Koby Wheeler Project 2 Shoe Mapping

Concept

For this project I used the song Weather Report by Bad Tuner. While this song was released in 2020, it has a very nostalgic feel to it that I really like. It features a woman's voice at parts where she is reporting the temperatures of different cities. From the first time I heard this song, I imagined the music video being this montage of old weather reporters from the 60's and 70's. 

Process

I found different old weather reports and news promos off of YouTube and began to splice these together to the song to create a video to be mapped onto the shoe. Once this was complete, I was able to import it into MadMapper and begin masking the shoe. I used a photo of the shoe from my phone to get a general sense of the shape, masked over the photo, then projected onto it to get a pretty close mapping. From there I live-masked the shoe to make sure there was no creep of the light onto the background. Once that was finished I added the video in and began to play with some of the line and planar mapping tools to create an interesting composition. At first, I let the video cover the entirety of the shoe, however, after running through that I noticed the aspect ratios were way too far off and many parts of the video were getting cut off. I decided, instead, to map a part of the shoe that would be a closer aspect ratio, and therefore the video in the final cut only shows on the right side of the shoe. I was able to find a nice cloud loop to use as the overall background of the shoe that I thought complimented the aesthetic nicely. I wanted some elements of the shoe to show through as to not ignore the fact that I was indeed mapping onto a shoe. So I mapped the Adidas stripes of the shoe to flash white to the beat, this really just looks like it is changing the transparency because the shoes are white. I also added a line that pulses around some distinct lines that are on the shoe to add another element to the composition. I set up a rig with my ring lights and a phone mount to capture the video of the shoe as pictured below.

Interpretation

I think this project has really good vibes with a fun flow between the song and the graphics. I love the weather, and looking at radar and weather reports, so to be able to kind of tie that into this project with media was really fun, I think this is a really fun way to experience this song in a visually interesting way and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.