Concept: For my project I wanted to try to turn a few boxes into small buildings and animate various elements to go with music.
Technique: I taped white paper to a few boxes so they could be used as a surface to project onto. Two of the boxes (the ones on the right and left) were mapped with a 3d model while the third was a basic surface. The windows and doors are actually two surfaces, one for the frame and one behind the frame that gets "lit up" when it's triggered by midi input. To control all the windows I used the virtual midi setup from my last project (albeit with different music).
Interpretation: I decided I wanted to have the windows set to light up with different instruments, with each instrument seeming to move around the buildings. This was incredibly time consuming and I'm not sure I'd do it again. The biggest issue I ran into is that my window lighting needed to be planned in advance, something which I didn't do. The result is that I was running out of space despite many of the windows being unused. Another issue that I discovered is that you can't control FX for a group, so each window has to be controlled individually (I was using brightness to make the windows "light up"). While this is time consuming, it isn't a big issue unless you want multiple controls for the same parameter. Speaking of wanting to control one parameter with multiple control inputs, it's just not possible. To put it another way, if you want to control a surface's opacity with two different inputs so that you can have two different effects depending on the midi input triggering it, you're out of luck. So my plan to reuse windows and color them per-instrument flew out the window. All that said, I'm okay with how it turned out, I'm just disappointed because I feel like I got held back by the program.
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