The Project:
For this project, I recorded my housemates eating various noodles with various cameras.
Process:
My primary research questions for this project were: Do my my housemates eat noodles differently? And if so, how?
I settled on this idea after spending some time with my family over fall break. During one dinner with my parents, I noticed how me and my dad peeled clementines differently: I peeled mine in a single continuous spiral while my dad preferred to peel off tiny scraps until a sizable pile accumulated on the dinner table.
This prompted me to think about how eating habits affect and translate to personalities. If you eat loudly and slouch, I assume you’re a lively and boisterous person. Similarly, if you eat quietly then I assume you’re a quiet person :/
I knew that I wanted to capture the quiddity of my housemates, for two reasons:
- I have known these people for all four years of undergrad, some for even longer.
- We live together and have lived together for the past 2 years. They already know about all of my shenanigans.
One of the hardest dishes to eat “politely” has got to be (in my opinion) a soupy bowl of noodles. If you’re not careful, they can splash everywhere. If your slurp game is nonexistent, you could end up with soup dribbling down your chin when you try to take a bite of noodle.
So I voiced my ideas to both Golan and Nica. After a couple of conversations with both of them, they each gave me many ideas about different ways I could record my housemates with a bowl of noodles.
So while I had initially just wanted to record some slurps, I realized I had to give my housemates a real challenge.
Experiment 1: Normal Eating
For this experiment, I just wanted a baseline for noodle comparisons. It didn’t take a lot of persuasion to get my housemates on board with this project (trade offer: I give you free food, you let me record you). I borrowed a camcorder and a shotgun microphone and sat each of my housemates down and recorded them all eating a bowl of noodles in one night. While there were some ingredients that varied between bowls (upon request of the eater to add ingredients they’d like) the base of the dish was still the same: ramen.
Here’s the video:
Something that was quite interesting about this result was that after filming, many of them said they felt the pressure from the camera just being pointed at them, that the noodles were very hot (oops), and they ate quicker because of the pressure. This was unfortunately expected from a direct recording. I had initially planned on putting a hidden camera somewhere in the house so that they wouldn’t notice they were being filmed, but I found it quite hard to find suitable hiding places for my camera. Plus, it’s very hard for me to lie to my housemates about random things, the moment I asked if I could make bowls of ramen for everyone out of nowhere I just spilled the beans.
I do think a hidden camera would have been interesting, perhaps in a different setting it would be a viable /more reliable experiment.
Experiment 2: 360 camera
This experiment entailed making a rig that would go in front of the wearer’s face while they were eating a bowl of noodles.
At first, I was given a Samsung Gear 360 camera to test out. Ultimately, after a night of fiddling with the camera, I decided that the accompanying software was shite (refused to work both on my phone and on my mac, they stopped supporting the app/desktop year ago) and gave up. I tried to manually unwarp the footage I got (double fisheye) with some crude methods.
Here’s a video of me eating some cheese + some other things.
I used very crude methods to unwarp the footage, and have included the ffmpeg commands used for the later two clips. Although I ultimately did not create the rig for the camera, since I couldn’t get the warp to look seamless enough, I do this think this is also a future experiment. Sidenote: (what I call) flat face photography is blowing my mind and I will be making more.
Experiment 3: a single noodle
For this experiment, I tried creating a single noodle to slurp. Since regular store bought noodles don’t come in outrageous sizes, I decided that making my own dough wouldn’t be too hard (first mistake).
I simply combined 11+ ounces of all-purpose flour with 5.5 ounces (combined) of water and 2 eggs. After kneading for a while, I knew I messed up the recipe. The dough was too sticky, and I most likely over-kneaded the dough trying to get the dough to a manageable consistency.
After I cut the dough into one continuous piece the “noodle” looked like this:
I then boiled the noodle, added some sauce, and gave it to one of my housemates to try.
This one in particular was a failure. Although they didn’t taste bad (according to said housemate), the noodles were way too thick and brittle, and it was almost like eating a pot full of dumpling skin. I think a future experiment would be to experiment with other dough recipes (using bread flour instead of all purpose, tweaking the water to flour ratio, time to let dough rest, adding oil) to see which would yield the longest “slurpable” noodle.
Experiment 4: Owl camera + Binaural Audio
This experiment was brought about after talking with Nica about my project. They asked if I had ever heard of the Owl camera, and I was surprised to learn that these hotshots are 360 footage + AI in ONE (wow :0 mind kablow). They’re used for hotshot zoom company meetings to allow people who are speaking at a meeting table to be broadcasted on the screen. I paired this device with a 3Dio Free Space binaural audio device, in hopes that I could capture some 360 SLURPING action.
These devices were relatively easy to use, the main difficulty was locating a circular table on campus: this one in particular is by the post office in the UC.
For the meal I prepared biang biang noodles in a cold soup with some meat sauce (a strange combination, but I wanted soup to be present for slurping). Biang Biang noodles are also super thick, so I thought it would be an interesting noodle to try. Ultimately this experiment became a mukbang of sorts.
Takeaways:
Overall, I think I was successful with this project in the fact that I completed what I set out to do with my initial research question. There were definitely many failures along the way as mentioned previously, but these failures only open up more pathways for exploration (in my opinion).
I’d definitely continue iterating on this project. There were many proposed experiments tossed around that ultimately I couldn’t do this time (but would love to do with more time). I also wanted to capture a group noodle eating session (out of one bowl). Another idea I had was to create a slurp detector (inspired by Sam Lavigne’s videogrep) so I could compile all the slurps from my noodle sessions, but I couldn’t get my audio detector to work in time. Golan had mentioned candele noodles as a kind of noodle particularly hard to slurp, and I think my housemates would be up to the challenge.