I didn't have a set background in mind for my wall wash concept. I wanted to use bubbles in my design, almost like thought bubbles coming out of the brain relief that was made for the event. I wanted to have some of the journal covers in the bubble floating and rotating across the walls, but I had issues trying to get the movements down like I wanted.
I also wanted to have the number 50 made out of bubbles. This I wanted to have moving as well but decided against it in the end because I didn't want to deform the 50.
I finally decided to use the journal covers in the background. I didn't like either of the options for the moving journal cover videos that were available. I would have used one of them but there was a weird offset shading that I didn't think would add to the design that I wanted. I felt like it would be too much for the viewer all at once.
Ideally, if I could present this again, I would get the bubbles with the journal covers in them moving and I would experiment with making the bubbles possibly vibrate in the shape of the 50, or having the 50 as a whole move around on the walls.
Altered States is a pair of works exploring experiences with psychoactive drugs, mental illness, and comparisons between the two. Whether you read into the pieces as drug-induced or caused by mental illness depends on your personal experiences with either. Either way, we experience a warping of identity and reality itself. I combined processed footage of my family members with shaking, vascular-colored lines to emulate altered mental states. The lines increase the hallucinogenic feeling while also expressing how altered mental states can act as a hazy filter or even confinement through which we view the world.
I started by taking footage of my husband Eric and my grandmother Rita (both good sports) and digitally rearranging them in Processing to simulate time compression and warping effects.
After harvesting thousands of images, I bring them all into Movie Maker and set the duration of each to .06 seconds to create a smooth video.
From here, I bring the created video content into Madmapper. After using the spatial scanner to calibrate to the relief sculpture, I added and adjusted the video content to best fit the structure and desired expression. After days of building content, I only end up using about 15 seconds of each video. On top of this I added lines in vascular colors of reds and blues with some auto-shake. I decided not to add background content, because altered mental states is often an isolating experience separating you from reality and other people.
Altered States
Altered States 2
I chose to work with the large abstracted head sculpture because it compliments the Dali-esque style of video I make using Processing and Movie Maker. I enjoyed combining a favorite process of mine with a new output and mode of expression; I think the relief sculpture compliments and adds to the work. I would like to explore this combination more in the future and experiment more with lighting, After Effects, audio inputs, and background possibilities.
Continuing on the concept of my Room Mapping Project, this composition expresses a different perspective towards my idea of allowing the viewer to step inside my mind and with it, to have a moment in which my memories are seen through space.
The second composition is the successor of a work created in my video production class, the story talks about a hacker who lost his wife due to an automated car accident. He loses his mind throughout the video and creates an Artificial Intelligence that replaces his wife but such becomes a much greater burden than her physical state.
Process
The first composition was created in After Effects and Mad Mapper, I initially exported the line output from MM and used it as a base to create the animation of the videos within AE.
Concept:
This project endured many different forms in my head. When first announced I wanted to do something interactive with a Kinect. I have no knowledge of the Kinect and how to transfer it to something like this. I instead decided to create multiple animations and a dark theme to go with a song. I wanted a song that had an industrial (like a Workshop/Manufacturing, not the music genre) sound. In the past year I had played a game called Ruiner. I knew that had music very close to what I was looking for and listened to it's soundtrack multiple times over to find a song that I could envision in the space. In context of the game all the music fits perfectly being rough, repetitive, and slightly unpleasing to listen to, because that isn't the focus and fits the environment that's rough, repetitive, and slightly unpleasing to look at (Dystopian, reds, blacks, and strobe lights). I knew I would be listening to this song hundreds of times so I had to at least enjoy it. I knew others would hear this and I chose the one song that stood out as a median between pleasant and industrial. A good test of would my mother listen to this at least once or twice and not skip it after 30 seconds (which is something I considered, love you mom).
Song Selected - Call by Zamilska.
Animations, How can I activate this space. I had many more ambitious ideas than I was able to accomplish either due to time or lack of skill. I knew because of the music and the source of where I found that music I knew to create a dark environment. I knew I wanted rats, from the beginning, to run around the space. I wanted those same rats to look into the space. I added holes to help the rats look into the space. I created two big gears to anchor the space. The backdrop was from an ad campaign for the game that I heavily transformed.
Process:
Going in Order, Song Selected, I knew before I started timing things I needed assets to apply to the timings. The rat running down the ventilation shaft was a goal for me, if I could do that, I could build every other asset I wanted too.
Rats, I got references of rats running (A gif by Karrakas significantly helped me) and created a 10 key frames of a rat running in photoshop. I took these rat templated and a MadMapper Mask I made of the vent and animated the rat running down the vent (50~ frames). I tested it and first try it looked amazing. I knew I could do this. Continuing with the rats, I created two different lengths of straight across running animations (50~ and 100~ frames long).
