I've had the idea of traveling within the inner eyes weeks before we were presented this particular project and I toyed with it a bit until I was content. After that I thought "How could I make this a consistent theme throughout the room?" And upon further thought I came up with the concept of having exaggerated human anatomy throughout the room as my composition, and I knew just how I could make it work.
Process:
I wanted to use 3D in order to activate a majority of the anatomy in the room, so I set out and found many 3D models of human organs and bodies. If they were not already obj files, I would bring them into Maya and convert them. With these obj files I could bring them into After Effects with a Plug in called Element 3D which allows me to texture animated the objects and render them quickly while composting other effects behind it.
There were also many instances that I needed to apply soft edges to my rendered assets in Madmapper in order to keep them seamless between two projects.
Interpretation:
I loved the way It turned out, Rendering this many 3D assets took a lot of time, but it was worth it at the end of the day.
Transitions is a room mapping installation with a narrative told through the combination of constructed audio and visuals. The piece follows an unnamed protagonist through death and imagines his afterlife. He begins in the city, driving a car and switching between radio stations when he gets into an accident and crashes. His death is implied through the sound of slowing heart beats and a transition to white as he goes into the light. He is transported to a natural space, where he reflects and interprets his life experiences through nature. After this meditation, he is transported again to the quiet infinity of deepest space.
Concept
When it comes for coming up with themes for projects, I tend to figure out what music I want to use, and then base my visual off of that. Childish Gambino's "I.Flight of the Navigator" from his album "Because of the Internet" is one of my all time favorite songs, there's something so ethereal and calming about it. That song is an experience every time I listen to it. I had a dream where I had woken up and realized I was dreaming, tries to wake myself up, experienced sleep paralysis, and I had to just wait and look at the night sky in my dream until I could wake myself up. Flight of the Navigator makes me think of that visual for some reason. I also decided early on that I wanted my theme to be centered around Gambino's albums/music videos in some way, shape, or form. Process
Hoo boy, this one was a doozy for sure! I spent a good amount of time in Illustrator. I really wanted to make this my own and try my hand at illustrating a majority of my project. The first thing I illustrated was inspired by Gambino's "Kauai" EP, This also inspired the other theme, nature and the different times of day.
After settling on the final color palettes for the illustrations, I exported certain elements separately in order to create subtle animated elements to these illustrations. I felt the last design needed a little more "oomph", so i made the sky transparent and took this stock footage of a meteor shower to give it that extra something.
Interpretation
This project was definitely demanding, but also gave the most creative leeway. However I think the opportunity to wash an entire room with projections that are your own is rewarding. Its also an interesting way to incorporate storytelling with your own media.
In my work I am interested in the language evolving from Internet culture as well as the aesthetics that take part in it. However idiotic memes seemingly are they circle around several Internet users and evolve into messages that reflect the current trend of nihilistic humor in everyday life, but is ironically accompanied with feel-good images of early 2000's nostalgia. In this work I aimed to capture this environment.
While entering the room I wanted the viewer to enter an atmosphere that is initially soothing, or fun. In the background 'Africa' by Toto is playing as it is an iconic 80's song that creates nostalgia in present days. The entire room is a girlish pink and purple with several viral videos of dancing and cats, both sides of the room include a fantasy galaxy view. At first glance I wanted the viewer to laugh. This imagery is heavily related to the Vaporwave aesthetic which has helped establish the nihilistic humor previously mentioned.
Upon closer inspection there are bodies of text acquired from several social media accounts scattered around which include the messages, "Me reassuring myself: it's really ok you dumb bitch", "my personality issues can be directly traced to the fact that I couldn't do the monkey bars as a child", "When you die your voice gets added to the Big Bang Theory laugh track" and "'It's like we finish each other's'... 'government conspiracy theories'". With the discovery of these messages the environment of the room is no longer a silly pink thing but contains an underlying tension expressed by a generation of Internet user attempting to normalize this discontent with a humorous cover up of a non-aggressive aesthetic. The result creates a very unique juxtaposition of aesthetic intention and underlying messages.
I took advantage of the massive size of the room to engulf the viewer with a feeling. To create a hidden tension I used smaller areas of the room for the viewer to find these nihilistic jokes.
