2016 Party - VIP Oscars Event

Here are most of the trophies and giftcards sent out to our guests who won. Some were sent out before and some after these pics were taken, but these are the bulk of them.

Congratulations to Kenny Bellini for getting the most predictions right on the ballots (who would win Oscars) with 16. Kenny wins a large AMC theater giftcare. Congrats to Oliver Pemberton who won second place with 13 right. Oliver wins a Starbucks giftcard. You should have received your giftcards in the mail by now.

A walk-through of Scene 1 later in the evening by Lily and I.

People were going back through the scene all night, even though I only lit it for when guests were arriving - so it was pretty dark. Still fun though!

2016 VIP Oscars Event - Walkthrough by Jeff and Lily Although the scene was meant to be walked through right when the sun was going down (17:00 - 17:30), a lot of guests went back through the scene later. We we...

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION OF SCENE 1

When we first started discussing doing this party I knew that I wanted to make it a red carpet event with paparazzi flashes going off. At first I thought about hiring actors to take pictures, but I'm always trying to use my Integrated Media Server product to solve theme-park attraction-like problems, and so I came up with this automated version.

It relies on many things to be convincing and fun - First, guests have already heard the radio broadcast, have their credentials to get in, are dressed up, nominated for the "part" and walking down a red carpet. The guest has already been "set up". I first hit the guest with bright 1K movie set lights to start with, so their night vision is a bit off on focusing. Seeing the photographers facing the guest and the white logod backdrop behind the guest completes the non-technical creative suspension of disbelief in the guest's mind.

From a technical standpoint, the requirements are non-trivial. I had to make something that triggered when you started, but didn't trigger if you went the other direction, and if you started to go through and backed up didn't trigger, and also didn't trigger on infrared (IR) from the Sun accidentally. So I designed the IR break-beam sensor to work that way, and send a message to the IMS that someone had gone by. It can detect a new person within 200ms (200 thousands of a second).

It needed to be able to detect each person, tell the IMS, and have the experience for each new guest to be the same, rather than have it be good for the person in front, and the person in the back gets the "end" of the first person's experience. To do this, every time a new person went through, it started a different "tracking" of that person, separate and different from everyone else. I made the system to be able to handle 10 different people go through the scene at one time.

The next problem is that the audio clapping can't start over when a new person goes through. I would have to have a ton more speakers and a lot of clapping audio content to layer clapping in a more realistic way. I know how to do it, but it would have doubled the difficulty of the scene. Instead I took the best applause audio I could find, appropriate for outdoors applause (not in a concert hall with reverberation), that was consistent (so you couldn't tell it was looping) and I made it seamlessly loop. When a new guest enters the scene, the volume on the applause went up and stayed up for at least 8 seconds, which is the length of time the average person takes to talk to the front door. If it's already up because there are already people in the scene, it didn't change - just stayed up longer. If the last person exits the scene and no new person enters the scene, the audio applause will go back down to nominal levels. I wanted the guest to hear the audio applause increase from a low level, not from being off entirely, when they entered the scene. Keeping it low also kept the security guy from going nuts while there was no-one going through the scene. I placed the speaker carrying the main audio applause at 100% at the beginning of the scene, so that as you walked into the scene you would hear the applause first, then continue to hear it as you walked away from the first speaker towards the speakers with the flash sound effects. I mixed the applause into the flash speakers at 15% so you could still hear the applause barely as you continued through.

Each flash that went off had it's own particular sound effect that went with it, that was played at a speaker at the location of the flash. The brain is good at determining distance and location, so this really added to the realistic feel of the scene. I chose various camera shutter clicks and flash pop sound effects. Most were from today's professional digital cameras, but a few were older-style film cameras, because our brains are used to hearing that kind of sound still.

The last difficulty was that each flash has a reset time. Once the flash goes off, it can't go off again for a while as the capacitor inside the flash charges from the batteries. I could have made this faster by getting rid of all the batteries and using a very high current supplying 3V DC power supply, but it would have had to have been such high current as to make the power supply be expensive, the current would be so high it's actually dangerous to touch the wires coming out of it, and it would draw a lot of current from the house. I did the math, and it was a LOT. So I stuck to batteries, which I replaced right before 5 (one reason why we didn't let people in before 5). I programmed the system to keep track of each flash separately, and when one went off, it knew it couldn't use that flash again for several seconds (depending on the kind of flash - I used several). When a new "routine" was started when a guest entered the scene, if a particular flash was "busy" recharging, it would pick a different, available flash, as close to the one that was originally supposed to go off as possible. In the end, flashes go off from everywhere, and more go off if there are more people going through, and you can't tell some didn't go off and are charging, so it worked perfectly.

This scene was a lot of fun to program because of the technical challenges I was up against. I am really proud of how it worked out myself. I know it can be made better....as always...with time and money. :)