Final Thoughts

There are many things I would do for this project if I were ever to decide to sell them. I would like to find a way to make the audio and the pillow to be one unit. I would also re-record my voice over with a much better microphone to make the audio that much better. 

I also would consider making longer and separate audio tracks of the four seasons instead of putting them all in one audio track. This would give the listener a choice of which season they wanted to imagine. 

All in all I am very proud of how my project turned out. I have not used it yet to help with an anxiety attack and I am glad that I haven't had to. I have used it as a meditation tool and I will say that it is very nice and calming. I am very pleased with this and I would like to see how much further I can take the project in the near future. 

Until then, I have been Ari Jerome and thanks for reading about My Anxiety Pillow. 

 

The Audio

So the more complicated portion of the project was creating my audio track. This was very much the meat and potatoes of the project so it had to be perfect. It all started with my concept and the actual writing of the voice over that I planned on doing. I knew that I wanted to stick with the natural themes in the voice over. I eventually decided on creating a calming scene following each of the four seasons. I found it very important that breath was a major theme throughout the entire file. I then wrote up a short script and got to work recording it. I only had access to the microphone built into my computer so I was only able to use that. If I had a chance to do it again I would look for a better option. However it worked for what I needed.
The next step was finding a piece of music to play with it. This wasn't very hard to do. I found a track off of youtube that I really liked and it worked really well with my voice over. I was sold.
The last thing I did was find various sound effects for my voice over that would help move the stories along. Once everything was found it was time to start putting everything together.

I am pretty well acquainted with Audacity so it wasn't very hard to put it all together. However I am a perfectionist so it took a while to do. Here is a photo of my Audacity file.

The top line is my voice over, the next is the music track and the rest are all the various sound effects I found. The entire thing ended up being just under 10 minutes with 5 of those minutes being my voice over. Afterward  the listener is encouraged to picture their own happy place. So without further ado, here is the full audio track that I made.

The Making of the Pillow

I am more crafty than technologically savvy, so having the pillow be the only visual portion of my project made this part a walk in the park. I had said before in my first post that I am awful at documenting my process, however I have a few photos of my fabric choice before I started sewing. Here's a little proof that I actually made the pillow and didn't just buy it at walmart.

The pillow was a very simple build. It was a simple stitch on three sides of the pillow. Then the pillow was stuffed with a polyfill (that white fluffy stuff that stuffed animals are stuffed with) and then the final edge was closed with velcro.

The velcro was used so the speaker could be easily accessed. The speaker I used was a small round $20 iHome speaker from walmart. 

The speaker plugs into any headphone jack and the volume is controlled by the music playing device. The volume must be set low because the user of the pillow is to place an ear over top of the speaker that is nestled down into the polyfill. 

The pillow itself is very long and thin but it is the perfect size for hugging. I have tested this out and it is very comfortable to use. 

Next I will discuss how I went about mixing the calming track for this pillow.

Anxiety Research

The largest part of my project was actually research. My plan was to make something that would help with anxiety so I was adamant on finding the best ways to help this. I talked a lot with some of my friends who suffer from anxiety attacks and I also looked into what helps me when I'm feeling anxious. So without further ado, here is all of my research.

 So SAM (or Self Anxiety Manager) is this app that a lot of my friends and I use.

My favorite feature of the app would be the clam breathing. This give you a visual of breathing in and out to help regulate and calm down from hyperventilating. I've used this many times for stress purposes. The default is set to 4 second of breathing in and about 6-8 seconds of breathing out.

I knew that I wanted breathing to be incorporated into my project but this app focuses on a visual help for anxiety, when as I decided that I wanted to focus on more of an auditory media. I find that calming music helps me calm down so I decided that this would be incorporated as well.

I talked with a few of my friends with anxiety to see what helps them when they have an attack. One friend said that she didn't find anything with light calming at all. In fact, it sometimes made her feel even more stressed out. She also told me that it is important to have something that reminds you to stay grounded when having an anxiety attack, so keeping something that has to do with nature around helps a lot.

I decided that my best course of action for this project was to make something soft and calming, such as a pillow, that would play a calming track that included music, breath support, and a voice over that described various calming scenes in nature.

So, my project was set and it was time to get to work on making the pillow.

Final Project Blues

I struggled a lot with coming up with an idea for my final project. At the very first milestone report in class, I had stated that I wanted to build an applause sign that would light up and do a lot of cool stuff but I was never completely sold on the project idea and I soon scrapped it.
The idea was replaced multiple times by various projects ideas that required a lot of programming and wiring and these are skills that I don't have, nor did I have time to teach myself these skills. Eventually the entire project turned into one big anxiety attack and that is when I discovered what I was going to do.
My project is something that I am calling My Anxiety Pillow. Over the next couple of post I will discuss with you the research that went into this as well as the making of the actual project.

Welcome and Intermediate Project

Welcome to my blog where you can discover how horrible I am at updating on process, so you get to see my finished projects all at once.

Well enough with formalities, lets get down into the nitty gritty of that intermediate project that was done a while back, shall we?

This is a camera that I had built for Berry College Theatre Company's first production this year, The Fantasticks. With the go ahead from Dr. Grout, I turned it in as my intermediate project in the class. There were two reasons why I wanted this to be my intermediate project. The first being that it shares the same spirit of a prototype and the second being that almost every element to the camera was made from found objects from around the scene shop.

Lets talk prototype first. When building props for a show, a lot of the time the prop only has to look a certain way but it may not have to actually work. This is what this camera did. It looked similar to the Kintograph camera that I was designing it to look like, but it does not actually record film. This being similar to a prototype. A prototype may not look as pretty as it could or it may have some bugs to fix, but most importantly, it is a start to an idea. 

Secondly, and probably my favorite element to this project would have to be how it was assembled. The only thing that was purchased for this project was the tripod that it sits on. The tripod was actually the base of a lamp that we found to be much cheaper than just purchasing a tripod. Less money spent is always a good this so we jumped at that chance to get it. Everything else on the camera were things that could be found laying around the scene shop and in props storage.

The base of the camera was an old trunk that was found in storage. The handle was pulled off and the rest of the body was painted. The lens was then end of a steel pipe, the eye piece was a rubber stopper and the crank was made from some wood scrap that we had in the shop. The crank works and the trunk is still able to be opened but most importantly, it still looked pretty awesome onstage.