Summary of the week: This week was Playtest Day! We spent the week preparing two stations/vertical slices of our experience for our playtesters to experience. We welcomed 44 playtesters at Playtest Day and felt encouraged by the results, but also learned some important lessons regarding issues with the audio that we will address for our final installation.
Halloween party
This week was the ETC Halloween party! Jiaxin and Aldora’s group won the costume contest with their fast food mascot themed group costume!
Process Grades
This week was our process grades with our instructors! We met with John and Shirley individually to discuss our contributions to the project, progress over the semester, and plans for making the most of the rest of our time on this project and at ETC!
“Put Your House in Order” Showing at CMU Rauh Theater
Angie, Charlie, and Lauren attended a showing of “Put Your House in Order” at the CMU Rauh Theater. This was the first play of the season in the same theater as “Lear.” We attended to get a sense of the audience behaviors before and after the show and how the audience interacts with dramaturgy installations.
“Put Your House in Order” had the following dramaturgy installation in the lobby. There was a small set inside of a glass case, a poster that showed a timeline of the horror genre, and a tv scrolling through current events news articles. There was also an interactive part of the installation where audience members could answer questions on pieces of paper and put the papers into the mailbox.
We found that unfortunately, very few people went up to the installation or interacted with it. We noted that 8 people looked at the installation and no one answered the questions. Most people arrived in the last 10 minutes before the show began, walked directly into the theater, and bypassed the installation entirely.
We also noted that even though it was a free show, audience members still needed to have their ticket scanned at the door. Therefore, people did not enter, drop off their stuff to save their seat, and then come back out to the lobby to hang out before the show as we originally believed. People just entered the theater right before the show and did not come back out until the show was over.
These were very helpful findings for us and for our installation! From this information, we learned that we may not have very much time with most guests and we would really need to attract their attention to prevent people totally skipping the installation and going right into the show.
After the show, Lauren also spent some more time in the Purnell lobby considering several options for installing our umbrellas without using a Genie lift. She came up with the following potential plan: Knot one end of fishing line on the balcony, fish it through the loops on the umbrella and leave those umbrellas on the second floor balcony for now, pass only the fishing line around the room, tie other end of fishing line to opposite end of lobby. Then throw the umbrellas down and push the umbrella with a stick or long object from the first floor into place. With this plan, we only need to carry the fishing line around the lobby and not the whole umbrella speaker wire setup. Also, it gives a good flexibility so that when we set up the umbrellas, we can move them slightly around to get the best configuration.
We will consider this plan for our final installation!
Playtest to Refine Workshop
Playtest Day is this Saturday! Angie and Lauren attended Mike Christel’s Playtest to Refine Workshop on behalf of the team. We discussed the logistics of Playtest Day and started to create our plan! We will plan to have two vertical slices of our experience for Playtest Day! We will have two stations set up, Regan and Edgar, with umbrellas, directional speakers, audio lines approved by Eliot and recorded by Angie and Charlie, pedestals, and props.
Faculty Consultants
We met with our faculty consultants, Scott Stevens and Chris Klug, to discuss our plans for playtest day and the rest of the semester preparing for the installation. It was great to hear their perspectives and we really appreciated their feedback!
Preparing for Playtest Day
A major focus for us this week is preparing for Playtest Day on Saturday! These are our plans for preparing:
- Aldora will complete two pedestals
- Lauren will prepare and hung up two umbrellas with the directional speakers inside
- Jiaxin will build, paint, and hang a large cloud as well as hang a small cloud
- Angie and Charlie will get the audio ready for the directional speakers
Clouds
Jiaxin worked on creating larger clouds using cardboard and fluff.
Jiaxin also worked with John on a new cloud strategy of using chicken wire and cotton roll.
UV Lights
We did several tests with our UV lights this week! We tested with several different materials and several colors of markers to determine which combination was most effective in revealing the secret messages in the UV light.
Lauren and Charlie also worked with Dave Purta on testing the dimming capabilities of the UV lights that we bought. They were able to be dimmed well so these lights will be great for our final use case of the lightning flashes! In our final installation, the lights will flash brightly then slowly fade, allowing people to read the hidden messages on the pedestals and plaques. Since it will be quite bright during Playtest Day, we decided not to plan on testing this part of the installation during Playtest Day.
Pedestals
Aldora finished 5 cardboard pedestal bases! She finished two pedestals for Playtest Day using tissue paper mache and paint. We also had paper plaques for the top of the pedestals.
We also discussed pedestal finishing techniques with our faculty. They recommended that we look into improving the top of the pedestals to accomplish a more finished look. Some options we considered for covering the top were using the top of gift boxes or attaching molding around the edges. We will consider this feedback moving forward as we work more on the pedestals.
Audio
Angie created some house audio demos for Playtest Day. She combined storm sounds sourced from Steve’s library of stock audio as well as free to use sounds from online to build the backing rain audio. She then added in human recorded voices, edited to sound like wind, rain, or whispers to create a 20 minute mix that rises in intensity over time. Angie and Charlie also recorded lines for Playtest Day, using their own voices. They acted as Regan and Edgar, to have a variety of voice pitches as well as moods. Charlie worked with Eliot on what Shakespeare lines to include, so we were able to include some of the King Lear lines in the audio. Angie then went into Audacity to edit the audio so it would work for the directional speakers, with the help of Dave Purta. A series of low-pass and high-pass filters were applied to each line. Angie also reached out to the actors to create a schedule for recording the final audio recordings for the installation.
Directional Speakers
Lauren worked with Dave Purta to construct two directional speakers with 50’ electrical wire. Lauren also tested the speakers at the full electrical wire lengths and they worked well! We will use these for Playtest Day.
Lauren also added strain relief knots inside of the directional speaker housings to prevent any issues of wires getting disconnected if the electrical wires get tugged.
Lauren installed these directional speakers inside of the red and orange umbrellas.
Installation for Playtest Day
We worked as a team to set up our Regan and Edgar stations for Playtest Day! We had many different people come up to us to talk about our installation while we were setting it up. It was encouraging to see so much interest and attraction to the installation before it was even finished being installed!
One lesson we learned during the installation was with our fishing line attachment strategy. Though the fishing line held up the weight of the umbrellas well and wouldn’t sag, doing the entire installation with only fishing line was tricky as it had a tendency to get tangled very easily. Therefore, we switched to a combination of fishing line and metal wire to hang up the umbrellas which was much easier and quicker to install.
Playtest Day
Playtest Day went well! We tested with 12 different groups for a total of 44 playtesters! We got a lot of valuable feedback and data about our experience, even without our playtesters having the full context of the play. We learned that some people had trouble hearing the lines and discerning what the character said, while others could hear it very quickly. We think a solution to some people not being able to hear the audio clearly could be editing the audio in a different manner. We also observed that people tended to bounce between the two umbrellas, going back and forth, listening to the different audio that played and interacting with the props. Some people did not relate to the characters, but did empathize with them, while others related heavily and even recognized lines from “King Lear.” Playtest Day proved that we are on the right track and will continue moving forward!