All the Animations (Excluding backdrop) were frame by frame animated by me in Adobe Fireworks (Which I haven't touched in 6 years) and Exported as gifs.
Gears, The big gear was created first. I've made gears before in Rhino and knew I could recreate them easily. The first Big gear had nine teeth and five inner slots. I learned when animating that in order to create small loops that could be repeated easily the amount of teeth needed to be divisible by the amount of inner slots (Here's some numbers to explain why this happened animating wise. In order to turn the gear one tooth length I had 4 frames planned. If you take 9/5 you cant simplify it into an integer without rounding. With my Second Gear I had 12 teeth and 6 slots, 12/6 can be simplified to 2 or 2/1. The numerator determines how many full teeth turns needed to make it look seamless and able to be repeated. In addition it takes 4 frames to animate and since I'm doing it by hand it matters. First Gear - 36 frames, Second Gear - 8. Work smarter not harder is a good lesson I've learned repeatedly this semester.). The Big Gear has 12 teeth and six slots while the Small Gear has 10 teeth and five slots. I animated one set of revolutions for each. I then lined up a circle with each medallion to make sure it fit right when I was animating it. I recreated the animations and transformed each frame of each gear and placed it correctly.
Holes and Eyes, The holes were created in Photoshop. I planned multiple and different holes but I had a hard time drawing them, as references didn't help me particularly well. I drew one and ran with it knowing I could rotate and flip it. I created 5 key frames for holes. The eyes I created at lightning speed as I was really familiar at this point with Adobe Fireworks. I created a wide open and half open eye in Photoshop and created a mass of them animated in Fireworks.
Gifs, MadMapper accepts .gif files and works well with them surprisingly. I used gifs to make sure early timings were perfect.
Timing, The Music this was all timed to music through Adobe AfterEffects, which I had never used before so it was quite the learning (and frustrating) experience. I timed out all the effects in the song that I wanted to time things too. The gears would turn on certain beats, the rats released on others, the holes were created early on, the eyes appeared with voices. The small gear was timed first and since it was a irregular beat I timed it in Fireworks, Took three different tries because of the massive amount of frames. This is where I tried to export the whole timeline of the Gear throughout the song as a gif, No No don't do this it was a horrible idea and it crashed Fireworks and froze up the computer for a good amount of time. I left Atec and went for lunch at that point hours of work down the drain, worried these gears wouldn't work. Came back restarted lined up one animation and got it timed back to where I had it last time and cropped it so it wouldn't freeze hopefully. I learned the amount I cropped significantly decreased the lag, so all my timings were off by up to 30 milliseconds. I re-timed it. Duplicated it to line the entire gif up with the song and export it, No No bad idea, you think I learned something last time. Crash, Restart, Re-time. I didn't duplicate it every time the gear spun it was like 2800~ frames when it was crashing (what a fool). This is where After Effects came in. I timed it instead in After Effects after converting the gif to a mp4. After this tedious experience it was mostly smooth sailing. I just lined everything up in After effects and exported them all as .avi files (I tried exporting through Media Encoder and was having all sorts of crashing and nonstop errors). There are seven places the rats can appear (15 appearances) , two gears, four holes, six timed eye set appearances. I don't like to point out flaws, but in this report I've mentioned multiple times about animating the big gear and it is still in the show. I animated the key frames and lined them up with the MadMapper template. In AfterEffects when I imported the mp4 I made (did check to make sure the mp4 was correct) it would only show two of the eight frames I animated. I couldn't figure out why and elected to move on and return if I had time. Each set of animations per computer setup was delayed in 5 second intervals so I could start each myself. Of course this is not perfectly accurate and leaves some upsetting discontinuities between computers but I elected it over trying to time 4 different people to click all at once.
(Quick Note about this Gif and Ruiner. The game is violent and about saving your brother from his captors in any way necessary. This gif contains the words "KILL YOU" scrolling across the screen. Given the subject matter I can see how this might upset some people. Since my theme was dark but not necessarily about violence I made sure in Max to make the text on the helmet/face non-legible)
Backdrop, I planned on creating my own video and putting it through Max to distort it with tests I had done earlier. This didn't work very well as I came to this after all of my animating and timing had been finished. Realistically, I had no idea what to do or how to do it. I found an gif of the Ruiner character from an ad campaign for the game that I thought would be interesting and after many Max tests I found a setup wasn't expecting that I loved. The Composition included duplicating the image multiple times, shrinking, scrolling, rotating, blurring (not really, but not easy to explain and blur is close-ish) and adding a VCR line distortion.The recording commands in Max just didn't work. I recorded through Windows recording and recorded the MadMapper Output that was Spout'd from Max.
