Concepts:
When I set out onto campus to find interesting locations to project onto, I immediately thought of the University commons buildings, more specifically their front entrances. Their round, tiered design is quite unique, and reminded me of a UFO, which makes sense considering the campus' astronomical history. I decided, then, to base my projection off the alien mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For a second composition, I chose the Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab in the far-North of the campus. I pass this building often and always thought the panels on the side would be an interesting backing for projecting movies onto from Lot T across the street. My chosen theme depended on what movie I decided to project. I chose the 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead because of its novelty and it's status as a public domain work.
Techniques:
For the University Commons entrance, the most important technique I had to utilize was mesh warping, which I used on every quad on the screen. This helped emphasize the depth and the shape of the building. This worked much better than using chained lines with applied textures. After I had made all of the accents (most of them using the "Line Anim" material), I felt the composition was still a bit lacking, so I applied two warped quads with the "Diagonals" material, and set them to a low opacity to mimic the mothership's wandering blue and red lights as a background. I also included a flashing panel on the topmost tier to make it look similar to the communication light panel from the final scene of the movie. I accomplished this by taking the "Simplex" material, setting the gradient to "Color_Cut", increasing the Noise Strop, then applying the "Pixelate" FX Type.
For the Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab, by far the most important aspect was projecting the movie. Due to the panels on the side of the building being spaced apart, this looked a bit off. I went through with it though in favor of projecting a larger image than if I had projected the movie on just one of the panels. In case the viewer would rather look at a smaller, but less distorted image, I added a second image of the movie onto the small tower on the left side of the building. The rest of the composition relied on creating a decorative border that would be interesting while not being too big of a distraction. I opted for putting an image of the movie poster on either side of the building and added a blood-red "clouds" material to fill the negative space, using masks to keep it from interfering with the posters and the movie. I felt this was still too bare, so I added a few iterations of "Waveform" that I tied to the movie audio. This made for a great utilization of the movie's sound design.
More than anything, I intended these compositions to be entertaining. There is plenty of interesting architecture around UTD, and utilizing that feeling for fun and whimsy seemed like a gre use of the buildings and the projection technology. In my own realm of the interpretation, the only other thing these compositions presented me was a challenge in design and meticulous tweaking and editing.
Image Sources:
https://lovecraftianscience.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ce-lights.jpg
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FailingSelfishDogfish-size_restricted.gif
Movie Source:
https://archive.org/details/PhantasmagoriaTheater-NightOfTheLivingDead1968321
A side note:
I apologize for the Madmapper watermarks on the videos. I anticipated working on this project for a multitude of hours so I opted to do the work at home with a trial version of Madmapper. After this I plan to rent the full version to dodge the many issues the trial version presented me
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