Ethan Christopher Tape Mapping

Burning Down the House
Taping Mapping Project
Ethan Christopher

For this project, I started with a specific vision and I now find myself with an entirely different outcome. This isn't necessarily a negative thing! My original concept was a cross section of a house ("doll house style") that peers into the mundane lives of suburbanites as chaos ensues outside of the house-- they live on unaffected. (I will get back to this topic at the end of my writing.)

As we worked in MadMapper during class time last week, Prof Scott asked someone to queue up some music. The importance of music is stressed a lot in class conversations and I realized I did not have a sound element for my composition. I clicked around and ended up playing a song by one of my favorite bands, Talking Heads. "Burning Down the House" thumped and the audio-input controlled lines expanded along with it- my house was shaking. This planted a new concept in my mind and I got to work. My new composition pays homage to David Byrne's cultish funk rock group and creates dynamic visuals tied to a (psycho) killer track.

The house outline was designed very minimally with intentions of leaving lots of room for it to be played around with. In Illustrator I laid out the 16 lines, created the SVG, and imported it into MadMapper.

I used the following video elements in my composition:

-Burning Down the House Music Video

-Eye Stock footage from Pexels

-Clouds stock footage from pexels

-Various exterior house parts (siding, roof, windows)

-David Byrne dancing Gif from google images

-fire stock footage

-facebook video of Professor Scott's sculpture

All edited in Final Cut Pro X and imported into MadMapper.

I layered the SVG lines over the media quad and added an audio input thickness control

FINAL OUTCOME:

MEDIA FILE:

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Side note: For a future project, I'd like to create an actual dollhouse and project rooms / life into it on a small scale by layering some sort of sheer or clear (plexiglass?) exterior and then create the outside environment too. I'm going to start experimenting with it.