isadora

Presentation:

Unfortunately, we weren't able to bring our project idea to full fruition before the presentation deadline, but we still felt proud as a group of what we achieved within the time. We all contributed illustrations and ideas, and I think some of our elements were quite compelling because of their illustrative nature. The project had a graphic identity that invited quite an immediate response, although it only performed about half of the functions we were hoping for it to have.

As it stood at the time, the "Astounding I" stall would recognise the user approaching and raise a curtain, and the eyeball character, although incomplete, would appear to watch the user. The piece did actually also project fortunes as a response to spoken user requests, although we were unable to incorporate the "scroll" flash animations we had made, which displayed the response on a scroll which appeared to be opened by the character. Also absent were the blinking light animations we had discussed, and we were unable to get the two halves of the character animation to interact properly. Overall though, our piece was not very far from its conclusion, and we would probably be able to overcome some of its issues given an extra week or two.

The stage was a mixed-media graphic work that we worked on collectively, and the various components and animations were a shared effort between the group. Our project may have suffered from a slight over-ambitiousness, as it turned out that combining all our various ideas in the time we allowed ourselves was more slow and time-consuming than we thought. Our one main error was that we under-estimated the need to troubleshoot, and so didn't allow ourselves any time for errors or difficulties in the manufacture of the end product. In future projects, we would probably have more rigid and time-specific goals with regards to the manual programming of the outcome.

I think as a group we were most proud of the outcome's personality and very instant, readable nature. We felt it made quite apt use of the Isadora platform and played well to our strengths as a group of illustrators. Obviously the technical facet of the project became under-developed, but overall, we were quite happy with our outcome.

If we were to continue the project, we would obviously be able to make the fortune-telling device as originally intended, but we felt it could make quite an interesting installation graphic piece, with a fun, sideshow feel. We had actually discussed making a material "tent" or stall to present it with, although we felt that logistically this may have been over-reaching, especially due to the demanding nature of the programming. We could also use the principles of our "artificial intelligence" set-up in other ways, and felt that it could be a good platform for further illustrative outcomes. The project probably wouldn't put any of us off using Isadora in future, if we had an idea that might require some of its software capabilities.