Scariness

This is where I'm working at the moment. I can feel their stony gaze, even through the walls.


Scary Warehouse from Retchy on Vimeo

Polygon Project

First proper day in the warehouse today and, as you can see from the last picture, I managaed to hang a triangle! I spent most of the time trying out different ways to hang them so that they don't wobble all over the place. Think I've sorted it now, but it'll mean having to re-wire everything for each part of the project I do, which is a bit annoying. I'll have to spend the whole day in there tomorrow until I get something filmed as the camera and projector have to be back on thursday...


It's scary in there on my own in the dark! I had a dream last night that there was a swimming pool full of ghosts on the floor below. Not that there is a floor below. I hope...


I ended up attaching a wire to each corner of the triangle and taping it to the floor as well as the chicken wire. It seemed to work ok, but it did ping off the ground a couple of times because it was tied down too tight. This would have been mildly irritating if I had spent hours animating stuff to it's precise position!


I was planning to do it further from the walls but there's quite a bit of light coming from outside even at night, so the bluescreen absorbs any light there is quite nicely when I'm filming. I think they'll be far enough away to avoid the kind of reflections I was getting in the kitchen.

Polygon Project

Tomorrow is my first day in the warehouse so I thought I should have some sort of plan. This is a mock up of the first test I'll be doing - keeping it nice and simple to start with, but not just repeating what I did in the kitchen. That would be a bit pointless. So I'll be playing about with patterns within the hung shapes and how they're revealed. The outlined triangles here won't actually have anything projected onto them so they'll be relatively invisible...


Polygon Test 2 Mock-Up from Retchy on Vimeo

I'll also be testing out boring technical stuff, like the best distances between projector and surface, and the accuracy of M8 (VJ software) in masking at different distances.

Polygon Project

I had a tutorial with Suzie the other day where she offered to lend me her Bolex 16mm camera and teach me how to use it, cos I don't have a clue about taking light readings and stuff. I had originally thought I'd try filming in Super 8 but realised they need lots of light that I necessarily won't have, then Suzie suggested 16mm a while ago and it's been at the back of my mind ever since. I think it'll be interesting to bring the footage fully into analogue as that's really where the initial idea came from - to recreate computer generated, digital 3d in an analogue space.

All of the test footage so far has also had a kind of clean, sharp edge to it that I want to get rid of somehow. I think it's had a lot to do with the animations I've been projecting onto the mapped surfaces - so far they've just been quick mock ups to demonstrate how the technique works, but I need to put more thought into this over the coming weeks. I need to work on more textural, rough animations to project I think.

Speaking of which, I had another look at Legoman's site today and realised how great his work actually is - for some reason I hadn't paid it much attention before. He creates 3d projection spaces with transparent mosquito nets as screens that you can walk amongst. I think the texture of the nets actually lends a lot to the overall feel of the installations. For some reason. Maybe not. Maybe I should play around with my projection surfaces a bit more - paint some washes on them or something. The foam board I'm using is possibly a bit too shiny...

Soundtrack Analysis

I need to choose a clip in order to analyse it's soundtrack for a presentation in a couple of weeks. My instinct, as usual, is to go for some sort of AV, VJ type stuff, but I don't think there'd be much to talk about really. There's a person's work on Vimeo that I was thinking about using. Here it is, I love this video...


Singing Matinkaari Bridge from Luka Dekleva on Vimeo.

I might ask him how the sound was recorded or produced actually. I think from looking at one of his other videos that the sound was all recorded from the actual bridge that's featured in the visuals, but I'm not sure. If it is then it might be quite interesting to look at in terms of diagetic and non-diagetic relationships - how does this work when the sounds that have been recorded at the time of filming are so distorted and remixed that they don't necessarily directly represent the images on screen anymore? Hmmmm? And if the images themselves are processed to a similar degree, which I guess they are here, do the relationships remain intact? I dunno. That's about all I can think of to analyse though, so maybe it's not very suitable. I'll see what he says...

Polygon Project

I decided to ditch the stop motion for now and have some fun playing with video feedback instead. My little setup sketch from one of my previous posts turned out to be right - I will need two projectors and laptops for future tests because with this single projector setup, the actual feedback projected on the wall is blurred as it's focusing on the lines of the cube which is about two meters in front, and this will only be amplified with the bigger spaces involved at the warehouse.

