Amir Naqi - Leonardo Project

For the Leonardo Wall Wash, I wanted to come up with something different.  I was under the impression that the other students would be incorporating the journal covers into their design and I wanted to approach it differently.  I found a transparent image of the publication's logo and I wanted that to be the focus of the design.  When somebody walks in and sees the relief sticking out from the wall, right across from the door, I wanted them to be welcomed in.  With this idea in mind, I began by vectorizing the Leonardo logo.  The source material I found online was low-res and I wanted the design to come out in much higher quality.  I took the logo and wanted to animate it so I went into Adobe After Effects.
Using Mercury Transmit, I was able to map out the two surface elements I wanted to project onto.  The background of the relief, and the circular center.  I went in and made a shape layer, drew up a bunch of points and worked to add new points and make micro adjustments until I was comfortable with the masks.  From here I needed a background design and a foreground element to play well with the design.  I started creating a solid, turning it into a 3d layer, rotating it, generating a grid, extending and repeating it to cover the whole background, then offsetting it to give it the illusion of movement.  I keyframed some motion, added in some easing in the graph editor, and rendered out a 3 second clip.  I wanted the design to be sound-reactive since I was also working on the music for the event.  I took the mapped background into MadMapper and started the clip over with each beat hit.  This gave my design a sort of pulsating effect to the beat.  I made sure to render out a white pass of the background so I could add MIDI input controls to adjust the color of the grid.  I also went in and added controls for speed.  After my background was complete, I went back and forth into After Effects to work on the foreground effects.
I used some of the similar techniques in regards to sound-reactivity and motion.  I wanted the design to play well with the music and to be inviting.  I rendered out a few passes for general purpose elements, like a circle hit that is mapped to the relief.  After I mapped out more MIDI controls for that elements, I worked to create a "dancing" Leonardo logo.  I wanted this to be larger on the canvas as it portrays the central theme of the event.  After lots of configuring, I found a comfortable balance between the nature of the design, interactivity of sound, and human control inputs through the MIDI devices.  Overall, I was happy with the way it turned out.