'Serious Fun' Summary

Summary of the project 'Serious Fun':

We had to think of how to incorporate at least one of our characters into something that a person could interact with but, also prevent it from being a game. We pretty much decided not to use that puzzle pieces/blocks as they would be hard to fit in with the other characters.

Our first ideas were leaning towards using Max MSP more than processing by using the webcam and filtering a person out of the image while still letting them control the characters. We had many ideas involving a person interacting with the characters by controlling them directly mainly via the webcam and Max.

After a group meeting we realised that we thinking too literally and focusing too much on the narrative of the characters without involving an outside interaction. During the meeting and then after discussing it further afterwards we decided on the idea and meaning of consumerism. Using this general meaning we came up with more ideas but also decided to use only the one character; Corey's rabbit.

After more brainstorming and discussion we decided on a general idea and did ongoing research throughout the project to develop it further until we had what we wanted.
At one point we decided what we were doing was too much of a game and therefore had to change it slightly to more tightly fit the project brief.

A large influence to us during the project was the movie Dawn of the Dead. The characters and story line in the movie have strong associations with consumerism which match our own thoughts and also added to our idea.

Our final idea was to use only the rabbit(in the scene of an office - to portray him as an average human as a typical consumerist) constantly demanding coffee(showing his demands for a product that he wants rather than needs) and also a simple object that can represent unnecessary products that a person is likely to want. What the object may be is open to interpretation by each individual person.

A person was to interact with the rabbit by feeding him coffee and giving him the object(which we had as a random coloured ellipse in processing) whenever he demands it. Specific things would happen at certain times. For example if he hasn't been given coffee or his object after a certain number of seconds, he starts to yell, gradually getting louder and more demanding. Also if he is fed too much coffee he throws up, which also further represents or main idea of consumerism. The cursor is the shape of a hand(to represent the person's hand) and can be controlled either by mouse or colour tracking from Max. We also used an apple remote to control the scene.

Our idea was developed and added to a slightly more to give us the final result that we wanted.