APD Week 8 - Play & Audience

Theme:

Play & Audience - to consider the role of the audience in our works and how we might involve them in a meaningful way.  

Method:

I will use dynamics/physic properties in Autodesk Maya to create a ball race machine, displaying the results as a video. Meaning and purpose behind the outcome of the ball race will be entirely dependent on the audience's emotional investment, as the results of the race will be fixed.

Context:

Ozzy Man Review: Thrilling Marble Race - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7mhFTAJvxA

The key inspiration for my response, this comedic commentary of a ball race serves to captivate and engage the audience through humorous and invigourating language. Despite having fixed results due to the medium of film, the race itself is playfully engaging for the audience to experience.

Rolling Ball Toys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afga_SYXsi8

Similar in concept to the ball races, rolling ball toys roll the balls through set tracks and obstacles to get to the end of the tracks. The toy structure create a playful sense of wonder and awe in the audience, who become entranced in watching the balls move through each obstacle.

Response: 

After being inspired by the idea of “Snail Races” and Ozzy Man Review’s ball race, which are entirely dependent on audience investment, I began creating a slope in Maya with gravity physics on 5 coloured balls. Due to the required angle of the slope, the balls were picking up too much speed, either clipping through the slope or flying off the edge of the slope before they could reach the end of the track. I eventually moved towards a smaller active area in a drop-box, also preventing me from having to move the camera around so much.

I started looking at the track pieces in various rolling ball toys and thinking about which I could reuse in my drop-box structure. To help maintain the engagement through suspense, I kept adding, adjusting or rotating the obstacles so that the winner of the race wouldn’t be easily predicted early on in the race.

Reflection:

My primary goal for this exercise was to create a work where the audience’s investment was the crux of the piece. Since the results of the race would never change due to the video format, the results of the race would be completely meaningless without the audience’s engagement.

After testing out my video response on an audience I’m quite happy with the results; nobody was able to predict which ball would win the race, and everyone was surprised when the balls started glitching out, getting stuck or flung from the race. The audience was definitely interested in the race and engaged with what was happening.

To take this to the next level I could add extra sections that take up the remainder of the screen, finding ways to move the balls horizontally as well as back up to the top of the screen to go through more obstacles in a new section. Doing so would extend the length of the piece and would allow for greater creation of suspense and thus intrigue in race.