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 Giaccino'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 the main developer on this project, although my teammate contributed to the code significantly as well.

• Created a script to make the balloons float upward when the audio reached a volume threshold.
• Added a script to programatically 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 for getting audio information created by our professor. 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 play through) but still controlled in a way that the outcome is predicatable enough to not affect that narrative.

Shortcomings

Although it wasn't required in the scope of this assignment, I would have really liked if this project was 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