Chelsey Suarez: Projection 3 – Classroom Mapping

Concept:

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.