The Backdrop was placed zoomed out on the far hallway and the two opposing walls. The other five walls I made a near seamless (except when the timing isn't perfect) five projector blend of one texture across three computers. I am very happy with that. I'd like to add the remaining three walls so I could have one unified blend, but I need to figure out how to increase the resolution in Max which is surprisingly elusive.
Additional Comment - Most of my other posts are worded differently. They go straight into it on how I did what, not saying much about trial and error. For this since I for a good part used programs I'm unfamiliar with I wanted to go into more detail about everything I learned and the difficulties I had. I really wanted with this project to expand my bounds and try something new. I could've created something new with Max and only Max. Instead, I want to use my time in this class wisely and try as many new approaches to this world of projection mapping while I have this perfect space available to me.
Thank you Professor Scott and Staff of the Atec, building that kept it open, for letting me spend my Spring Break in the Lab working on this project.
My main composition is Mist Beast, a piece about identity that blurs lines between human, animal, and technological life. It is a conceptual play on tape mapping as a technique which emphasizes lines as boundaries between spaces and content. Mist Beast was inspired by indigenous masks which were worn in spiritual ceremonies meant to evoke the spirit or qualities of animals. The morphing face of Mist Beast expresses a tension in identity felt by being not quite animal, not quite technological, only enigmatically human. All compositions are audio-input controlled. I also created two paper crane compositions, including one for Valentine's Day set to Ella Fitzgerald's Dream a Little Dream of Me. For my subversive commercial, I created a satirical piece set to ASPCA commercials. Here the ambiguity of identity is poking fun at the way ASPCA commercials humanize animals in order to invoke empathy from human potential donors.
I start by mining Youtube for usable footage, and input the media into Madmapper. A crucial part of my process is adding quads and aligning each section in the input screen to perfectly fit eyes, noses, mouths, and ears. I find an ideal loop and speed for each body part. I added cloudy presets for the face, plus drone footage of forest for the background. I input audio from Spotify and Youtube and started adding audio controls to lines and layers. Working with two sets of lines, I tried out every combination of animations, and saved presets when something looked dynamic and balanced. I made 50+ compositions and then narrowed it down to the best dozen. I recorded with Syphon while switching between presets to the beat of the music. In Movie Maker, I edited together two versions of the video and added fades in and out from black for a finishing touch.
Tape mapping is a relatively quick way to make an interactive and immersive installation. It is a great choice when the concept of the work is related to boundaries. It is really fun to do tape mapping with audio inputs. Choose music you really really like and won't mind listening to for several hours on end. Also, when you add audio input controls it is possible to effect saved presets, so watch for that. Otherwise you may end up spending several hours editing together two videos when you didn't have to. :)
Mist Beast - set to Lines of the Broken by DROELOE
Dreaming of Flight - set to how many stars are there by Idealism
Happy Valentine's Day - set to Dream a Little Dream of Me by Ella Fitzgerald
Will you be an angel for a helpless mist beast? - set to ASPCA commercial
Concept: Inspired by the origins of this origami crane, I constructed a composition in which all of my hypothesis regarding the nature of such are designed in a single layout.
Crane Setup
Process: The creation of this composition was serviced by a pre-made origami stop motion which served as the main video, free footage of a swan swimming on a lake, and a slow-motion cloud formation visual. The videos were compiled in adobe premiere pro and animated in adobe after effects.
MadMapper Setup
After Effects Sound Reaction Process
Interpretation: This video represents three theories regarding the origin of the crane: The first is that of a single piece of white paper, folded with care yet accurately, it initially transforms into a more organic form of a crane then into a standard origami style. A second theory involves a reversed transformation, from an organic shape into a two-dimensional form. Lastly, a third theory is based on a formation of clouds that were compiled and compress until the crane shape was formed.
Concept: Inspired by the music video Human by SEDVALIZA, this composition is organized as of how I perceive the visual to be projected into the following static wireframe.
2 Projector Setup-Left Projector
2 Projector Setup-Right Projector
Process: The composition was edited in adobe's after effects and premiere pro, within the latter a series of masks were created in reference to the rectangle design of the right projector, as well as a sound reactive opacity. On the opposite side of the design, the sound reactive rectangle lines were animated in after effects implementing the keyframing assistant, a blender effect, and the ease(value, x,y, minx, max,y) expression. The animated lines on the sculptures, speakers, the projector, and the pipe, were created within the MadMapper software using the projector as a reference.