Concept:
I wanted to create something that interacted with the geometry and objects in the room. I like bright colors, and wanted to have something that was unified and able to be run with or without a background track.
Process:
I began by mapping each of the projectors, including as much detail as I could in the form of quads. This took an eternity. I mapped out all of the pipes, ceiling, walls, cabinets, projectors, unnecessary shadows, etc. for each of the setups.
layering
Once I had completed creating all the quads for each setup, I exported the output to vector so that I could manipulate the geometry in after effects. I pulled the raw vectors into illustrator put each quad on its own layer so that AE could read them as separate objects.
I imported the illustrator file into AE (as composition - retain layer sizes; makes it easier to manipulate later) and began messing with one layer to see what kind of things I could do. I was able to come up with a couple effects that randomized the color of the layer and rotated through different colors at a good pace. I copied this effect tree to all of the other objects. Because the effects were randomized individually, each layer was a different color at a different time.
After figuring out the main code, it was just a matter of applying it to all of the layers (excluding the masking layers, which were left black). After I had exported the final animations, I brought them back into MM and had do some some small adjustments to match them up perfectly with the original quads. I also had the animations bounce so there wouldn't be a seam and they could loop infinitely independent of one another.
Concept
This concept is expanding upon one of my looks from the last project. I wanted to show texture and scenery from far west Texas. I recently took a trip to Marfa and collected dozens of videos from inside galleries and all over the town. mainly looking for textures on walls, trains, and fences. to give you a feel of what its like to walk around there. I also went to Big Bend national park where I got footage of some of the most beautiful sunsets and mountains that I have ever seen. Originally I was going to make a look showing the contrast between footage of people working on making phones and electronics on one side of the room and on the other side of the room commercials for those products. I decided it was a bit too dark for the energy of the room.
Process
I wanted to use several of the features of the room to accent my composition including the tape maps and geometry of the cabinets. I made sure to mask out all areas where two projectors were hitting and edge blend all the projectors together. Then went through and selected as many of the videos that looked good and fit with each other. distorting there color and speed to make things cohesive.
In this video you can see that I have used video from a sandstone found there mixed with footage from out the window of the car and several of these videos have been mixed together on the tape design on the right. I used hints of pink and yellow to make the natural orange coloring of the land pop.
Final Product
Tunnel
Credit to David for showing me the video that I got this idea from watching. I wanted to make it feel like the whole room was moving through a large tunnel. To do this I was going to need to make the tunnel in Blender and morph it around as it moves over the cameras. I made one small section of tunnel and used a modifier to duplicate it a couple dozen times. I then applied a path modifier so that I could animate said path. bending the tunnel on both sides of the cameras. Then I add three cameras two perspective cameras for the front and back so the tunnel gets smaller the further away it is. One orthographic so that the video I use on the 6 projectors pointed at the side of the room flow into each other without the distortion of perspective. The results were very effective and made for a very active look.
This is what the setup in Blender looks like. Notice that there are three cameras in the center and that the path next to the tunnel has two points with crosses as handles so that I could animate them.
Orthographic side view
Perspective front view
Perspective back view
And when its all set up in Mad Mapper and projected it looks like this.
At the start of this project the first thing that came to
mind while seeing nearly all wall space in the classroom covered with light was the
idea of immersion. The ability to cover an entire room with content creates a
transformational space (literally and figuratively) for the audience. At this
point it was important to pick a theme to create content with. Some beginning
ideas included playing with scale by creating scenes that made the audience member
miniscule to a toy car, a cup, or even a crayon. The idea here to make the
audience members “toy-sized” compared to the items projected on the walls.
preliminary concept work
The
second idea that came to mind was a nightmarish scene that also played with the
idea of human scale in a more story oriented format. With this idea each
projector setup area would be depicted of stages of a nightmare that would
exhibit feelings of anxiety, fear, terror, anger, etc. The last idea was to
create an immersive enclosed space of real places in the world and their
cultural implications. Thus the final concept for the classroom mapping
assignment was finalized where each projector setup would be depictive of a
specific cultural story that stems from my own personal background – being
raised in New York and having an Ecuadorian and Colombian background.
