Post 21: Artist's Meeting

   Everybody came to my house last night for a Light Dreams 2014 meeting, brainstorming session, wine and soup. I had a great time, and think everybody else did too.
  Jessica led and moderated the meeting with her usual enthusiasm.
  Three months from D day, most projects are still only loosely defined, but enthusiasm is high, energy is there, and I have confidence everything will come together, and be bigger and better than last year. 
   Adam announced he had secured from Atlanta two 18K Barco Projectors to replace the two 10K's(plus other goodies) we had last year, and that's a big deal to me because that is what I wanted in the first place, and we will definitely need the extra brightness this year to compensate for the use of the Anaglyph glasses.
   Andrea Brooke will be our Guest Artist with her new "Sonic Butterfly", the long strings stretched to the building from the grass knoll near the gate. Christophe will create projections for the Sonic Butterfly wings.
   The entrance gate will get new projections.
   Kimberly will bring back the Parade to start the show every night, only bigger and better. She will organize classes at ArtPlay to make lighted costumes, sculptures, etc… There will be prizes awarded to the best costumes.
   The School of engineering and the VisCube group led by Corey and Eva are working together on several 3D projects.
   Mike is reworking his PacMan game to fit the facade of the smaller adjacent building in the courtyard, and making a giant joystick to play it. He should have a 10K projector, and the game will be played full time from the courtyard.
  The Gaisers and kids from the ArtPlay workshop will VJ again on the building between shows.
   Jonathan is proposing to project on his fabric covered "tunnel" an Animated montage of his Architectural Drawings of various Birmingham locations.
   Randall Crow and Mary are cooperating on a multilayered Danse based mapped video to be projected on the main building accompanied by a sound track by Andrea.
   Joe is going to do some new magic with the words collected from the public, also projected on the main building.
  Liesa and Tony will create images for the water sprayer, and also photograph all the Artists for a "fold out", at the next meeting.
  Besides the double face "Lite Brite", Heather is bringing in all her friends and former Artists in residence from out of town to create a huge "Steampunk Kettle" of sorts, fires stoked by huge foot powered lighted bellows,  spewing all kinds of vapors and smoke to project on, and doing who knows what else…
  Sarah is doing a series of new "Ethereal Translucent Bird Flock Light Sculptures" to hang on the courtyard wall.
  Jon is proposing a projection of people walking on a long wall, possibly using live cameras.
  Vero is making eight "wind prop" "Zeppelins" lighted with LED's and mounted on sticks, to be first carried in the parade by people wearing white coveralls, and then arranged on poles as a Light Sculpture for the rest of the evening.
  Randy Gachet will bring back his "CosmoPod", and is working on several new projects with his students, possibly using Safety Reflective tape.
  Alex is going to light up the "Church".
  Karen Lake will present a piece of her own, and the work of her students from UAB's Arts Department at the new Abroms-Engel Center across the street. We are hoping the building and the long wall will be lighted, and the galleries open to the public.
   I have been at work on the full 3D Anaglyph version of "Artista Somnia", which of course turned out a lot more trouble than expected. As far as Google knows, I don't know of any 20 minutes full 3D Anaglyph Architectural Mapping Projection having been attempted ever before. That should be a World first.
   I am also working on a short 3D Anaglyph  Phantogram, an Anamorphic Ground Projection, which has a small "sweet spot", and trying to figure out where to place it so people have to be at or at least stand near the sweet spot to watch it. Stuff will first come up from the ground, and then the ground will cave in to reveal an underground world...
  
  
  

Post 20: Back to 3D Gruntwork!

  Only 3 months left to Light Dreams 2014, and it's time to stop playing with new stuff and finish turning the show into full Anaglyph 3D. A good while ago, I did the basic work of creating 2 cameras in After Effects for each sequence, lining them up, and re rendering the whole show in 3D. It worked fine, but a lot of improvements could be made improving the depth of the 3D space and accentuating the 3D effects for individual objects. I reworked all 5 sequences, and re rendered the whole thing in 3D. After watching each sequence, I made lists of errors and improvements, and have been "fixing" things. That's turning into a much bigger job than I expected, as always. 
  I have pretty much finished the first 3 sequences, and am now working on the difficult fourth sequence, the "Hommage to the Quay Brothers". I have gone through the whole thing at length, creating a full 3D staircase in front of the facade, giving depth to the pediment, and generally pushing the 3D effects as best I could. I am now working on a second series of corrections and improvements.
   Just to give you an idea of the complexity of the job, here is a screenshot of my 4 x 23" HD 1920 x 1080 monitors setup desktop with After Effects CC running:

    It really takes all that screen space to work comfortably, and I still complain that the fonts are too small…
   Top left are the project files and the Camera View( that's the left eye view of what will be projected on the building):

   Top right are four different views of the 3D set: top, front, side, and a 3/4 view that shows the three dimensional set:

   Bottom right are the Quicktime movie I am correcting, the Effects Panel, the list of the corrections, and various other panels:

   Finally, on the bottom left, last but not least, is the Timeline with all the layers of the animation,in the case of this sequence a total of 390 layers:

