Evaluation; Performance Video January 20, 2011

For this project I have turned a PlayStation One Dance Mat controller into a controller that allows the user to control various loops, mostly within Ableton. I am proud of what I have achieved in this project as I have worked on my own with as little help as possible, I taught myself how to use Ableton and learnt to use a lot of different pieces of Freeware and Shareware  in my experiments of how I was going to go about making this project work for me and decide what programmes would ensure that my finished product would be user friendly when it comes to someone using the product that is not already familiar with it.

Whilst keeping the User Interface in mind I created my own cover for the Dance Mat so that the user would then be looking at my functions and not the functions that would have previously existed on the Mat should they have been using it for the game. I also made a helpsheet so that if the user did not know what it was that they had to do in order to use the Mat they could find out what all the buttons do and then begin using it from there. I also made visuals to go along with the audio so should it be used in perhaps a VJ environment then whoever is in control of the music is also in control of what is being shown on screen. I would have liked to have developed this aspect further but due to the time restrictions I was unable to achieve this with the limited Flash knowledge that I have.

I asked for advice with this from the people that I used to test it out. I took the mat into work one day and set it up so that everyone could have a go at playing with it and I could create some footage of the product in action. I asked everyone what they thought of the project and how I could improve it’s looks and it’s ease of use. Once taking this advice on board I then designed the various interfaces and took it back for them to use again. As for seeking advice from experts, it is not that I tried to avoid it but I did not seek it so that it would not cloud my vision of what I wanted to achieve by someone more experienced telling me to make it more complex. However, I did seek a fair bit of help on the Internet when I was trying to learn how to use Ableton, and I also got a fair bit of help from Dan when it came to starting off my Flash Action Script as there was not very much that I could remember when it came to programming.

If I were to make this project again, or have more time on it, the first thing that I would do would be to rework it so that there was the option of using two Dance Mats at once, allowing a multiplayer experience and getting two ‘musicians’ to work together. I would also learn/relearn more about Flash so that I could efficiently write out my Action Script so that everything works efficiently without having to spend days trawling the Internet finding out how to solve problems that arise when putting in a new piece of code. Other than this I am proud of how my project has turned out and I think that it is one of my best pieces of work over the two years. I have learnt a lot in this area and am glad to say that I was able to do it by myself.

Mat in Action With Ableton:

Mat in Action With Flash:

Calling It A Day January 19, 2011

I experimented a lot with various different forms of Action Script 2 in order to make my project work within Flash, and therefore making the audio and visual work at the same time. I have decided to call it a day on this project as I have found it quite hard to progress with everything and make it work in it’s entirety in Flash. I am happy with what I have achieved otherwise within Ableton and Flash.

What To Do With One More Week January 10, 2011

After the crit today we were all given another week in which to work on our projects. I think I am going to use this to my advantage, hopefully my second adapter will have arrived by then so I can utilise a second Dance Mat. While this means that I can over come all of my problems with running Ableton and Flash at the same time but only being able to control one each I do not think it will be all that successful. I need to make a list of the things I need to tweak in order to try and do this but I am not 100% confident that it will be very effective, if the video and the audio are being controlled separately then they will lose their sync and it may not look very effective. While I could try to overcome this by getting the user to use both mats they would still not be in sync and there would be the risk of everything still being out of sync.

I think that during this week I may not bring in the second Dance Mat and just work on tweaking the controls that I have made. As I have both audio and visual in Flash I think I will work mostly on the coding here so that all of the videos are working coherently and while I will lose the sound quality that I have in Ableton I think at this point it will be more important to have the sounds and the visuals together in one place that is easy to use. I have enjoyed this project a lot more than most of the past projects so I am quite happy to carry on with it and try to get it a little closer to perfect.

