It's a Thursday, probably not the best time to do a weekly overview but the studio will be closed for the rest of the week so here we go!
Things I did this week:
Created and executed my first animation for Projection Mapping
Created live animation for a performance of the students at the VCA's Interactive Composition course
Meeting with the composer whose EP a fellow animator and I will be creating visuals for
Projection Mapping Process:
Following up from workshops with Pauric Freeman on Projection Mapping (and a smaller one on Virtual and Augmented realities as well as Unity) on Wednesday and Thursday, I finished my first animation created for projecting onto specific surfaces! In this instance, it was a set up comprised of two square surfaces with a box placed at their intersection.
When I was coming up with concepts for this animation, I got a little ahead of myself with an idea I wasn't sure was going to work: turning the box into a pedestal, above which there would be a floating head, and a hand behind all of these.
Getting the animation done in less than a week was surprisingly less difficult than I had anticipated! I started animating the hand on the Wednesday, finished it up on Thursday, and then animated the head in its entirety on Tuesday this week.
The animation is based around frames like the ones above, and there's different variations of it and two different layers: the one outline of the sculpture head looking up, and the shifting marble colour layer.
That's all of the traditional animation I did for this project! The rest was created in VDMX or in After Effects (fuck After Effects, really).
So, how did it go?
It went pretty great! Wednesday had us all visit the studio room where the projection space was set up to map the animations we had made onto the surface. It was a lot less intimidating than I'd anticipated it being, and while I was a bit obnoxiously perfectionistic about it, it worked really well.
I think it worked a lot better in person, when you could move around a bit and really experience the space!
I'll see if I can get a better video up in the near future.
Wednesday Night Live Animation:
Maybe last minute and without any preparation is the most fun way to VJ. It's certainly my only experience of it to date!
The VCA Interactive Composition had an entire night performing and displaying work collaboratively, which was pretty interesting to witness. From a projection/audio space set up with sideways and stacked café tables with selectable tracks named after coffees, to a haunted house-esque performance piece with mannequins and nearly naked people, we had a few things to entertain us while we waited to provide some visuals to the other students.
It was a little stressful, using VDMX with a different setup, without the files I'd thought I'd have, and with the added pressure of doing it for a group of people to watch, but I got the hang of it and discovered some really fun effects.
The ones to note:
City Lights
Light Tunnel
Glitch
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