I wanted to do something spooky for the Halloween season, which led me to the idea of a skull. But I felt a generic human skull wouldn't be as interesting (or as creepy) as some of the other options out there. This led me to the dog skull, which I always thought of as a very interesting shape, and lends itself well to an angular, polygonal rendering.
I palled around Google for a while, and found this image:
I took that into Illustrator, and went over it with the trace feature which gave me a scalable vector image, which I then cleaned up and edited down until I had this line set:
I exported these lines as a .SVG file, and popped it open in MadMapper. Once there, I began playing around with placement and orientation. At the urging of Prof. Scott, I iterated the design to take advantage of as much of the space I was projecting on as I could.
When taping off the image, I tried to slightly exaggerate the angular, nature of the lines, especially with the rightmost skull, which I reversed and had a mind to juxtapose against the other two, making it look rougher and more sketchy.
After that, I started playing around with effects and colors.
I animated the lines of the two blue skulls on the left in the same exact manner, giving them a stable, unified look. I also masked them off and put a spinning particle cloud behind them, orbiting around them in a tight swarm. The red skull on the right got a vibration animation to make it look erratic and disturbed. I also put a pair of green particle clouds in the red skull's eyes to give it a haunted, possessed feel.
Screen Capture Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IC1jeaNbhqmiwaVQm40hntuOD_Sv22IY
Not quite satisfied with it just sitting there, I decided to figure out how to get the design to react to sound. First, I linked the red skull's vibration animation to sound, making it fly farther and farther apart the louder the sound. I also added a pair of lines representing laser-eyes from the red skull and set their default thickness to 0 before setting it to increase with sound. I tried to make the vibration react to higher pitches, while the laser eyes react to bass sounds, but the results were mixed. I then went to the blue skulls and recycled the mask over the particle swarm and inverted it on an animated stripes quad. Again, I set the default thickness and speed of these lines to 0 and used identical settings from the laser eyes for their own audio trigger so that they would appear at the same time and with the same intensity as the lasers. I colored them red and oriented them to travel laterally down the skulls so as to evoke damage and impact animations from old video game sprites.
Projection Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lHB5xhzhJOQfpHAOhvH1q3aeULDIFIBJ
The piece's meaning kind-of evolved as I was working on it, but I ended up settling on a theme of unstable radicalism against controlled unity. The red skull is crazed, individualistic, and violent, while the blue skulls are unified, conformist, and judgemental. Both tho, are ghoulish, inhuman, and dead.
MadMapper File: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1S20xCN-97tztGxHAKs4aSYDMJjeS0JWU
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