Testing The Mat With Flash January 8, 2011

I have added a little more to the Flash coding, I have made a simple section where the ‘Restart’ button takes the loops back to the beginning and so that pressing space (as ‘Pause’) pauses the piece. However it is somewhat buggy, I am yet to finish the code for the pausing so that it starts again when the space bar is pressed a second time, and the ‘Restart’ and ‘Pause’ actions seem to only be applying to the second, third and fourth videos. The coding for the video has been finished so that buttons ’1′, ’2′, ’3′ and ’4′ control the visibility of the video windows. Here is a screenshot of my .swf file with videos ’2′ and ’4′ turned off:

From here I then made new settings within USB Overdrive to see if I could get the Dance Mat to control what I have done in Flash so far. This was more successful than I was expecting as when I had tested it briefly before it did not work at all. The controls on the Mat are exactly the same as they are on the keyboard and here is a video of it being tested:

I would like to be able to get the coding sorted before the deadline as that means that I can have the visualisations and the music all in one place and can be controlled from a single programme as I have discovered that I cannot control two programmes at once with the same setting. While I have a finished project to present I would like to be able to get this done as well as an evolution point to present. However, if I do not get it done perfectly then I will present the Ableton work and then the Flash work and explain how I would plan to expand in the future.

Working With Action Script 2 January 8, 2011

So, after a lot of time spent researching with Dan, we managed to find various pieces of action script to put together in order to get the key press to turn the different loop animations on and off. The code we used consisted of key listeners and triggering the alpha levels.

myListener = new Object();
myListener.onKeyDown = function() {
if (Key.isDown(49)) {
if (_root.clipone._visible) {
_root.clipone._visible = 0;
} else {_root.clipone._visible = 1;
}
}
}
Key.addListener(myListener);

From here we then just needed to copy and paste the code, and amend it where necessary in order to facilitate the other three video clips that would need to be playing. Now I will test the various combinations that I have set up. I will see how this Flash set up works alongside Ableton, if I can put the .swf file in with the Ableton and alongside the .jpeg, however as I also have audio within the Flash file, I could change my key press layout in order to accomodate this and just use Flash instead of both.

Thinking About Visualisations January 8, 2011

Whilst I have been trying to figure out how to make my Button 10 issue co-operate I have been looking at how I can make some reasonably effective visualisations to accompany the loops that I have playing in Ableton. I’m not 100% sure how they are going to link with Ableton as I cannot play them within it using my Key Map, and I cannot have Flash and Ableton running at the same time from the same USB Overdrive setting.

However, these are the visualisations I have made. I used After Effects to make these, using plugins from the Trapcode Suite. The two particular plugins I used are called ‘Sound Keys’ and ‘Particular’; the ‘Sound Keys’ plugin analyses audio files and creates keyframes depending on the amplitude of the music within different ranges, the ‘Particular’ plugin creates Particles that move nicely with the ‘Sound Keys’ plugin and seems to provide a lot more control than other particle plugins that come with After Effects. I also owe a fair bit to a tutorial that I found on the Red Giant website (tutorial here), I used this primarily to teach myself how to use the plugins, and as a guide for what I could acheive. In the video they produce an effective very similar to what I wanted to create, I followed it closely to begin with but then as I created my three other files I strayed from the format and changed my own settings to create slightly different effects whilst still trying to keep a sense of uniformity intact.

I will now (with guidance from Dan) get experimenting with Flash and Action Script 2 to see how easy it will be to get the videos to be triggered from key presses. At the moment I will be happy enough with this happening from the keyboard alone, but if I can get it to work with the Dance Mat/Ableton set up then I will be most happy. This has now given me the idea for a back up plan however, if I can make things work with the Dance Mat, the loops and the videos in Flash then I could plausibly leave my Ableton set up and use Flash instead.

Testing With Ableton January 7, 2011

Here is a video of my friend testing my set up within Ableton. I chose to use a friend as they are not as familiar with this set up as I am so I figured it would be a good opportunity to test is usability.

I am still having trouble with the help sheet button, however I feel that there may be something obvious that I am missing in order to make this work. I am quite proud with how everything has turned out so far for this project, while it is not the most complex of projects I now have time to tweak settings and work a bit more on the visual aspects before the deadline. I think that my next job will be to trying to create some simple visualisations that move in time with the music, I will then aim to get these videos to be triggered with the same settings as my loops within Ableton. As I have previously mentioned, I am not sure how easy this will be to do, I have asked for a little more help with Flash so I think it may be a case of patience to see how easy it is to create and then go from there as to what I would like to achieve with it.