This footage is all a bit samey, but in future tests I'll be able to control what's happening on the cube (or polygons) while hopefully somebody else will be able to help out with the camera work. It takes a while to get used to the ridiculously subtle camera movements that you need to be able to control the feedback, but it's so much fun when you get in the zone. Earlier footage was all over the place until I figured out the best positions to get into.


Mapping Feedback Test from Retchy on Vimeo

Apologies for the music, but I didn't want 6 minutes of silence. It makes it all seem so profound, doesn't it :)

I don't know where the green comes from by the way, it wasn't intentional. Maybe the projector was just slightly off balance and the extra green was amplified to infinity. And beyond. Or something.

Edit: I wasn't far off with that actually. Luka Dekleva wrote this on the Vimeo thread - 'Btw the green is probably a result of a colour temperature diference from projector to the camera. Green is 7200K (neonlight) Daylight is 5500K, and Tungsten is 3200K. you can see that your feedback is only gradualy becoming green. So the diference is acualy small maybe 500K (projector 6000K and camera 5500K) but it gets multiplied trough feedback.'

Polygon Project

This is shit, but not quite as shit as my other attempt last night which is so shittingly shitty I refuse to show you it in motion - there's a photo below that doesn't look quite so bad. It's just really hard to get enough accuracy to be able to animate the mapping smoothly. It kind of worked better with just solid garish colours like this, but still isn't what I was hoping for.


Stop Mo' Mapping Test from Retchy on Vimeo

So this is how I tried it first. It looks ok when it's still, but in motion the edges where the small box emerges jump all over the place. Maybe it was just my impatience with this kind of animation though - I think I'll give it another go tonight and perhaps it'll turn out better now I know what to expect. Although having said that, I'm struggling to see how I'm going to use this technique for anything other than rubbish looking 'tests' in the future.

VJ Puppets! (Sort of)

Check out the videos at the bottom of this page - www.imagin1son.com. In fact, watch all of 'em. I might do something along these lines for the Narrative: Forms and Structures module, which is being taught at the Puppet Theatre!

In fact, the Puppet Theatre is at risk of losing it's funding because of the fucking Olympics. This ENRAGES me, as it should any normal puppet loving human being. Please join the facebook group and sign the petition (if you can find it, I can't).

Polygon Project

Here are a few of the ideas I'll be testing out soon...

Video Feedback. I think this is how it'll work - so you've got the hanging shapes in the middle of it all which will be projected onto and animated etc. with projector 1, and then the camera will be filming the shapes and feeding it's output into projector 2 which is projecting onto the wall behind the shapes so that they are in between the camera and it's output. That should create video feedback that I can play about with by moving the camera around and animating the polygons.


Hopefully I will be able to produce something half as beautiful as this piece by The Audio Visual Orchestra. Unfortunately I can't seem to find any of their videos online... the pics at the bottom of the photo page are the kind of feedback I'm talking about - they perform with a dancer holding candles where I would have the polygons.

Lazy Stop Motion. This idea was born of my lack of patience and desire not to have to build loads of bloody boxes. The original plan was to do some stop motion stuff a bit like the cubey bits in this cool video by [[- charetteprod -]] on Vimeo, but with mapping.


stop mo' studies from [[- charetteprod -]] on Vimeo

But then I realised the beauty of mapping is that things don't have to appear as they seem, so I could have a similar or perhaps better effect by only using two boxes. So in the example below, I would be animating one box coming out of the other. Normally, if they were solid forms, I would need to create multiple boxes of varying sizes to animate the smaller one coming out of the larger one, using stop motion. Using a hollow box however, I can mask the projection so that it projects one constant colour or tone onto the inside surfaces only, creating the illusion of a solid face to the cube. Then the smaller box is animated coming out, with a slight alteration to the mask so that it isn't projected onto.


Got that? Good. I bet it doesn't work though.

Backlighting. Back to the hanging shapes, errr, yeah... backlighting. Maybe play with coloured lights or something. I haven't really thought this one through yet...

Polygon Project

A quick After Effects test to demonstrate my thinking on one of the ideas for the Polygon Project. The only movement is in the position of the camera relative to the shapes and their forced perspectives. The points where the camera stops will be the 'scenes' where other stuff happens - these are a bit random at the moment so my next AE test will be to compose pre designed shots for the still bits.

This probably won't be as easy as it sounds, especially when I do it in analogue land.


Scene Shift 1 from Retchy on Vimeo