Process:
After the concept was finalized I needed to go through
collecting as much external content as possible, this included personal
footage, stock footage, images, fabrics, and music. It was important to collect
tapestries and a variety of fabric patterns because this texture would be used
in multiple parts of the projections to not only exhibit another cultural
notion but also give the walls a sense of implied texture. In After Effects the
video and image content was manipulated and animated to enhance the cultural
elements for each projector setup. The wall on the farthest right was composed
of two images, the first of mountain ranges in Colombia, and the second of Colombian
street art layered on top of each other to show movement. The next section was
a clip of street art that illustrated a typical Colombian meal – la bandeja tipica
– in After Effects I played with scale and position to create movement and
layered on colors of the Colombian flag. The following section used two
sections of Ecuadorian street art where flower elements are animated in the
foreground and cycle through filling the scene, and then falling into the
ground.
The next two scenes are also depictive of the Ecuadorian culture where footage
of a truck moving through a small town and layered with an Ecuadorian textured
blanket, and fabric is animated with the blue footed booby in the foreground.
The last section is composed of video footage of the view out of a train in New
York that that has a cartoon effect in addition to being layered with Colombian
street art. After the main portions of the walls were covered I began to
repurpose some content to fill other areas: doorways, doors, side walls, etc.
that would help to fill the space better and create a more immersive experience.
Interpretation:
Once all the created content was on the walls it was
interesting to see how all of the individual sections came together to tell a
cohesive story. The panels worked together to fully immerse the viewer into the
culture both visually and audibly. While a lot of bright and vibrant colors
were used, each panel worked effectively in serving to show off their individual
content independently from each other wall section. This is successfully because
the content can be displayed through all projector setups or shown individually
and still be strong enough to stand on its own.
Noema is a concept introduced in phenomenology by Husserl, a french philosopher, as something to do with the 'thought' and what these thoughts are all about. It is in a way, the start to our thinking and our whole imagination. If we think about the world, the world is like a series of thoughts collectively constructed into a single collective conscious mind. All animals big or small, humans, fire, water, earth, the smallest creatures like bacteria, the smallest grains of sand, the vast roads circling the earth, they all form a collective consciousness which influences the world in its own way. There is energy being transferred between each of these elements in their own simple ways. I wanted to develop an immersive installation, guided by my own soundtrack, which gives us the experience of being small and insignificantly futile compared to our collective consciousness. I wanted to cultivate a sense of guided spirituality through the sounds, visuals and video narratives.
Process:
Architecture and spatial perspective:
The first thing I did was map out the whole space and look at what physical objects I can use as props inside the installation. This was the most interesting challenge as each space had its own nature and objects to play with. Below are the photos for each space with elements we could play with: the exhaust shaft, the gauzed box below the exhaust shaft, the ceiling vent and alarm, the side of the big projector, the pile of cardboards below the lion and the electrical outlet box on the side wall.
Content development:
Station 2:
I thought about how collective minds work and the first thing that came to my mind was ants. Ants collectively help each other and function as components of a single mind. Each ant can be looked at as a thought. A collection of these ants results in the formation of an imagination funneling into something. I decided to funnel these ants to move into one of the big overhead exhaust pipes. I had made a short movie last year called 'Samudra' which was shot in my pilgrimage beachside town of Gokarna, India. The movie's essence was to belong to the earth, with elements of animals, plants, trees, the sea and fishermen. I decided to project this onto the entrance doors as it formed a good flat canvas. Then I decided to use the lion calibration to animate the lion on the side wall to feel like its facing waves from the neighbouring walls. I projected a movie of being on the road on the left door next to the lion as it gave a sense of rebellion to the door which said 'do not enter' but it felt like we did enter it through the road. I covered the overhead walls with clouds and a waterfall effect.
Station 1:
I was working on a composition signifying the meeting of the elements of fire, earth and energy. I used the big projector to project my composition on to the walls. I used the constant elements of particles to signify energy flow across each canvas. The particles were like a portal to the next canvas in each projection space. The hand in the round canvas catches fire momentarily and the blanket on the left is like a safeguarding of the energy that is being transferred. (the particles are sheltered underneath this blue blanket) I layered the overhead pipes with a line pattern showing a DNA strand- like pattern which moves.
