1. Getting Oriented: Houdini Tutorials

When confronted with a new software, I personally find it rather helpful to allocate some time entirely to the ordeal of processing various general concepts, principles and vocabulary before diving in to the task of learning how to perform whatever procedural task.  In this regard, I spent this week ruminating on the basics of Houdini and have generated several PS edited frames which can serve as helpful references in the future, both near and remote!  The first slide below provides an overview to the 5 main panes of the Houdini interface, the second provides an orientation to the control tools for the viewport.  The third slide surveys network basics.  The fourth slide shows how to import an object from the shelf and the fifth slide shows how to change the color of the object.  The sixth slide shows how to change to vertical column fomratting.

Houdini Basics ... ad infinitum

The preceding slides, while perhaps informative in a myriad of ways, are also quite time consuming to generate (photoshop, on+on+on ...photoshop, ahhh!!).  In the spirit of practicality, it should be understood that the next couple days of my time will continue to involve practicing with Houdini basics, but the summary of these efforts will terminate here.  In other words, for the sake of formal blog documentation of my efforts, - it can be noted that several additional "Basics Slides" could be generated (PS edited and detailed).  For example, the significance of the Transform node below is substantial to these types of software and should be highlighted in any Introduction to Houdini Basics, but the task of pulling the screen shot into PS and then addressing the dozen issues relevant to generating a decent slide starts to become temporally counterproductive, i.e. an inefficient or perhaps irrational use of time. 

For the following slide, and bypassing the use of PS, it can still be commented that one can access the Transform Node by means of the tab menu, and then the Transform Parameter pane allows for ready change in different parameters by means of an automatic base 10 logarithmic scale (note orange square in the Parameter pane).

​2. Interactive PDFs - Embed a .MOV!!

The UAL LCC Technical Resources Center provides assistance with various secondary issues such as introduction to Adobe platforms.  Adobe InDesign allows for genesis of media entities such as interactive PDFs that allow for the inclusion of brief movies in a pdf, which may prove useful for my thesis.  On Mon Oct 26, I met w Esmeralda from Technical Assistance to receive an introduction to this algorithm, as it is typically done using Adobe InDesign.  From our encounter, as below, the following is a brief summary of the steps relevant to making an interactive PDF allowing for visualization of short movies right within the PDF.   I also found a decent tutorial for this algorithm (Montilla, 2020).
 

​3. Empirical Research: Survey Questionnaire 

For the empirical research component of the thesis, over the last month, I had started developing a questionnaire to target various issues re the genre classification of the music video brain film project.  The main point of the EBS videos, what genre each might most belong to, and whether some basic neuroscience points in the video were learned by the participant were all addressed by the initial questionnaire.  Specifically, the process pf developing the questionnaire began with one face to face questioning session of a 31 year old female nursing student, which resulted in the development of a typed questionnaire, which was then tested on a 20 year old female film student.  From this round of effort, questions were refined, and it was further realized that an internet based survey questionnaire would need to be developed, so that participants could simply review each version of the video online and then answer questions provided as part of the same website.  Three resulting question sheets were developed, the first simply acquired basic demographic info for each participant (age, education, gender, occupation), questionnaire #2 presented questions especially relevant to video #1, and questionnaire #3 presented questions relevant to video #2.   Summary components of the process as developed prior to this week are presented in an abbreviated form, as per the figure immediately below, and the final component, i.e. 3 final questions sheets developed this week, are further below.  

Study Questionnaire and Website

As described previously, the empirical research component of the thesis involves evaluating person's response to the different versions of the EBS video (Ottowitz 2019).  The final questions went through several iterations and are still not complete, but an initial effort with the website questionnaire is shown below.

AGENDA FOR NEXT WEEK

Start focusing on Houdini skills relevant to creating the Liquid Lines effect, i.e. the effect which mimics brain DTI technology.  Complete the Interactive PDF (thesis oriented) exercise - and complete the final questions and website for the Empirical Research component of the thesis.   

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Bibliography

Caskal (2017). Houdini Tutorial 01: Liquid Lines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBzNrqwroOI

Dalvi  R (2019). Houdini Projects: Creating Isolines.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2UNkR1ZNrQ

Emotion’s Brain SECTIONS (2019). [video] Directed by William Ottowitz. Finland: Bill Bevan Music Video Brain Films.  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjSTDil_Bv0

Montilla A, (2020). How to add videos to an interactive layout in Adobe InDesign.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhTliWR5O6k

Nine-Between. Houdini Isn't Scary: Part 1, Basics.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsv8UGqDibc