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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
So here's a little edit of most of the backgrounds, recorded at the rehearsals. Technical hitches aside, I think the project turned out pretty well. Director David seemed happy anyway...
Technical problems ahoy! The clouds have been bloody annoying - VJ software apparently wasn't built to deal with 10 minutes of them, so we came up with the solution to just scroll a very long still image of clouds in the VJ software, at the expense of some lovely parallax. The slight problem with that though is that they randomly decide to disappear at seemingly completely unpredictable intervals, leaving a black sky in the background. And the slightly bigger problem is that this actually did happen on the opening night of the play! I was sure I'd sorted it out in rehearsals but I think it's just a software bug, so we're keeping them still for the rest of the run... turns out people thought it was intentional anyway!
Did some tests last night and they worked! First time! This is an unusual occurence for me, as things usually fuck up straight away and I end up giving up in frustration. I am properly excited about it now though, and I can't wait to try it out in the shoe factory.
Hopefully you'll understand what I'm trying to do now, as I am aware my previous explanations were a bit rubbish. Just try and imagine this on a much larger scale, with way more shapes and more interesting things happening, without a kitchen table in the way...
Edit - 01/03/08: It's been brought to my attention that I didn't actually explain how I did this in the end. So for those of you that are interested, here's how I've managed to do it without any programming trickery, which is what I feared may be involved.
The first thing I did was stumble across Deepvisual's tutorial on Youtube about how to do 3D mapping in Modul8 - here it is. Luckily, I have a copy of Modul8 and it was a great relief when I discovered you could do it this easily. To summarise his video, it basically involves taking 2D shapes into M8 and using the Perspective Transform Freeframe effect to distort the shape as if it were in 3D space. You do this as you are projecting onto whatever you want to map so you can see when it's lined up correctly.
Once you're happy with how it's lined up (and it can be a bit fiddly with this method), you need to render a frame of all of the shapes as they are set up in Modul8. If the map isn't quite right and leaks over the edges a bit, you may want to take the render into photoshop to trim the edges until it's right - this is completely trial and error and you'll need to keep importing new versions into M8 to test them as you go, but if you keep the current version projected onto the shapes you can make slightly better judgements by cross referencing. If you're doing more complex shapes than just triangles (like badly made cubes with curvy edges!) this can take quite a while.
So you've got the mask finalised, now you need to animate it. I use After Effects, so I took the still frame and used it as a template for my animations. Make sure the movie is at the same resolution as you have set up in M8 (in this case it was 640 x 480) so that it lines up properly when you bring the final animation back in to be projected. That should be it, as long as you've kept the projector in EXACTLY the same position the whole time. Pretty simple really if you've got all the right kit, but this is probably not the most efficient or accurate method, and perhaps wouldn't work for more organic, irregular shapes (although I haven't tried this). It works for my purposes at the moment though...hope this might help someone.
The backgrounds are finished! Big thanks to Joseph - he done 'em, he did. We're gonna animate a few bits and pieces, like the fireplace in the kitchen, and drips in the caves etc. We need to re-scan the red barn I think, cos the colours are a bit screwed compared to the original.
We did a quick test of the projector at the theatre on Friday, and discovered it's not very bright and makes our work look a bit shit, so we're going to need to borrow a good one from the college. I was a bit worried that we'd been doing everything on too small a scale, but having seen it projected I think we'll be fine with a decent projector. I would have more to show you, but I left my laptop charger at college and have about two minutes to write this - goodbyeeee!
This is pretty much the finished version for the intro projection, although I've left out the 10 minutes of slowly moving clouds that will be there when the actors are doing their thing. The actor playing Maurice (the cat) will come on stage as the cat fades out...
