Exercise 3-1: Mood Mix

For this exercise, my goal was to show a transition from a positive mood to a negative one. I took footage of myself writing that was meant to show optimism and diligence, hope for the future. Then, I took footage myself with flashing red lights to show despair and helplessness. I wanted to tell the story of how it feels to start off as a hardworking, happy student that eventually spirals into depression and the feeling of always being behind no matter how much you do. 

For the first scene, I created it by pre-writing a bunch of words in a notebook and then filming it in a way that you can see me writing more words. At the end, to contribute to the positive atmosphere, I purposely put things like exclamation marks and a smiley. For the second scene, it was done in complete darkness. I did not show the environment at all, just myself with my head in my hands and a red light flashing on and off. I really wanted to use lighting in this particular scene to convey the negative feelings.

This is my first video: https://youtu.be/n8IpUAJixDA

This is my second video: https://youtu.be/JUWiEKGyiHk

I wasn't able to completely get it working. My idea was to have the "." key on the keyboard be the crossfade trigger. The scene was to start on the writing video, then trigger the fading/mixing when you pressed the "." button. It would mix three times, gradually adding the second video until the final frame was entirely the second video of the flashing red lights. In TouchDesigner, the plan was do this by using movieIn TOPs, over TOPs to overlay the text, and then use keyboardIn, select, count, and math CHOPs to handle the keyboard tap logic. Each press of the "." would increase the opacity of the second video. Lastly, the cross TOP would of course be the one showing the mixing. One thing I added to the network while actually creating all this was also playing around with lighting for the first video to make it appear more bright and happylike.

I set everything up and had the logic work, but ultimately, pressing the "." key just keeps increasing the count only to immediately set it back to 0 when it shouldn't be. I've troubleshooted for so long and in so many different ways, but I can't seem to figure out the problem.

Process screenshot:

Beginning video screenshot:


Ending video screenshot:


Again it's definitely very messy and not super great. I'm sorry about that.

References I used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGTvjTO2fLI
https://youtu.be/-eTXg4Xh3_s?si=zMP-TT5GU3E-P6PZ


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