This semester, I am working with Valentina Camacho, a very good friend and awesome creative partner, on content for a 120-foot-long screen at the IAC building. This is the fifth year Dan Shiffman has offered the class, and he takes great lengths to make sure we don’t reinvent the wheel. He provided us with several strategies and templates for every software imaginable. We were able to put up content within the second week of class, and last week got to test out our project ideas on one third of the screen.
Valentina is an amazing illustrator. We created a storyboard, sketched out some scenes/characters and she vectorized them for our animation. But as soon as we put them up on screen, everything looked different. The colors were off, brush patterns were magnified and subtle vector graphics became off-putting.
Fortunately, our time in grad school has taught us to always have a plan B. The night before, ITP’s equipment room also happened to acquire a new waterproof case for the Lumix LX5. I walked away from my coding and jumped in the pool with some mardi gras beads. We rendered out a 3840 X 1080 video of the camera under a faucet, in the pool and in puddles outside my apartment. It was intended to be a simple test, but the results were very visually stunning.
We were both running pretty low on sleep, and the experience was surprisingly draining. Walking away, I think both of us had reservations about our original idea but didn’t want to bring it up. After a couple days, we looked back on our experience and had to admit defeat. Our first project is too ambitious, and although we are fans of linear narrative, it won’t work on this scale and dimension.
We are now producing more content from real footage of water, and perhaps with real-time manipulation from the viewers’ interaction. Hopefully in the next few weeks, things will come together. But before burying the fruits of our labor, I wanted to share the images we created, because they really do look beautiful. Just not on a Brobdingnagian scale… Now to concoct a plan C and D.