Making The Cover & The Trials of Button 10 January 7, 2011

I have now made the cover for my Dance Mat. It is basic but it resembles the mock up quite well so I’m pretty happy with what I have achieved. Here is the cover attached to the Dance Mat:

I have also made  some changes to the Help Sheet, due to problems that I encountered when testing my set up. I found that as I had Button 10 (pictured as ‘?’) to open a .pps file I then had no way to close it and make Ableton the active programme again, without having Ableton as my active programme my key press settings would not work. I had a think about ways I could then rectify this, the first idea I thought of would be to make a new key map, one that is not exclusive to Ableton but useable within all applications. Once I had made this, I tested it out (running both Ableton and PowerPoint at the same time) but once again it did not work.

I then had a little bit of a research session on the Internet to see what other methods I could use to go about this. I found some stuff about inserting .mov files into Ableton. I then decided to test this out. I then went through a simple, but kind of cheating, process of turning my .pps into a .jpeg to see if that would work in the same way as importing a .mov. The process I used was in no way scientific or complex, I just simply made a screenshot of the PowerPoint file and then edited it in Photoshop so that it was just the display, excluding the UI of Powerpoint.

I have now inserted this .jpeg into my Ableton session and it appears on the timeline and opens a window. My next obstacle was to find how to control the visibility of the window with a keyboard shortcut that I could easily assign to my leftover button. I looked at various options, while not really knowing what it was that I was looking for, and started off with the speaker option that I was using for the loops. I assigned this to the number five and then went back into USB Overdrive and assigned Button 10 to key press number 5. I tested it, it did not work, back to the drawing board. I then decided to look at whether or not I could find a shortcut for deactivating and activating the clip. After a little bit of Googling I remembered that this was something I briefly looked into when trying to figure out how my loops were going to play. I had not found anything then so my hopes were not high about finding anything in this instance. However, while looking at my various options I did find (in the common place hero of mine, the right click menu) that I could toggle showing the video window with the shortcut ‘alt+cmd+v’, I then went back into USB Overdrive and assigned this shortcut to the Key Press setting for Button 10. Tested it and had success.

This is a tangent that I think I may follow when it comes to visualisations. Should I have the time I plan on creating visualisations for each of the different loops that then turn on and off with the loops turning on and off. At the moment I am not quite sure how I would like to go about this as if I use this current method then I would need another four buttons (something that I do not have access to) or find another way to create a shortcut. However, with some assistance, I may be able to create something in Flash to do this. My knowledge in Flash is very limited, and probably quite outdated by now, so I’m not sure how confident I am to be going down this path.

Designing The Help Sheet January 7, 2011

As aforementioned, I will be using the ‘Left’ button on the Dance Mat to open a help file, which will provide the user with what they need to do in order to control the system. I decided to do this using Microsoft PowerPoint, this means that I can assign the button to the function of opening a file. I have saved the Presentation as a .pps therefore when it is opened it will go straight into the PowerPoint Presentation instead of going into the whole programme first. While there may be better ways in which I could have gone about this, I believe this would be the most effective way. I also believe that in doing it in this way I may make it easier for myself when it comes to inserting any visuals into this project to accompany the loops.

Here are the various screenshots during my process of creating the help sheet and how my design developed:

I quite like the final design that I have ended up with, it is colourful enough to fit in with the rest of the aesthetics of the system but is not too garish or ‘in your face’. In terms of adding the visualisations, I would like them to trigger when the loops are triggered, but I need to see what control I can get over the videos and how I can have them playing all at once or in different variations.

Final Mock Up Design January 7, 2011

Here is the final mock up design of the cover that I will be making for the Dance Mat. As mentioned in the previous post I have added the black outlines to all of the objects as I believe this makes it look smarter.

As you can see, in comparison to the older version this one looks a lot neater thanks to the black outline and gives a more uniform look when used in conjunction with the numbers that already had outlines. I think that the footprints still look a little messy in comparison to the rest of the design but this is due to the fact that I got all of these quick images off of Google searches (to make the process quicker and therefore increase productivity), when it comes to making the real thing they will be coloured in solidly like the rest of the icons and I will draw around my own feet in order to make sure that they are in proportion.

Now I will proceed to making my ‘help sheet’ that will explain to the user how to go about using the Dance Mat.