My MA thesis, Micro Lux Chants is a project based on the life cycle of Bioluminescent Bacteria Aliivibrio Fischeri.
Bioluminescent bacteria produce organic, natural light on their own when they breathe.
Me and my collaborator, Brian Merlo decided to streak petri dishes with these bacteria in the shape of 'UTD' and we recorded a time lapse over 5 days to make the bacteria speak back to us with light. What you see below is bacteria lighting up and dimming away during their life cycle.
Station 3:
My close friends Adnan Naseem Khan (Astral Hawk Interactive) and Vincent Martin were happy to collaborate with me as I wanted the element of feeling small and insignificant inside a vast desert in this installation. They shared their drone footage of White Sands, New Mexico with me and I decided to project this onto the middle wall containing the huge exhaust pipe and gauze box. I added a 3d object inside the gauze box and it gave a really cool effect (which you will see in the video). I added the cubes and particles as energy transfer over this vast white desert. I layered the over head pipe with spiral lines making it like a helix.
Station 4:
This was the composition I spent most of my time on. It has the main elements of thought, the eye, energy, the genie and the galaxy patterns. I had made an art project for Mihai Nadin's Aesthetics Class called 'Galaxy in a Jar' which was a pickle jar artwork meant to generate visuals like outer-space and galaxies. I layered the whole canvas with these outer-space elements to give a sense that not only the earth, the whole Universe is a collective mind breeding continuous thought. When two beings interact with each other, energy is transferred between themselves and thats how we can sustain the world. By being there for each other. Hence I made the old white genie on the left and the face on the right as a form of evolution of man.
Hence adding all the micro and macro elements, I developed this installation to create an experience of the whole Biome we live in.
Interpretation:
I developed a soundtrack on Logic Pro X to encapsulate the experience of this whole immersive installation.
For this concept we really wanted to go all out and make the room light up with colors and moving objects. We wanted to show our expressive/creative side out onto the wall with color and glowing images to simulate a sort of rave feeling with a bit of animation both self made and professionally made. After finding out the mutual love of Dragon Ball Z we both had, we wanted to implement some animations in the show into our pieces. We split the work up since we had twice the things to cover.
Process:
Amanda -
I came up to the school lab with Elizabeth and there we went
ahead and mapped the whole room and got some visuals up on the walls, with lots
of color. I brought some LED props and I recorded me and Elizabeth messing
around with them with the walls with our projections playing in the background.
It created this neat effect that I was wanting to bring into premiere and edit
them to be bright and colorful visuals. I also found some other footage of the
LED props in action to blend with them. I wanted the colors of the lights to be
vibrant so when I edited them they would change drastically, creating an
interesting flow of color.
I played around with a nice variety of effects and blends until it looked like a glitch or psychedelic.
Me and Elizabeth spent time in the lab and came
up with the idea of a dragon ball theme for the room. I had the idea to use
.gif’s in this one, so I went to Giphy and found a ton of Dragon Ball .gif’s
that were ready to go. I wanted to use the gifs as panels in the Geo around the
room.
Elizabeth -
I created a few gifs to go along with the wall art that Amanda and I created with the LED lights and the Madmapper files in photoshop. I animated us with our heads moving along the walls to make it look like the drawings were interacting with whats going on with the classroom mapping.
As stated before Amanda and I worked together to place the many gifs of Dragon ball z within the room, seemingly replacing some of the objects within the room with short clips of Dragon ball z characters interacting with each other. Amanda created a few colorful videos to place within certain parts of the room and I was tasked with placing them in the proper spots such as a bright water animation on the large silver contraption to make it seem as if liquid was flowing through the tubes.
We both collaborated on which video to put where on the rest of the projection maps and what what movement would look better on the walls. We then implemented Dragon Ball Z gifs into the designs and tried to find interesting ways to display them.
Interpretation:
After completing this assignment we found it to be a lot more fun and easier than we expected it to be, and it opened our eyes to the possibilities of what projection mapping can do to a simple room and it made us hungry for more.
