Projection through fog/vapour
Filip Sterckx on Willow Sweater Music Videot
Filip Sterckx on Willow Sweater Music Video
Ben: Is this music video the first time you’ve worked with a CAVE… did you know about the concept as it applies to virtual reality or is it something you stumbled upon separately?
Ben: Why did you choose to use a CAVE instead of a typical green-screen?
Filip: I’ve been working almost 10 years now with projections. The fact that it is realtime made me choose for this approach. I would never have made this project using green screens, it would take all the magic out of the project I think.
Ben: Who was responsible for the visualizations (storyboard artist and/or animator)?
Filip: I did the storyboarding and 3D animation.
Ben: Who was responsible for the CAVE used in the music video?
Filip: I did the set up in collaboration with my colleagues from skull mapping.
Ben: Did you consider using rear-projection to eliminate shadows?
Filip: For this project I didn’t even take rear projection into consideration because we didn’t have enough space (and no money to rent a bigger space).
Ben: What hardware was used to create the setup in the music video?
Filip: I used a MacBook Pro with a Matrox Triplehead, and as software, Madmapper. As beamers [projectors] we used three PANASONIC PT-LB90.
Ben: Who made the decision to incorporate a treadmill into the setup; was it difficult to sync it with the visualizations?
Filip: It was my decision to use the treadmill. Because I wanted to have the singer to be able to move through the worlds (as opposed to the PS3 commercials, where the actor is almost always on the sofa). It took some time to get the timing right, not only from the singer and the projection, but also from the pre-rendered images and the camera move that had to be in sync. Here you can watch some outtakes.
Ben: Do you know of any other music videos that have used a similar setup?
Filip: After the willow video went viral, someone sent me this link from a Puma commercial. Another example that was brought to my attention is this Nike commercial.
Self-made avatar
Using the shading and tone of the face generated in Avatar 1, I translated what I saw onto a photograph of my own face. This was harder than I had expected due to facial structure and my limited ability to work with Photoshop. I used the paint/draw tool to essentially re-draw my features on top of my face, using its structure to map out where the highlights and shadows were supposed to be. What I found the most jarring was its transformation from a three dimensional face to a flat, one dimensional plane. I realised that the eyes made the biggest difference - as soon as I brightened the whites of my eyes in order for them to appear more artificial, the image came together and looked computerised. I made a conscious decision to leave the hair and everything apart from the face untouched to create an unsettling dichotomy between realism and artificiality.
Davis Ayer Photography
The idea that the surface an image or video is projected onto can drastically change its meaning is fascinating to me. Davis Ayer's photographs show him projecting everyday street views onto a nude figure. I am interested in the way the projection is altered and distorted as it is projected onto a three dimensional form rather than a flat wall.
Michael Naimark's statement on Displacements
http://www.naimark.net/projects/displacements.html
Displacements is an immersive film installation. An archetypal Americana living room was installed in an exhibition space. Then two performers were filmed in the space using a 16mm motion picture camera on a slowly rotating turntable in the room’s center. After filming, the camera was replaced with a film loop projector and the entire contents of the room were spray-painted white. The reason was to make a projection screen the right shape for projecting everything back onto itself. The result was that everything appears strikingly 3D, except for the people, who of course weren’t spray-paint white, and consequently appeared very ghostlike and unreal.
Displacements was produced three times between 1980 and 1984. By the third time, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1984, it was done.
Twenty-one years later, in 2005, my long-time friend and colleague Brenda Laurel cajoled me into a redux. The young couple in the original living room are now middle age with a teenage daughter. Mom is still pensive, Dad still watches TV, and the daugther is curious. Displacements 2005 was shot and projected in digital video rather than 16mm film, which, it turns out, was much more challenging.
Ending scene from The Favourite - Yorgos Lanthimos
The closing scene of Lanthimos' film The Favourite has stayed in my mind ever since I watched it. The use of subtle overlaying unites the two characters and shows that their individual narratives are coexisting. This is a very effective technique in showing duality and synonymity and is something I will consider including in my own work for Lux.
