My Nu Vu

Well, since we finished up at the recording studio yesterday…there wasn’t all too much left for the songwriting team to write. In the morning, after a little yoga, we all sat down as a big group and talked about how we would divide up our efforts now that Jeff’s team would be joining Raghava’s. We talked for a little while about what images would go with what lines in both verse two, and the minor bridge sections. For “it’ll get you paid, it’ll get you laid, we came up with a jazzy scene with Justin Bieber and the Kardashian sisters, along with some other clever little animations for Numa Numa, Double Rainbow, and Chocolate Rain. Ragz said he would need one or two people to help him storyboard the rest of the song, and Dez and I decided to take the job. While Dez and I went off to draft a few images for what we imagined the animations looking like, the other kids from the music group went with Raghava for a 1 hour flash-course in Photoshop, to get them closer to “up to speed” with the rest of the kids who had been working with him the whole time. We took our designs back to Raghava, and he told us to start giving his team directions on what to draw. It was interesting being placed in such a position of authority. We were also told to put all the information into a spreadsheet, so we could keep what we had or had not finished organized in one place. After taking care of that, we just started handing out some tasks for the artists to finish overnight before that 2:50 mark hit. It’s amazing how fast a day goes by.

We had a set time this morning when we had to be out of the recording studio by, so once we all got in the door, we immediately headed right back out, right onto the T. This was my first time going to a recording studio, and it was pretty exciting to imagine that I would be singing at the same mic that some local band first sung at when they were just starting out. And it turns out that MOST alternative rock bands that started in Boston actually recorded in the studio…the Dropkick Murphys and Guster, among others :O  ). Adam Steinberg, one of the coaches from the other studio had some history with the studio, called QDivision — presumably the reason why we chose them to record our song…debatably the only reason why we were able to professionally record it at all. When we got off the T in Somerville, I was having trouble imagining a big-label studio nestled into the iconic sub-urban neighborhood. We walked down the street, around a few corners, and behind a parking lot, when we arrived to a metal door on the back of a large red brick building. Adam opened the door, and I fell in love. It was almost exactly what I expected it to be. Files and folder strewn over a plethora of wooden desks fitted with brass lamps and coffee mugs. Further inside, a kitchenette, living room, break room, couches, Foosball tables, records covering the wall; it was brilliant. But the studio itself was infinitely more impressive. There’s not much more I can say than that it was the quintessential image of a professional recording studio…or at least whatever I could imagine one would look like. When we actually finished the recording, I was finding it difficult to leave, and resigned to designing my future home after it. The guys running the studio were really friendly, considering that they put up with our non-singing song. The rest of the day we…didnt have much else to do with the song, so we helped out with the animation team.

Mr. Justice, more commonly called Aaron, did not show up to grant us more otherworldly wisdom today, as he usually does every Monday morning, in addition to doing some yoga, so we went straight to work on tweaking out the song. The day started with a LONG discussion on the material that the music team had come up with since Friday, as well as the overall direction of the project. Although I don’t think it was quite necessary to spend three hours essentially going in a circle about our overall objective, a few key points did emerge from our discussion, first and foremost that our song/animation would no longer be reaching for viral video status (which I was thinking all along was moot, because the two things that the viral videos that we were mentioning had that we didn’t were spontaneity and originality). We also got a couple of good listener effect fixes out of it, that we spent the rest of the morning fixing. We scrapped the introduction Dez had written the week before, and wracked our brains on a new one that delivered our “message” more clearly up until the MINUTE before lunch, when I felt a sudden surge of inspiration and knocked one out in two minutes. After lunch, we worked a little more on lyric fixes, but focused the majority of our time to final touches in the rhythm and tempo to prepare for our studio recording tomorrow morning (which essentially meant that we needed to get everything PERFECT by 2:50). Liam, our instrumentalist savior, wowed us all again by playing a track to the song that he’d apparently written over the weekend. He did an astounding job on it, which was no surprise considering that he’d joined our studio halfway through, and completely turned our project around. The last few minutes of the day were spent tweaking with Donnell’s rap section, and we all went home very content, and ready to record first thing tomorrow.

OK, got 4 days to build a robot, haven’t built one before, but I know how to use an electric screwdriver well enough. No big deal. Start with the basics, a design. That part I’m good at — concepts. I prefer to think that I have an advantage when it comes to concept design — the less I know about what I can’t build the more freedom I have in imagining it. We started out with a simple design, the general build of its original inspiration, the camera dolly. 

Because we only had two motors, a couple of servos, some nuts and bolts, and a lot of cardboard, however, it would be easier to design a mount from scratch. We know what we wanted: 360 degree x axis rotation coupled with 180 degree y axis rotation. We decided last Friday that tank drive would be the best method of making our robot mobile, with front-wheel drive and pivot wheels on the rear. Our two motors would undoubtedly be taken up by our wheels then, as none of us knew how to engineer a tank drive system with one motor and no gearboxes. That meant the 360 degree rotation would have to become 180, the max turn of a servo. I proposed a lazy Susan design, but unfortunately we had no ball bearings, so we would have to improvise…but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, first we might need a chassis…

We just managed to get some of the last glitches fixed by the time the morning presentations started. The issues with wiring were sorted out yesterday, but the top servo for controlling the y-axis camera motion was still…broken. We would have to go on without it, because the only way to fix it at that point would be to add an extra battery pack to control the motors and servos separately. Well, that’s the only way we knew would work at least. Anyway, the morning presentations started off with the “quantified self” group, where they talked about what they had been testing for the past two weeks. I was pleasantly surprised by some groups, who had originally failed to pique my interest with their topic, such as the effect of playing Call of Duty before homework. Their results, although inconclusive, were at least carefully considered. My favorite by far was the polyphasic sleeping group, who were testing whether polyphasic sleeping, that’s sleeping 20 minutes every 4 hours, was beneficial to overall ability and reaction time. The time they were limited to in the studio eliminated the chance for a thorough investigation of the topic, but they presented some good arguments as to why one might want to try a new sleep cycle, rather than the monophasic 8 hours we humans get on average due to the way our schedules have evolved over time. I decided that I would try it as well over the summer, to see if it might really work. After we came back from lunch, the robotics groups presented, starting with Tim and Ian’s “Plantbot 1000” (I think its marketable), and finishing with our Camera Canter. I was surprised to see the range of utilities the robots were designed for, from a toilet that would lower and raise the seat for you, to a automated marker to draw on any wall, to a humanoid-esque robot engineered for entertainment. I had a lot of pride for what we designed, but I couldn’t say it was the best, despite being well-recieved by our audience. There were lots of things that I would do differently if I went through the process again, which I think I will end up doing, because I just enjoyed this studio so much, there’s no way I can stop here. Of course, a shout-out to Ryan and Dan and David, the in-house tech-geniuses who were so awesome in their coaching and assistance.