reflecting on the 6th Capitol Demo

This was the final caption testing session, so I wanted to have everything as locked in as possible by this stage. And I can say with confidence that, yes, I am indeed at that stage! There were only a few minor tweaks to finish the project. The biggest one was to manage the dynamics of the commentators a bit better so that the peaks of their voices didn’t destroy the eardrums of everyone who was listening, so once I’ve placed that in, I’ve pretty much locked in my final piece!

Progress

This week is just getting a few minor tweaks embedded into the project as I thought of them, taking notes when I thought of it and implementing it when I got the time to go to my computer to fix it. One such issue was the timings of when the players appeared on the screen because, after some consideration, I thought the players didn’t appear quickly enough, given the high BPM of the accompanying audio piece.

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Week 11

Reflection

For this week’s reflection, I want to dive into my experiences of creating the video and sound for the project, as each week, I’ve only altered the video slightly with a few changes, so today, I wanted to take a holistic approach to video and audio. See a screenshot below of my timeline from Final Cut Pro.

With the audio, because there are quite a few aspects to it, to help manage the volumes, I’ve placed them all into separate compound clips. Within the compound clips, the volume of the individual clips are managed against each other so that when the compound clips overlap each other in the main timeline, I can adjust their volume and place effects onto all of the affected clips. One such example of this is with the commentators, who each recorded on their own devices and then set up their recordings. Because of this, their volume was not only different between the two commentators, but the actual pickup pattern was different because of the microphone. So, after getting their volumes balanced against each other, I placed an adaptive limiter and a compressor onto the commentator’s voices. The purpose of the adaptive limiter is to have the volume of both the commentators constantly reach the same output level. Then, the compressor is to help reduce the dynamic peaks because commentators tend to get quite excited when key moments happen within the match (I would know as I also do commentating myself).

Then, regarding the video clip, most of the things that I needed to do were involved with the into, as the gameplay section of the video is all locked in and can’t be changed (in retrospect, I think I might have messed up my recording quality settings as I don’t think it ended up recording in HD). However, the critical aspect of the intro was introducing who was on the teams and enhancing the lighting experience, as the projector within the Capitol Theatre provides a light source. Due to this, when the lights go to a blackout in the intro, I plan to have the video also reflect this in the video. This way, the audio will die out, the lights will blackout and the video will go black simultaneously, creating an effect that will help the audience distinguish between where the intro sequence stops and where the gameplay sequence begins.

Progress

This week’s focus has been on fixing the sound effects within the audio. After last week and getting the background music synced at a better level with the commentators, many of the audio cues I had reflected onto the lighting system were not as audible because the commentators overpowered it, but because there is no way to extract the sound effects from the music clip what I’ve had to do is hop in game and go into recon mode where there is music. Then, I’ll add the extra sound effects on top of the other audio.

Additionally, because the sound effect is much more prominent, I’m adjusting when some of the colour changes happen within the Pharos session so that the colour changes occur at the exact moment the sound effect plays.

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Week 10

Reflection

From the testing session in week 9, there were a lot of improvements to make, so let's go straight into that! This was the first session with the commentators, so many issues were with the audio. The biggest one is the volume of the commentators themselves was way too overpowering. This error comes from my bias in running the broadcast for competitive gaming, as often the music needs to be significantly lower than the commentators. However, when initially setting the volume of this, I didn't consider that my design for the Capitol heavily relies on the intro music and some of the audio cues that come from the in-game sound effects.

The most complex challenge of these potential alterations will be obtaining the individual sound effects to put into the audio track so that the audio cues will be heard more easily without boosting the in-game music. The challenge is that there is no way to extract the sound effects from the audio track, as in Splatoon, the music is integrated into the same track as the sound effects. I'll need to investigate how to tackle this.

I'd also like to note in terms of the lighting, everything beyond the intro sequence is pretty locked in, as it's all working as I'd like it to work. The main focus points with Pharos will be syncing the music more closely to the lighting changes in the intro.

Progress

This week's focus has been on getting the intro of the lighting sequence more closely locked down. Primarily, this has been focused on the arch surrounding the screen. I've made quite a few changes over the weeks, however, after seeing the 5th testing demo, I'm making a call to just have the left and right flash simultaneously rather than alternating. I kept finding that it either felt too slow or disorienting having a light turn on during the off-beat.