Concept With this project, I had originally wanted to continue working with MIDI controls to affect parameters and visuals through MadMapper. My first thought seemed a bit ambitious, but I was excited to attempt to work it out. Since each of the dual projector setups were run on four separate computers, I needed to find a system that would allow them to sync MIDI with each other. Initially I felt that a hardware MIDI interface would solve the problem, but that would only be useful for sending a handful of MIDI data to a single computer. I looked into syncing the computers via a Virtual MIDI Network, seeing as Ableton Live 10 allows you to host a single Live session on multiple systems via Virtual Networks (Wi-Fi). The bump that I ran into with this technique was simple, we are running 3 Windows and 1 Mac. While the Mac has a driver for Virtual Networking, apparently most Windows systems do not. After learning this, I decided to find another way around creating this project. Instead of starting with the technical aspect, I decided to start this project thinking of what I wanted to portray creatively. With 8 projectors washing the entire length of the room, I wanted to create something environmental, and heavily textured.
Process I remembered that I had great 1080p drone footage given to me by a friend that he had bought for a music video. Bird's eye view video of beautiful oceans and forests with lots of rich greens and deep orange sunsets.
I wanted to make this footage more rhythmic and a different balance between the importance of texture and color. Keeping the texture of trees and rocks was important, but I also wanted to make it more about the natural colors. Taking the footage into Premiere Pro, I scaled the footage down and rotated it in a radial motion around the center. The amount of sections varies from clip to clip, but I used anywhere from 3 to 24 sections of the same video repeated.
To 'soft-sync' all of the footage, I rendered my final composition four separate times. Since the visuals are set to music, I let the beginning of each render have 4 bars notice to start the next station (Station 2, which runs the music, has 16bars notice, Station 1 has 12bars, Station 3 has 8bars, and Station 4 has 4bars). This allows me to press play with slightly more accuracy than quantifying my start times with seconds. One thing that irritated me about working in Premiere Pro, is the lack of grids that are possible within the timeline. Since everything is in sync to the amount of video frames (30fps), it is impossible to tweak the video by BPM (beats per minute). My only solution was to use the closest frame marker as possible, which throws off some of the video renders by roughly 5 milliseconds.
Concept:
This project endured many different forms in my head. When first announced I wanted to do something interactive with a Kinect. I have no knowledge of the Kinect and how to transfer it to something like this. I instead decided to create multiple animations and a dark theme to go with a song. I wanted a song that had an industrial (like a Workshop/Manufacturing, not the music genre) sound. In the past year I had played a game called Ruiner. I knew that had music very close to what I was looking for and listened to it's soundtrack multiple times over to find a song that I could envision in the space. In context of the game all the music fits perfectly being rough, repetitive, and slightly unpleasing to listen to, because that isn't the focus and fits the environment that's rough, repetitive, and slightly unpleasing to look at (Dystopian, reds, blacks, and strobe lights). I knew I would be listening to this song hundreds of times so I had to at least enjoy it. I knew others would hear this and I chose the one song that stood out as a median between pleasant and industrial. A good test of would my mother listen to this at least once or twice and not skip it after 30 seconds (which is something I considered, love you mom).
Song Selected - Call by Zamilska.
Animations, How can I activate this space. I had many more ambitious ideas than I was able to accomplish either due to time or lack of skill. I knew because of the music and the source of where I found that music I knew to create a dark environment. I knew I wanted rats, from the beginning, to run around the space. I wanted those same rats to look into the space. I added holes to help the rats look into the space. I created two big gears to anchor the space. The backdrop was from an ad campaign for the game that I heavily transformed.
Process:
Going in Order, Song Selected, I knew before I started timing things I needed assets to apply to the timings. The rat running down the ventilation shaft was a goal for me, if I could do that, I could build every other asset I wanted too.
Rats, I got references of rats running (A gif by Karrakas significantly helped me) and created a 10 key frames of a rat running in photoshop. I took these rat templated and a MadMapper Mask I made of the vent and animated the rat running down the vent (50~ frames). I tested it and first try it looked amazing. I knew I could do this. Continuing with the rats, I created two different lengths of straight across running animations (50~ and 100~ frames long).
