Author: Ryan Rotella
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Out On The Field
by Ryan Rotella The hopes of my Saturday rest on the shoulders of 18 to 25 year old men who I’ll never know But who used to be my father, uncles, and grandfather On the field The men clad in armored pads and helmetsAllow me to project onto themManifesting more passion than most anywhere else in lifeMy side…
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Thesis Progress Update 4
This week marked a significant pivot in my thesis direction. After exploring theatrical immersive performances over the past few weeks, I’ve decided to shift toward creating a satirical gambling app that reveals the gambling logic embedded throughout modern society. This experience will combine a mobile app built in Swift/SwiftUI with projection mapping via TouchDesigner, using…
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YouTube: Entertainment Innovation
YouTube has fundamentally transformed how I consume media every day of my life. What started as a simple video-sharing platform of lip syncing and parodies has evolved into a digital behemoth that adapts to whatever I need at a given moment. For me, Youtube now functions as an oscillator of content between background noise and…
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MoCap Final: Out On The Field
Enjoy the rough draft of my Masculine Movements in Football video collage. I re-targeted a lot of motion data in Blender using a process that my colleague, Galt, documented very well on his blog with my Python script that I created and in conjunction with Mwni’s blender-animation-retargeting plugin.
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Thesis Progress Update 3
For my Research-by-Making these past 2 weeks, I made 2 storytelling projects in 2 different mediums. First, I made a video collage by using Motion Capture data retargeted to 3D models in Blender as well as archival footage of my grandfather, father, and uncles playing football. This was a final for my class, Mocap for…
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An Ode To Bridges
iterated on sand castles: project link here I walked past the Manhattan Bridge the other day. It made me stop and wonder. How many workers did it take to build the whole thing? How many setbacks? How did anybody get people to agree to actually go out into the water and lift each stone to its…
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Project Update before the Final Week
Currently, our final project (Capturing Movement in American Football) is underway and making good progress. We had our third motion capture session last Saturday, October 4th. For this session, I invited a friend who is an actor, Nick Yañez-Atkins, to don a suit and play the role of a coach in my football concept. He…
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Sandcastles, or The Invisibility of Editing
project demo link Directors get all the credit. Whenever most people (myself included) watch a movie, they think, “Wow, that Martin Scorsese… how did he think of all this?” And while good directors do think of practically every aspect of making a movie, editors are the ones really sewing a movie all together. Thelma Schoonmaker…
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Progress Update 2: Research Findings & Reflections
Research Findings: What I Learned Since establishing my initial inquiry space, I’ve pursued a focused research trajectory that has significantly shaped my understanding of participatory performance, therapeutic theater, and the tension between spectacle and genuine emotional engagement. Drama Therapy and Applied Theatre: A Critical Distinction Following my advisor Luisa’s feedback, I explored the drama therapy…
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Designing a MoCap Narrative
I’ve been struggling with the exact narrative form I want this piece about football to have. Part of me wants to have an exact script with dialogue, fleshed out characters, and a clear narrative arc. Currently, I do not have time to do that for this project’s scope (finish in the next 2 weeks). However,…
Ryan Rotella 