The Process

 

The House in the daylight

The House in the daylight

Collaboration

Collaboration is key to our way of creating.  Collaborating came very easy to us since we both have a passion for communal based learning and sharing.  We both played roles as both a facilitator and as participant so, working together was truly a pleasure.

 

Vision

The vision for the project was to attempt to preserve a seemingly timeless 20th century personal experiences that both Ruth and joey’s familia’s have experienced over their generational ancestry here in San Antonio, TX.  Through the use of new media story telling, joey and Ruth embarked on the Luminaria submission process to aid in facilitating the telling of their story.  After having the project accepted we then focused on the process of creating the new media installation.

The following highlights our collaboration process:

  • Jamming
  • Building
  • Filming & Editing

Jamming-  One of the core values of our collaboration that quickly became evident was that we both were very interested in hearing each others ideas, sincerely hearing, and working together to create something greater then ourselves.  Joey tends to say “I like to have my students take technology, something they love, their heart, and ‘Make Stuff'”, this resonated with Ruth.  Having formal training in the arts, Ruth’s artistic vision complimented joey’s new media techno art background.  And both of us having a community oriented background, we would talk about our ideas, not worrying about whether each other knew the technical or artistic requirements.  We knew we would come together to tackle those issues together and we believe our work speaks to that.

Building One of the first visions we had was the creation of a house that we would project on.  Ruth sketched up a drawing and then created a scaled down version of the house using foam board.  Concurrently joey acquired and developed the projection mapping methods to create a literal “working model”.  Once the proof of concept was complete we acquired the building materials and physically constructed the house along with the help of Andy Castillo, a local South Main Street architect/community builder.  The house was developed to be mobile, with the wood being screwed together and the once built, we were then able to take test footage with an HD projector and test out our project in a full scale space.  The results were very positive and well received by joey’s apartment patrons.

Filming & Editing- The vision of the videos were conceived by both Ruth and joey over a series of informal jam sessions, such as going to eat at restaurants with other “makers, artists and doers”.  joey’s formal cinematography background took Ruth’s general visions of shots she wanted and built a visual narrative.  However, what was truly collaborative was when Ruth had joey train her to shoot video with the DSLR and shot the “interior” scenes of the house of her mother making fresh flour tortillas at 5am in the morning.   The videos were then brought together in Final Cut Pro X and we created 3 core video experiences.

The next step was to create the “house” feel for the videos, which turned into another truly collaborative experiences where Ruth would create the sketches and joey would then digitize and colorize the images.  They would then both work together to compose the housing “frames”.

 Collaborative Process

This website is the final piece of the collaborative process as both Ruth and joey built this site and edited the copy.  We hope you find this site useful for your own collaborative efforts and artistic ventures.