All the Animations (Excluding backdrop) were frame by frame animated by me in Adobe Fireworks (Which I haven't touched in 6 years) and Exported as gifs.
Gears, The big gear was created first. I've made gears before in Rhino and knew I could recreate them easily. The first Big gear had nine teeth and five inner slots. I learned when animating that in order to create small loops that could be repeated easily the amount of teeth needed to be divisible by the amount of inner slots (Here's some numbers to explain why this happened animating wise. In order to turn the gear one tooth length I had 4 frames planned. If you take 9/5 you cant simplify it into an integer without rounding. With my Second Gear I had 12 teeth and 6 slots, 12/6 can be simplified to 2 or 2/1. The numerator determines how many full teeth turns needed to make it look seamless and able to be repeated. In addition it takes 4 frames to animate and since I'm doing it by hand it matters. First Gear - 36 frames, Second Gear - 8. Work smarter not harder is a good lesson I've learned repeatedly this semester.). The Big Gear has 12 teeth and six slots while the Small Gear has 10 teeth and five slots. I animated one set of revolutions for each. I then lined up a circle with each medallion to make sure it fit right when I was animating it. I recreated the animations and transformed each frame of each gear and placed it correctly.
Holes and Eyes, The holes were created in Photoshop. I planned multiple and different holes but I had a hard time drawing them, as references didn't help me particularly well. I drew one and ran with it knowing I could rotate and flip it. I created 5 key frames for holes. The eyes I created at lightning speed as I was really familiar at this point with Adobe Fireworks. I created a wide open and half open eye in Photoshop and created a mass of them animated in Fireworks.
Gifs, MadMapper accepts .gif files and works well with them surprisingly. I used gifs to make sure early timings were perfect.
Timing, The Music this was all timed to music through Adobe AfterEffects, which I had never used before so it was quite the learning (and frustrating) experience. I timed out all the effects in the song that I wanted to time things too. The gears would turn on certain beats, the rats released on others, the holes were created early on, the eyes appeared with voices. The small gear was timed first and since it was a irregular beat I timed it in Fireworks, Took three different tries because of the massive amount of frames. This is where I tried to export the whole timeline of the Gear throughout the song as a gif, No No don't do this it was a horrible idea and it crashed Fireworks and froze up the computer for a good amount of time. I left Atec and went for lunch at that point hours of work down the drain, worried these gears wouldn't work. Came back restarted lined up one animation and got it timed back to where I had it last time and cropped it so it wouldn't freeze hopefully. I learned the amount I cropped significantly decreased the lag, so all my timings were off by up to 30 milliseconds. I re-timed it. Duplicated it to line the entire gif up with the song and export it, No No bad idea, you think I learned something last time. Crash, Restart, Re-time. I didn't duplicate it every time the gear spun it was like 2800~ frames when it was crashing (what a fool). This is where After Effects came in. I timed it instead in After Effects after converting the gif to a mp4. After this tedious experience it was mostly smooth sailing. I just lined everything up in After effects and exported them all as .avi files (I tried exporting through Media Encoder and was having all sorts of crashing and nonstop errors). There are seven places the rats can appear (15 appearances) , two gears, four holes, six timed eye set appearances. I don't like to point out flaws, but in this report I've mentioned multiple times about animating the big gear and it is still in the show. I animated the key frames and lined them up with the MadMapper template. In AfterEffects when I imported the mp4 I made (did check to make sure the mp4 was correct) it would only show two of the eight frames I animated. I couldn't figure out why and elected to move on and return if I had time. Each set of animations per computer setup was delayed in 5 second intervals so I could start each myself. Of course this is not perfectly accurate and leaves some upsetting discontinuities between computers but I elected it over trying to time 4 different people to click all at once.
