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Senior Thesis: The Big Idea

Last semester I had a talk with John Kuiphoff and he gave me great advice. John told me about one of his friends that does animation. The friend chose one element of animation to focus on in his career. This gave me great inspiration to focus on facial expressions. The part of me that is greatly enraptured with psychology was drawn to the idea of expressions in animation. In this project, I want to dip into the world of facial expression.

My first big idea is to incorporate music into my project. I want to have a close up of a face that reacts to different genres of music. I want to really focus on smoothness and the realness of the facial reaction of music. For the face, I would have the 3D model to be a female in her late teens or early 20’s. I am a bit conflicted on what my time duration would be. I would love to have it on loop. So maybe having 30-50 seconds of animation would be great to present. The music that I will choose will be royalty free. The genres would most likely be: Pop, Emo, Alternative, Country and Screamo. I am hoping that this will be my project. However, I do have an alternative project just in case.

My alternative idea would be to animate a mermaid captured in an aquarium. I would focus on her sad expression through the glass aquarium. However, with this idea, I would animate her swimming around in the glass water filled cage. This could help me work on the smoothness of my animations as well. I would include music in this idea too. However, it would not be the focal point like in my main idea. The music should be more incorporated in the background. I would want the music to be somber in mood, as you see the mermaid locked away for the entertainment of others. This animation I would also love to have on loop. This animation length would be about 45 seconds long.

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Project SYNC

For my senior thesis project, I’m interested in creating a series of motion graphics inspired by music. I’m inspired by graphics that both accompany live musical performances and smaller scale looping graphics that accompany tracks on Spotify Mobile. I’d like to create motion/video graphics that will accompany a song and add more depth and elements of storytelling when paired with the music.

This past summer I interned for a marketing company doing motion graphics and video editing, gaining more experience using After Effects and video editing software. I really enjoyed it, so I’d like to strengthen my motion graphic skills and create some work for myself. I was inspired by the looping motion graphics which accompany many songs on Spotify Mobile, and would love to try my hand at creating my own.

Over the summer I also went to a Billie Eilish Concert where I was captivated by the background visuals which spanned 3 huge screens and the stage itself, and the ways which they accompanied her performance so well. With my thesis I’d love to create a variety of visuals that tell a story when paired with pieces of music.

I’ll likely have to reach out to the artists who’s work I’m interested in using for permission, but I guess it’s all part of the process. I’m hoping to create some looping, formatted for mobile, “spotify-esque” graphics as well as some longer, standard video format graphics that may change throughout a songs entire duration, and possibly even some graphics designed to span a series of screens, perhaps to accompany a live performance.

I’ve always been interested in combining my love of music, performance, visual art and animation, and I feel like this is a great opportunity to do so.

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Senior Thesis – Preliminary Thoughts & Ideas

Senior Thesis was always something I wanted to enter into knowing full-well what I wanted to accomplish. Being someone who has skills in a range of areas – cinematography and video editing, audio recording and production, digital painting and illustration as well as physical design and creation, I have felt overwhelmed in the broadness of options I have to produce a singular final project. 

Should I focus on a skill I’m proficient in?

Or should I reach for something I have no idea how to do?

After many sleepless nights and anxiety-filled brainstorming sessions, I think I’ve come across an idea that has sparked my interest unlike any that have crossed my mind thus far – guitar pedals. While building guitar pedals from scratch is quite a popular hobby, I have never dabbled in the craft or found much interest in them at all despite being an active guitarist for over 11 years.

I keep coming back to an encounter I had recently while buying a homemade guitar pedal (quite legitimately one of the only pedals I’ve ever bought) from a true DIY man, “I never really bought any pedals growing up because none of them had the sounds I wanted, so I just made them myself.“

My jaw dropped, man is he right.

My first goal is to learn how to build a guitar pedal from the bottom up – understanding electronic components and how they work and alter sound, soldering and wiring the printed circuit boards, creating unique enclosures using digital fabrication and branding the product to be my own. 

Once I generally understand the mechanics and intricacies of guitar pedals, I want to push the limits. Although this second phase is still in the pre-production stage, I would like to integrate features that have never been used before with an effects pedal. Whether that means adding proximity sensors that modify the tone depending on how far the player is from the pedal or having the pedal interface with your phone, I want my device to be unique to both the guitar gear world and Interactive Multimedia. 

As this process continues, I can also focus on certain aspects of the build to exemplify my talents. For instance, if I have more difficulty than suspected with the electronics portion of the build, I can focus on creating interesting and exciting enclosures that spark attention to my skills in design and laser engraving. Reversely, I can focus on creating the most distinctive tones and features a guitar pedal can have, utilizing microcontrollers such as Arduino to make the pedal more interactive. 

I am very excited and a bit nervous to see where this goes, but alas, I have an idea and I am going to run with it.

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My Thesis Project: Brainstorming

In class, we were asked to provide three ideas, so it seems to me that I should report those as my first post to the thesis class blog! Naturally, I had done plenty of thinking about my own thesis over the summer (and even before then), so I was definitely prepared to talk about two ideas in particular. Though, the “crazy” idea — perhaps we can substitute “particularly ambitious”? — had been floating around in the back of my mind a bit, too.

First Idea: Most Likely

Essentially, it is a web-based application for creating your own cross-stitch patterns. I was inspired by the obvious connection between this style of embroidery and pixel art, since each stitch is made in rows and columns. However, there are limitations of trying to represent a cross-stitch pattern as pixel art. For example, a program for pixel art will be unable to mix colors within a single pixel (as some patterns may call for), nor is it able to do any outlining between the pixels (the way backstitches are sometimes used).

A natural extension of this tool would be the ability to customize a pattern based on a digital image. While there are tools that can convert your image into pixel art, which usually also recommend which thread colors to embroider with, no program that I have found online factor in the two shortcomings of pixel art.

Basically, this thesis would be a major design and development project, with a focus on user interface (UI), computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Second Idea: Alternative

This was actually my first idea for a thesis project. It would be a revisiting of one of my early IMM projects: a game using abstract art to convey a message about the pressure to assimilate. The original venture was in p5.js (not p5.play!) and was never completed. The idea seemed to me the perfect way to come full circle as a college student. From my first coding class, to my final project as an undergraduate!

However, I am starting to question whether a career in game development is right for me. There are some serious cultural issues in the video game industry, such as working extreme unpaid overtime in periods of “crunch.” As a survivor of the Downingtown STEM Academy, I have learned the value of sleep, pacing myself, self-care, standing up for myself/my needs/my boundaries, and keeping sane. Basically, if I don’t go into game dev, why should my thesis project be a game?

I do, however, still consider this a legitimate alternative since there are clearly valuable skills to be learned by tackling my game as a solo project.

Third Idea: Particularly Ambitious

This one is hard to describe, but basically I want to consider accessibility in VR for people with limited vision by instead focusing on audio design. This would be less a game and more a toy/experience, as a person dons a headset and is tracked in their space. As they approach certain auditory stimuli, the [surround] sound may grow more intense. Some items would be interactive. I would want to include some tactile feedback as well, such as a gentle breeze.

It’s a more underdeveloped idea, but I consider it ambitious because I would probably have to learn to model, rig, and animate most of the objects in the scene. While I do want to expand my skill set through this project, I would much rather focus on my ability to problem-solve using code.

If you got this far, congratulations! This has been good practice building a post. Remember to check out the “Thesis Projects by Student” page and bookmark my category (Robin Friedman) for future updates.