MadMapper Setup
After Effects Masking
Interpretation: The meaning of this composition relies on SEVALIZA's song Human, which was introduced by a friend of mine, during a trip to Cici's pizza. I interpret the video of this piece as stating that she is a human despite her minotaur half and with the lyrics, "I am flesh, bones, I am skin, soul, I am human, Nothing more than human" resonates with my perspective on how one should compare itself to another being.
Two projector composition
MadMapper Two Projector Composition Left
MadMapper Two Projector Composition Right
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Concept: This creation was inspired by the lamp setup and the functionality behind candle lanterns, though they are not convenient during such modern times, I always wanted to own one thus the following composition.
Lantern Setup
Process: Pre-made footage of some animated 3d candles was taken into adobe after effects and altered using a scatterize effect, sound reactive scale transformation, and color correction. The orange lines and sound reactive ellipses were animated within MadMapper.
MadMapper Setup
After Effects Sound Reactive Process
Interpretation: This is a lantern that is traveling through space. A distorted flame appears whenever the lamp goes through a wormhole and arrives at a dimension where enough gravity allows its shape to remain unified.
Video of lantern composition
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Concept: I drink monster's zero ultra energy drink whenever I need that extra push. The latter inspired this composition to be a commercial implementation of projection mapping where the company would project this on a wall next to a corner store and even a building.
Lion Setup
Process: Compiled in adobe's premiere pro, a monster energy drink 3d animation commercial by youtube user Vproductions was altered one and at times two mirror effects in order to create a kaleidoscope visual, creative lumetri color corrections and a glitch reaction to Monster Energy's logo made from scratch.
MadMapper Setup
Interpretation: Power, energy, and lots of movement are all I think when I see a visual of a lion, thus this composition is created based on such. I decide to keep the original audio of the animated commercial since it produced an active yet controlled sense of energy, which represents the feeling I get whenever I drink my emergency dose of this energy drink.
For this project I decided to go off campus and get some flat architecture from one of the beautiful modern building in Dallas. The section I'm using is from the Omni Hotel. One of the new key features in the vibrant Dallas skyline. The part of it that I'm using is located on the back side of the hotel right next to the event entrance. These compositions together are a proof of concept and could be custom themed to have information about the current events. It could even serve help direct patrons toward parking, ticket purchase, and the event itself. For now I have it setting two examples of general moods for the people coming threw. I decided to do it in a way that is non specific and could be custom fit to any given event.
This is directly outside the event center and an ideal location for information to be displayed. It has some beautiful unique architecture and is a rough white stone. The perfect surface to act as a screen
This is a composition is intended to insight motion and excitement. It would be a great thing to project at the beginning of an event. It says"This is where it's happening!" It has a strong flow toward the entrance of the building. With side swipes on most of the surfaces. It also has a large yellow arrow going into the parking area. Coupled with some projected text or street signs, it could be a very useful tool to help direct traffic.
This composition would be ideal for projecting at the end of an event. It says"Goodnight, go home, the fun here has been had." Once the event is over patrons don't necessarily need any additional information as they would know where there cars are. Instead it would be better to just give them a pretty parting gift. Leaving a lasting memory of there time spent at the Omni.
Both of my concepts are inspired by Mike Winkelmann also known as Beeple, a graphic designer that releases content through a creative commons license in which famous artists like Srillex, Tiesto, and Flying Lotus have used during their concerts. Also, the outstanding architecture and magnitude of the Founders and ECS building at UTD begged to be spatially activated thus the following ideas were implemented:
Founders Building - The University of Texas at Dallas
Engineering and Computer Science Building - The University of Texas at Dallas
Technique:
For the Founders building concept I used Beeple's UNPLUG (loop) and projected it on the main surfaces of the composition using quads, mesh quads, lines, and masking, such would be visible from a distance as well as experienced when walking from both sides of the building. The grid pattern of the windows was accentuated with animated lines and a fill-up animation that complemented the orange dominating color of the video as the lines flowed through the grid. Lastly, a smooth wave animation was used on a couple of horizontal surfaces which balance the magnitude and power of the main vertical quads.
My second concept was also inspired and constructed for Beeple's Transparent Machines. Major ideas came from the message of the composition and the current net neutrality situation, my take on this topic is reflected by the emphasis of the text used in my projection and various other quads with relevant sections of Beeple's composition such as people like Barack Obama & Mark Zuckerberg. I aimed to keep the intended eye movement of the audience thus the position of text which persuades the viewer to flow throughout the design.
Materials:
MapMapper 3.2.1.
Microsoft's Game DVR functionality.
Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.
Adobe Premier Pro.
Beeple's UNPLUG loop & Transparent Machines video.
YouTube.