   That's a hell of a lot, and is pushing After Effects and my MacPro pretty far… 
   Each image, and each sound is on a separate layer. I name and color code each of the objects for clarity, and all the audio is light green. Some of the layers are actually "Pre Compositions" that have their own timeline and set of layers. For example, each "paper drawer" is a composition made of a front, a back, a bottom, and two sides assembled in a box shape in 3D space. The stairs are a Composition made up of 11 Pre Compositions, each containing the top, front and sides of a flat box.
   After Effects makes it very complex to build cylinders and spheres, to say nothing of odd shapes. So most of my objects are flat images. That's not perfect, but that is the best the software can do, and I don't mind at all the "surrealistic effect". 
   I have experimented with Maya and other full 3D softwares, but am not happy with the textures. The objects ARE 3D, but they don't look real to me. I prefer my flat textured images, and it's just too much anyway for a lone 68 years old "half geek" to learn and to do. May be with a "full geek" team of 4 working thousands of man hours, we could do a FULL 3D show. 
   But there is no budget for that, and I am honestly not convinced the show would end up any better. Plus I would rather retain full control over the final product…
   Back to work now...

Post 19: Makey Makey, Arduino, etc...

   Well, in my never-ending quest for new ways to control a computer and a projected image, this is one I have wanted to investigate since last year. So I ordered a Makey Makey touch controller:

  It connects to the computer via USB, and to conductive objects with alligator clips.
  People have used it to make fun stuff like "banana pianos":

and other things as shown in this video:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkPt9MYqDW0
  But most of the stuff I found on Google is rather geeky and shoddily made, except for this "apple marimba":

and the 3D "musical drawing in the video above:

   I do like the idea of using graphite on paper as a touch trigger, and made a little experiment with a rough drawing that plays 'Twinkle Little Star" when you run your finger along the bottom "keys":

  Besides the 6 keys on the front that I used, the Makey Makey has 6 more connections in the back pre programmed for letters W,A,S,D,F and G, so it offers a total of 12 touch inputs.    I could make an instrument or graphite drawing playing a tune with 12 notes.

  Now if I could figure out how to also make LED lights turn on and off, I would be in business! That should be easy…

   Well, not so easy actually. The Makey Makey talks to the computer allright  but to turn lights on and off, the computer has to talk to the lights, and to do that, I will need an electronic interface called an Arduino:

  I am going to have to learn to program the Arduino to do what I want using the PROCESSING language and the Arduino software. 

  So I went ahead and ordered an Arduino Kit from Amazon, which on top of the Arduino Uno, includes a breadboard, a manual, and all king of gadgets to connect to it:

   I would really love to see a "music and light making contraption" at Light Dreams. It could be a big drawing that plays tunes and lights up when you run your finger on it, or stepping stones that play music and light up when you walk, or a fruit xylophone that projects matching images, or a set of lighted balloons under a conductive ceiling...

Post 18: Back to work

    December as usual was a wasted month, but with the new year comes renewed energy, and I am back to work on the 3D version of ArtistaSomnia. I have rendered all five dreams and 3D Anaglyph, and am now correcting mistakes and trying to improve the effects.

   I have been experimenting with the Kinect, and found a great tutorial on how to use it to control an image with movements of the hand

using a great free little application called Synapse, that recognizes the joints in the body, and draws a skeleton:

       The info is fed into Quarz Composer, which is configured to control the projector:

     All that only works on the Mac.  

Post 17: Working on the "3D Artista Somnia"

     I started reworking last years show to make it 3D Red/Cyan Anaglyph, to be seen using the geeky cardboard glasses. I can't wait to shoot a picture of the public wearing a thousand of those...
    I started with the "Brick Drawers" sequence because it had a lot of depth already built in, and it works well with minor adjustments. The camera I used was fairly wide angle to increase the depth effect, so I just duplicated it twice, moved one left and the other right, and called them Right Camera and Left Camera.
    I adjusted the convergence of the cameras to a point on the facade itself, so both images would fit the building as best as possible, protruding blocks would appear in front, and receding blocks behind. 
   I rendered the right and left movies separately in After Effects, and combined them into a single Anaglyph movie using Anaglyph Workshop Movie Edition for Mac. 
  The resulting movie tends to be dull looking, so I ran it through Premiere and applied curves and saturation effects to "ZAP" it. It now really looks pretty good, almost "straight out of the box". But I have time to tinker with it and make it better.
   Put on your Anaglyph glasses and check it out on YouTube.
   Next, I will do in 3D the third sequence with the Tarot Cards and the Asteroids flying around.

Post 16: Moving the Water Sprayer

    I moved the water sprayer to a place at the bottom of my driveway where it is totally free standing and can be seen from both sides. I set up the projector about 20 ft away behind:

    I tested it last night, but the jet force of the top sprayers caused the very flexible top arch to turn down,  producing a very thick wall of water. It showed some interesting almost 3D effects, but I could not get a good focused image. 
   So I used nylon fishing line to tie it in place. I will test it again as soon as I get a chance. 

Post 15: 3D within 3D?

   The problem at this stage with the ground projection is that my objects look flat within the 3D space. I sure would like them to look 3D, without using full 3D software. It may actually be possible, so I tried using some of my Red/Cyan Phantograms in After Effects. It does work, but a lot of distortion has to be applied to make the 3D effect look realistic, and to have the objects appear like they stand on the ground. For some reason, it is easier to make them look like they are below ground level. The bigger the object, the more difficult.

   Next test was to use different left and right images in the separate left and right camera final renderings of the sequence in After Effects.