(Quick Note about this Gif and Ruiner. The game is violent and about saving your brother from his captors in any way necessary. This gif contains the words "KILL YOU" scrolling across the screen. Given the subject matter I can see how this might upset some people. Since my theme was dark but not necessarily about violence I made sure in Max to make the text on the helmet/face non-legible)
Backdrop, I planned on creating my own video and putting it through Max to distort it with tests I had done earlier. This didn't work very well as I came to this after all of my animating and timing had been finished. Realistically, I had no idea what to do or how to do it. I found an gif of the Ruiner character from an ad campaign for the game that I thought would be interesting and after many Max tests I found a setup wasn't expecting that I loved. The Composition included duplicating the image multiple times, shrinking, scrolling, rotating, blurring (not really, but not easy to explain and blur is close-ish) and adding a VCR line distortion.The recording commands in Max just didn't work. I recorded through Windows recording and recorded the MadMapper Output that was Spout'd from Max.
The Backdrop was placed zoomed out on the far hallway and the two opposing walls. The other five walls I made a near seamless (except when the timing isn't perfect) five projector blend of one texture across three computers. I am very happy with that. I'd like to add the remaining three walls so I could have one unified blend, but I need to figure out how to increase the resolution in Max which is surprisingly elusive.
Additional Comment - Most of my other posts are worded differently. They go straight into it on how I did what, not saying much about trial and error. For this since I for a good part used programs I'm unfamiliar with I wanted to go into more detail about everything I learned and the difficulties I had. I really wanted with this project to expand my bounds and try something new. I could've created something new with Max and only Max. Instead, I want to use my time in this class wisely and try as many new approaches to this world of projection mapping while I have this perfect space available to me.
Thank you Professor Scott and Staff of the Atec, building that kept it open, for letting me spend my Spring Break in the Lab working on this project.
When the project was assigned, the idea of washing the walls reminded me of walk-through museum exhibits. When walking through these exhibits, visitors must keep moving themselves and their heads around to capture the full idea presented, as each piece tells a unique part of a story. This then reminded me of the visitor centers in different state and national parks I had visited, so I wanted to mimic that mood. I started with the theme of National Parks and worked my way from there, picking imagry from Garden of the Gods/Pikes Peak, Colorado, Grand Teton/Yellowstone, Wyoming, Grand Canyon, Arizona and Yosemite, California. I originally wanted to use personal family videos from my visits to these places, but found that -especially in older cases- the video wasn't high definition, and would blur harshly on some projectors, so I looked online for drone footage of these parks and began my project.
Process
After finding the videos I wanted to edit for the projection, I drew a diagram of the room in order to distribute the parks in a cohesive manner. Two of the parks have separate sections, so I used the 1st and 4th setups for those.
Once initial planning was done, I opened the videos on Adobe Premiere and cut them into short loops. I then found sound clips of different biomes and animals to piece together into ambient noise, creating a more immersive environment for each park.
With all the assets ready, I went into MadMapper and mapped out every interesting surface from each projector; thus creating a mock-up of the room.
I then uploaded the videos to their corresponding setup files and laid out the videos in order of what I considered to be most important to least, placing the landmarks on larger surfaces and surrounding parts of the parks on smaller surfaces. I also included titles to denote which park is on which wall. In each setup, I also included a layer containing the ambient noise so that each computer could play the correct track. Inclusively, one setup contains indie folk music to bring the piece together with a woodsy-road-trip aesthetic. I lastly named the piece "Titans of the West".
Interpretation
[Video to come]
After finishing this project, I have a greater appreciation of interior spaces, as planning out this projection was a lot trickier than I had imagined. It also gave me several Ideas of future projections I would love to create using several projectors.
Its hard to keep my mind together sometimes, especially when there are so many things to think about; Family, Friends, Career, Food, Nature, and Indulgences. This composition shall allow the audience to step into my head and get a taste of goes through it every day, it's a lot I know, but wear my shoes for a moment and understand my story. It's important for me to share where I come from since I got big plans for where I am going next and I want to make sure that everyone knows that dreams come true if you work hard for them and that some will have to work harder than others but that is perfectly fine!
Process
This composition was created by analyzing every possible surface in which the light from the projectors would hit, every single pixel! From boxes on the shelves to pre-made sculptures at the studio, I aimed to interact with as many surfaces as I could. I created a quad for each individual video and placed it according to the following layout.
Projector setup
Interpretation
Memories Composition
..::Party::..
Here lays a bonus composition due to my latest party mood.
