For day 1 of our trip, we met that the ETC at 3AM to catch our flight at 5AM that morning. Once we landed, we went straight to the village where we took a tour again to get a better since of the village, and also since it was the first time one of our instructors was visiting it. Once we started working on the Pillow Tree, we first checked out the lights that give the tree a red tint and noticed that they can be DMX lights, which the village said was fine for us to do we just need to connect them via cable to a computer. We ended up moving the tree away from the wall so that we can access the computer because the computer is literally inside the tree. We got approval from the village to move the computer to a back room if needed, which is something we are planning to discuss as a team. The previous team did a great job with labeling and organizing all their phidgets so that we are able to tell which phidget is attached to their corresponding object. We also took this time to interview a couple volunteers there so that we can put together some general training documentation for them. One challenge that we are seeing is if only one volunteer is helping with the Castle Of Miracles at that moment we need to make sure there is enough time in the opening scene for them to run back and put a pillow in the shoot. For this, we are thinking of having the first chapter break come after the dance party, that way there is enough time for them to run back to put the pillow in and come back.
For day 2, we took extensive pictures of the tree as well as took footage of the tree and ourselves inside the village that we can use for our preview video. We spoke with someone in the engineering department who tried to help us with the lights to see if we could temporarily change the colors so that there wouldn’t be a red tint to the tree. We lastly looked at the physical tree and tried to brainstorm some ways to touch it up and make it look nice. We are thinking we may get to cut some of the hanging burlap off and glue what we can to try to just make it look a little nicer and less scary. We are considering the idea of painting, but are hesitant because it will most likely fade away over the years like it did for the previous team.
Overall, the trip was extremely insightful and we are all very grateful to have to have had the opportunity to go before final installation!
This week is also TEA Summit, so 2/4 of us will be out for the week, but we hope to continue on our background and preparing for softs next week.