NAMRAKANT TAMRAKAR
Rigger / Technical Artist
Commit 2 The Bits
Commit 2 the Bits is an interdisciplinary team of 5 from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. In this faculty pitched project, we aim to incorporate the rhythm of a full improv show on Twitch. In doing this, we intend to develop technical toolkits that will ensure running smooth improv shows, identifying and building Audience Participatory Games interactions and mechanisms, and testing those through weekly improv shows.
Platform: Twitch
Project Duration: 15 Weeks (Spring 2020)
Team: Karen (Zhiran) Zu (Producer), Shiva Kannan (Programmer & Designer), Hyoeun Kim (UI/UX Designer), Guimin Ren (Programmer & Designer) and Namrakant Tamrakar (Artist & Designer).
My Role: To create motion graphics for the show, edit video for the trailer, find and bring new improv games for each playtest which can be played in our show based on the interest curve.
Tools: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro.
I had so much fun creating the video trailer above, learned so much about after effects, premiere pro. Below, you can see the motion graphics I created with a green background because these all were used as an overlay on Unity and Streamlabs OBS.
I used the website http://improvencyclopedia.org/ for the improv games. I categorized it into the types of games we were planning and tweaked it a bit to fit in our show perfectly. The best part of my experience in this project was that there were shows when we didn't had sufficient players so I was one of the improvisers in our show. I learned a lot from the professional improvisers as well and got so much interested in Improv that I became the Improvisation Acting Teaching Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University (Fall 2020).
Well, since I was unable to attend the Improv course for Spring 2021, I found a few students interested in running the Improv show within our department (Entertainment Technology Center) and the toolkit we developed is still working well.
