Balloon Life

Project Summary

Balloon Life is an audiovisual music video, inspired by the story of Pixar's Up and set to the tune of Michael Giacchino's Married Life. It was created in Unity, and the overall goal was to create a project that utilized audio input to dynamically affect the visuals.

My Contribution

I worked as one of two developers on this project, creating the balloon movement and physics, section system to trigger events at specific times, and the audio-reactive rising of the balloons. My teammate, Max Davenport, created the balloon model and materials, the sideways wind gusts and rain, and the changing of the sky at specific times.

Some of my specific contributions include:

• Created a script to make the balloons float upward when the audio reached a volume threshold.
• Added a script to programmatically spawn clouds on each play.
• Created a script to trigger actions during specific parts of the song.

For a full breakdown of my contributions, see the project's commit history.

Outside Resources

For this project, we began with some useful Unity scripts our professor wrote for reading audio data. Our project was forked from this GitHub repo.

Accomplishments

Overall, I'm proud of the narrative that we were able to create and the way that it relates to the music. I also think that the system for making the balloons rise with the audio was quite successful at being dynamic (different each playthrough) but still controlled in a way that the outcome is predictable enough to not affect the narrative.

Shortcomings

Although it wasn't required in the scope of this assignment, I would have really liked it if this project were interactive. For example, being able to play with the balloons using your mouse might add a fun element.

What I Learned

This project definitely taught me the importance of audio. Music tells a powerful story on its own and the visuals we created helped enhance that, but would not be nearly as interesting on their own.

On the technical side, I learned how to work with audio amplitude and frequency in Unity, and how to convert them into visual effects.

Future Goals

In the future, I would like to pay greater attention to audio and especially music in my projects, since they are so powerful.

"When 100 people watch a video, they all see the same thing. When 100 people listen to someone's voice, they all imagine different people in their head."
- Lucas Rizzotto