Advanced Play Design - Week 1 - Play and Self - Samridhi Handa

By Samridhi Handa

Advanced Play Design

Week 1: Play and Self

Annotation

RATIONALE: What I have done: For this week’s response for Advanced Play Design, we had to create something related to ourselves. This week, we were focussing on how we can relate play with our own life. I thought I could use play and sound to document my daily regime. I used more sound and less visuals for this week’s response. This week, I decided to play and experiment with sound and portray my routine. I designed a 3d model of my apartment and showed a day to night cycle with sounds to point towards what time of day it is. I have added the video, flat renders of the model and screenshots of my work as I went through with this project in this post.

Why I worked on this idea: I felt this video and working with sound was the best way to depict myself playfully. As I live alone, and given the current situation I am home, mostly, these are the only kind of sounds that I hear (sounds from outside and keyboard sounds). This also kind of portrays the looping routine I have nowadays.

METHOD: For showing my routine, I observed and took pictures of my own studio apartment. Further, I created the 3d model of my whole apartment in Maya. After creation of the 3d model, I installed various camera in the model and took renders from all angles. I also played with the lighting to show the day-night routine. I took separate renders for the lighting. I compiled everything in after effects. Furthermore, I worked with sounds. I took all sounds from online resources. The resources have been mentioned below. The sounds I used helped me explain what time of the day it was. Also, I added keyboard sounds to depict how I work all day in front of my computer screen. I worked with video and sound editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. This gave me my final output.

CONTEXT: I researched thoroughly before I made this project. I researched online before arriving at this idea. I had many inspirations to create this project. Some of them are mentioned below:

• Routine animation by filmnow: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6l90ks
• Works by David Kamp. David Kamp is a sound designer based in Berlin. He has worked with many sound designers and animators. His works can be accessed on his website: https://www.studiokamp.com/sound-for-animation/
• Jeff Shiffman, who is a sound designer for animation and is the co-owner of Boom Box Post.

https://www.asoundeffect.com/animation-sound-design/

REFLECTION/OUTCOME: After the creation of this project, I felt how great this chance was. It has given me a glimpse into my own self. It has made me notice things about myself which I often considered a part of my normal life. It has helped me reconnect to myself and my home. As the topic was play and self, I have been able to express myself with the help of this platform and share my own personal experiences with others too.

Conceptually, this project was not only playful but also offered me a deeper insight into my own routine. It is a kind of documentation of my own life these days. I realised after the creation of this project that play is not only about having fun, but also play shows us parts of life which we often can’t notice. It helped me notice how my day goes by. It also helped me contemplate about the time I spend on my laptop and how much I enjoy working.

Technically, this project has helped me play with realistic sounds. I have never played and experimented with real sounds in any project. This was a chance to tinker and work with realistic sounds. This project also let me play with lights and I enjoyed working with that. I learnt how I should be using various values of colours to generate various kinds of lighting throughout the day.

We learnt about various forms of play in our class. I further read about those various forms of play and learnt about them. I think I could associate play in this project as a form of ludic play. Because ludic play provides a knowledge of things, and kind of draws upon past experiences. This definition of ludic play was provided by a British psychologist, Corinne Hutt, in the year 1979.

Overall, this project was a fun experience. I think I could expand the sounds and working with lights on a larger scale in the future. I could even make a major project using only sounds and music as my resources. This project has enlightened me about the role of sounds in any project and has also sharpened my sound editing skills.

REFERENCES: Music resources used in the project are:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih4_1FyVjaY
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rvc63Ez6DM
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEi8ZjfYa9E
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0aADZQ2df4

ITERATIONS: I have worked on this project with multiple iterations and tests. Iterations have been shown in a PDF document called “documentation of work” attached with this post and some failed attempts have been documented below:

https://youtu.be/QBM_8WBZud8

https://youtu.be/c3ctgrZnizM

https://youtu.be/Z1jgHPPhxsQ

Downloads:

Download File: documentation-of-work.pdf