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Week 9

Reflection

Going from last week to this week, there hasn't been too much work on the project, as there was a focus on collecting some video and audio footage for the project. However, during the recording session with the commentators, there were a few key things that I picked up. The first was learning how 'scripted' the intro sequence needs to be. This is mainly due to the strict timeframe between each 'movement' within the audio. So with the commentators, we had to prepare a somewhat comprehensive plan on how to tackle this introduction.

I'm also on a bit of a wall regarding what direction to take the research, so I'll look around for next week's blog to see if I can find something to dive into.

Progress

This week has been quite dry in terms of progress. The main things that I did was fixing all of the broken aspects from the last test session in the Capitol.

Also, I changed the intro sequence slightly so that the entire room would flash with the beat as the game began so that it would intensify the excitement going into the match.

You can see the test session here: https://youtu.be/R7za6Ijy6QA

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Week 8

Reflection

Last week's test was by far the most positive feedback session yet, which was awesome to experience. People were very optimistic about the entire experience. I could hear from some of the talking during the showcase that I've definitely got this up to being an awesome experience, which has been great! Also, it was terrific to see the colours accurately represented finally. 

But, there's always room to improve, so here's what I took from last week's test and what I'm going to try and work on implementing over the coming weeks. Although I will say it is a lot more minor adjustments now. These include;

Having the penalty light pulse

Sync up the intro to be more in sync with the music

Darken the roof lights so that it doesn't overpower the walls

Sometimes, blue goes in the wrong direction on the roof.

These are some simple fixes; however, this week, I'm focusing on another aspect of the project...

Progress

The focus of this week has been on two aspects: collaboration and the milestone presentation. The milestone presentation will occur next Tuesday, so I will spend some of the time working on the project this week; however, my work focuses on collaboration. Moreso, it's to get the parts finished in which I need assistance from other people in the Splatoon community. The people I had in mind were NineWholeGrains and ShinyHunterZach. Both of these two have done the live commentary for the Nintendo Splatoon Championship 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/live/ecsVny3ebQ0?si=dFgsCA0iOy-7dSHw) and have helped out with the major in my organisation ran - FABL (https://youtu.be/Kz5w3a8Z_tM?si=PHLddrdJlB-PMwyi) so I've worked with them in the past, and luckily for me, they were happy to help out.

When getting them ready for this recording, I had a few dot points to cover to make sure that they were going in the direction I wished for (see image below). During the session, they were happy to follow all directions given, and we also had some discussions and improvements during the session on how to improve the commentary further which I appreciated.

Another collaboration I had to get done to deliver an awesome experience was to get some free cam footage of the stage that the match is set on so I could enhance the experience beyond what the standard in-game tools allow for. This was a bit harder to search for someone to help out. My usual contact unfortunately had their console broken, so they couldn't help. I then asked them if they knew anyone else, which led me to someone who knew someone else... who had temporarily lent their console to another person. With the people I know having the mod all unavailable, I finally turned to Twitter (or X as it's called now), and luckily, I got reached out to by SourBraix who had access to the mod. With a bit of direction from me, we got the shots that I wanted. Phew.

Research

This week, I looked at the Splatoon 3 Championship for 2023 to see what Nintendo was doing to try and make their event 'awesome'. And as expected, their live event still doesn't match up to their competitors in competitive gaming. However, being limited to showcasing the competition at an exhibition is quite a limiting factor in creating this type of experience. One particular section I wanted to focus on was how they are sharing some aspects that I'm doing in my work. At the startup of the match, the lighting system they had was to project both of the team's colours, which I did in my project, and then at the end of the match flood the area with the winning team's colours. Again, I already do this, but it shows that this is the direction I should be following and enhancing.

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Week 7

Reflection

From the testing session in the Capitol during the mid-semester break, the key change that I needed to make was to "be bolder". Once again, the colours aren't right (probably due to the architecture works and the amount of white that is in the space), and we can also now clearly see and compare it to the screen and how off it is (even if they are digitally the same hex colour). Luckily, I was given the opportunity to just play with the colour wheel directly in the space, so I now feel like I've got the colours done. Just need to get it ready for the next demo.

