Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to Softs. Our team slept very little in preparation for the faculty visits. We all had no sense of whether or not what we had created was successful, or fun, or felt connected to music. We went into our first walk-around feeling a little concerned, and burnt-out. But we were surprised to receive mostly positive feedback.
Most of the faculty enjoyed the experience, and felt that we were onto something. The constructive comments we received were very directed changes we could make to our experience in order to improve it.
One of the most important challenges we faced was getting the ambisonics to shine. While our entire setup was now in place, we had spent very little time on figuring out how to get our spatialized audio to pop. Eventually we determined we needed to use a vector based setup to emphasize positionality.
Another aspect that was clearly lacking was a finale. We were working towards adding progression and building an emotional arc, but, we had yet to introduce a climax to the experience. We received some recommendations about the different spectacles we might add, but ultimately settled on using existing assets.
There were also comments on the aesthetic of the world. We needed to focus on making all of the various pieces fit together more. Other aspects like progression could be strengthened as well.
One major thing we decided to change was the look of the water. It didn’t match the level of detail seen in the other aspects of the world we created.
After Our final walk around on Tuesday we were all drained, but glad to know we had final found a model that worked well. We decided to take a break for much of the week in order to focus on other class work, and to catch our breath after a long weekend.