Afifah Mazhar: Project 1 Background Mapping

 

Concept:

For this project I wanted to create three different scenes that were unified in some way. For this reason I decided to think further in to what I wanted to convey with my work. As this is a new medium for me, I decided that I wanted to work with something familiar as my base. For this reason I chose to use a paneled wall in my home. As I was brainstorming what I wanted the core idea of my project to be, I remembered a certain skin from a game I play (DJ Sona from League of Legends). In this skin, the character has three transformations while still being unified through the music she plays. I was inspired off of this and choose to make a mapping for each of her three skins. In the game, her skins are interactive and have different sounds per her attacks. I wanted to capture this through using interactive audio in my project and having it follow each skins actual music. 

 Techniques:

The first thing I did for this project was gather all my materials (photos of the background, videos to be used, and music played by each form). I then uploaded the background image in to mad mapper and created quads on every area where I wanted a projection to show up (then added masks for the areas where I did not want projections to appear in the quadded areas). The quadded areas and masks can be seen in the picture below.  As I wanted the audio to be interactive with the actual audio used in the character's skin. I made use of the sound input options MadMapper had. From there, I would record my screen as I played the corresponding sound for each of the three variations I had. Lastly, in a video editing software, I combined the three screen recordings and fixed the audio to make it clearer. 

Interpretation: 

As I was inspired by the three different forms of the DJ Sona skin, I wanted each mapping to embody the differences in each version while still highlighting the unity between them. For this reason, I made sure there was a common outline for where the animations would appear (the sound on the side panels and the video in the center panel). To show the difference between the forms, I used different visuals for each. One example of this can be seen in the red version of the skin. In this version's animation all of the projections are sharp and quick representing the music and intensity of the character. In contrast to this, in the purple version of the skin, I made sure to use projections that were slow and flowed smoothly. This emphasized the calm nature of the character in this form.