Also, going along with the theme of being bold, it was suggested that I add more 'flourishes' for when something happens on screen, so given that I'm not using the screen lights for pretty much anything currently, I'll probably end up using those lights for this.

The other thing that was noticed (or wasn't) was the team's progress within the roof. In general, I got the census that people would prefer that the entire rim lit up rather than individual lights (which will be easier for me, so that's a bonus).

Overall, though, I think the syncing up with lights with the video worked out well! And other than some more tweaks to get the whole thing in a draft state before next week's test session, it will be great because that demo was only half complete!

Research

Now, here's a bit of disappointing news. I can't find many academic sources or works that depict exactly what I want to do. Most of eSports flashy lighting procedures go into what I call the 'intro', which is essentially a hype reel before the game begins. The most that tends to happen in both the eSports scene and real-life sports is some animation (and maybe some lights turn on) when something like a goal (or in the same games akin to a goal) is scored. Nothing that really gives any indication of progress, or when a team holds possession. 

Now there are probably two main reasons behind this. The first is that it requires a lot of setup, and there are a lot of scenes to create if this were to be produced in a live setting (or a lot of complex code interacting between different applications and APIs). The second reason is that it doesn't make sense in a lot of games to have this sort of progression system. The game most akin to Splatoon in terms of its competitive ruleset is Overwatch. In Overwatch, you can respawn, and the rulesets are objective-based, rather than on elimination that occurs in many shooters or a 'goal' system like real-life sports and other sports like video games. Add in the fact that Splatoon has very distinct colours for each team and you can see why this idea hasn't been incorporated on a large-scale basis.

Progress

This week, I'm really trying to finish of the lighting design. That's because there will be such a long break before the next Capitol test, and also, I need to get some of the video elements (like the intro and getting commentators) started!

While I didn't really run into many challenges per se (other than testing what presets work the best with what I'm trying to produce), the biggest issue I ran into this week was the constant crashing of Pharos. I think in one night I encountered three crashes (which made me lose around three hours of work total). I think the issue with this was that I had my editing software, Final Cut Pro, open at the same time as I needed to test some things with that open simultaneously, but that ended up causing more hassle than it was worth (...yay).

The key changes I've made this week were changing up the colours and incorporating the other feedback (discussed above), as well as getting the intro in place. The purpose of the intro is to hype up the audience before the set begins, so I'm planning on starting with a small amount of lights, and then building it up so that people really feel like they're in for an awesome time. Luckily I decided on the audio piece early as it fits right into what I want to do (Surrender Peace by Grabbitz). The song itself builds up to a drop and the instruments combined with the style they're played in have a very similar vibe to Splatoon, so that's why I picked that track.

You can see this week's draft here ->

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Week 6

Week 6 - HME Blog

Reflection

From gathering feedback and reflecting more on my second demo in week 5, I need to separate the colours between the orange and the blue so that the colours are a lot more distinct and don't merge. Because of how cameras work, the demo looked better in the video than in the actual Capitol space, so going into this week, I will need to look more deeply into how I can separate these colours. Additionally, it's about time we got some actual gameplay footage to start seeing how much the screen looks with the lighting occurring simultaneously.

Research

After a more thorough understanding of what I'm trying to do here, I wanted to take a dive away from eSports and look at traditional competitive sports broadcasts. For this, I took a look at some of the animations that occur during AFL games in the MCG

This is precisely what I'm trying to accomplish in my own project. Firstly, the stadium lighting up in your team's colour when a goal is scored gives that thrill of excitement, one of the reasons many people prefer to watch games in person rather than online or on television because it provides that awesome experience. Second, it also helps anyone who doesn't understand how the game works, "Yes, team X just scored a goal". A design motif I'm constantly seeing from this clip and eSports design as well is the use of "waves" to show when a team has the advantage, which I'll lean more heavily into going forward.

Progress

For this week, my goal has been to take the feedback from my second demo and apply it to the Capitol viewing session that occurred during the mid-semester break.

The fundamental change I've made is that with the exclusion of the introduction, only one colour is present in the room at one time. This is so that it becomes crystal clear to any viewers who don't understand the gameplay that either blue or orange has possession.

I've also changed how the roof is working. Rather than just being a wave of who's in possession, I'm now having more lights turn on when either team increases their objective. However, creating this is very time-consuming as I not only need to know when each team loses and gains possession, but I also need to take into account the penalty points (since the objective doesn't progress with a penalty) and the actual point count being reflecting into the lights. To help me, I did create this sheet with a few timestamps to help me with this, since Pharos can't display the video at the same time.

While I haven't mentioned this earlier, this is also why, for the Demos, I've included a timecode element into the video, and these times accurately represent the timecodes that are also used in Pharos, just something I decided early on that has undoubtedly saved me a few headaches.

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Week 5

Progress

This week's main task was getting a range of examples going for the Capitol session that occurred on Thursday. From the first session, I found out that the yellow colours didn't come out well in the lighting system, so this time, I'm trying out the orange and blue colours you can find in-game (Splatoon). This aims to have some colour that pops out more. Additionally, I learned from the first Capitol session that the time-related animations must be a bit snappier (also an easy fix).

The rest of what I wanted to get done was to create a variety of different types of tests I can use for the actual project, particularly for showing which team is currently in possession of the objective since one of my goals for this project is to enhance the viewing experience for people who don't understand how the game works.

Reflection

From the second Capitol test that occurred on Thursday, here are my main thoughts...

Having the whole room move when a team is in possession, rather than the other two tests of half room and a rising light.

I was expecting this heading into the class, but it reduced the strength of the roof lights.

Also, incorporate a lot more black into the movements to showcase the colours more (this might also help reduce the roof lighting problem).

Here's a video clip from the test if you want to see that!

Research

Over the past few weeks, the Rocket League World Championship has occurred, and since this is my biggest inspiration for this project, seeing more of what they do has been awesome... which is what I'm going for. Here are two examples from that...

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Week 2

This week, there was a lot of focus on understanding what the Capitol system is capable of and getting a clear picture of how my projects will work.

From my understanding, I'll start with the eSports project, as this project will give me more flexibility in understanding how the Pharos systems work.

Most of the time this week was spent researching (since the first assignment was due) other works, but this has given me a clear understanding of what I need to do for this esports project.

From all of the works I looked at, a few key components must be included in my work to make it seem awesome. From all the works I looked at, there's one key, critical aspect that they all have: that you're fulfilling the audience's expectations. Is there a drop coming in the music? Have the lights reflect that drop. Do you need to get their attention? Drop the lights. There were other things as well, but you can see all of those examples here: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/s3898709-a1

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Week 1

Reflection

This week has been mainly about understanding what this course has to offer, as well as what types of projects and opportunities are available throughout this course. The two aspects that seem to interest me the most is the Capitol lighting system, as well as the music:not impossible vests. However, after the two ideas I've had, I'll likely stick to creating two projects for the Capitol (after some consultation to get the green light on both). 

Project Progress

Before we dive into the research, let's start by getting an idea of the two projects I'd like to do, or will propose as of this state. The first surrounds the idea of 'mesmerising' in which the concept features the classic game, 'Pong' and the project's premise is that the ball goes outside of the frame (utilising the Capitol lighting system). To make this idea more engaging, there will be sound effects and a soundtrack linked to the lighting/video, and potentially, as the time continues additional balls will appear.

My second idea focuses on the word 'awesome', and this project plays heavily into my interests. The idea of this project is to create an accompaniment to a live eSports competition, creating a lighting system that reflects the current state of the competition (winner, waiting for a match, match starting, etc.). Due to my previous experience, and the colourful palette of the game, I would ideally cater this experience to Splatoon. The idea around this is to increase the 'hype' around an eSports match, making an awesome experience for the audience.

In both of these projects, I'd ideally like to use the Captiol lighting system, as well as the projector that is within the theatre.

Research

The main research I conducted this week was looking at other works I could use as inspiration, and two stuck out to me for the eSports project. These are the FNCS Major 2 Grand Finals (Fortnite) and the RLCS Spring Major (Rocket League). Both of these major events use unique lighting setups to help enhance the experience for the viewing audience, whether in a real-life setting (RLCS) or a purely online stream (FNCS).