Digital Influencer - Lil Miquela
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/lil-miquela-digital-avatar-instagram-influencer.html
Over lunch this spring, Nikola Burnett, a 15-year-old who always carries two cameras — one film and one digital — sat staring at an Instagram selfie, perplexed. The subject was Miquela Sousa, better known as Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old Brazilian-American model, musical artist, and influencer with over a million Instagram followers, who is computer-generated. “She’s not real, right?” Nikola asked me shyly. She knew the answer, but something about Miquela made her question what her eyes were telling her.
At first glance, or swipe, Miquela could understandably be mistaken for a living, breathing person. She wears real-life clothes by streetwear brands like Supreme and luxury labels like Chanel. She hangs out with real-life musicians, artists, and influencers in real-life trendy restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, where she “lives.” When Miquela holds her phone to a mirror, her reflection stares back. When she is photographed in the daylight, her body casts a shadow. She even complains about allergies and often references the temperature with tweets like “39 degrees out im still getting this iced matcha.”
In selfies, you can see the freckles on Miquela’s face; her gap-toothed smile. But up close, her brown hair, often pulled into Princess Leia–esque buns, looks airbrushed (Twitter users have noted that her flyaway frizz always falls in the same pattern). Her skin reads as smooth as the glass screen that separates us. And when you peer into Miquela’s big brown eyes, she fails the ultimate test of humanity. No, Miquela isn’t real — at least not like you and me. She is an avatar puppeteered by Brud, a mysterious L.A.-based start-up of “engineers, storytellers, and dreamers” who claim to specialize in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Body paint - robot hand
Having stumbled across the work of smaller artists who specialise in body paint, I am inspired to try this out myself. I had considered physically making a robot hand to include in my Being Human film, but then realised that it would be less of a performance if it wasn't my own hand. By painting my hand to look like a robot hand, I will be blurring the boundary between what is real and what is fake, intentionally creating a sense of artificiality and falsity.
Shana Moulton Interview
How would you describe your work to someone new?
Shana Moulton: If I had to describe it in a couple of words I would say “home decor” and “spirituality”. But if I had to use more words... I haven't got my simple spiel yet and I should! It's video art and performance art. The body of work I've been making since I was a student always makes use of an alter ego and it's all under the title “Whispering Pines” which is the mobile home park I grew up in.
Who is Cynthia?
Shana Moulton: Cynthia started out as me imagining what kind of person would need to wear these dresses I was making as a student. The dresses were embedded with various medical devices. One was a neck brace dress. I had a walker dress. A haemorrhoid pillow dress. (Cynthia) was this heightened state of anxiety or a caricature of discomfort and pain whether it was psychological or physical. She became a combination of myself and other female relatives, but she doesn't really have specific biographical details. She often gets described as a housewife, but I don't know if she's married. I'm not married! She is described as an agoraphobe... I don't know about that! She is always depicted in her home alone. What her story is about is what I personally think about or do when I'm alone at home wondering how to escape reality, or defy ageing, or death. Maybe she has a social life but it’s not part of that narrative!
I spend so much time at home alone! I am sort of trapped by work or laziness or whatever it is. A lot of the narratives end in transcendence by being outside or being in nature. But yeah, I’m definitely a hypochondriac! That's for sure. But maybe in a way, a lot of us are worried about dying... Who isn't?
Hajime Sorayama
On his 'Sexy Robots'
https://vocal.media/futurism/hajime-sorayama-interview
I've become good at them. Five years ago I was still awkward at it. That is, because I was new at it. I didn't know that at certain angles they wouldn't show to best advantage, etc. For example, the back is extremely difficult to draw. That's because it's all subtle movements. Something like the arm makes rather primitive movements. We move through the mutual working of muscle and bone. Therefore, something like the fingers are easy to draw while the palm of the hand is hard to do. It works through bone and muscle, but one is drawing skin and, on top of that, one has to show the setup of the bones. If you don't it doesn't give the feeling that it is about to move. In the case of female robots, one is drawing skin and body fat. Fat beneath skin. If you look at a woman wearing a bra, there's a depression in the flesh there. That's how you can portray fat. For the hips as well, there's a part protruding when they are sitting down.
The swelling of muscle, the cutting into the flesh of the straps of a bra that you've talked about, can't be portrayed in a metal robot, can they?
Therefore one must draw that sort of thing as a lie, a poetic truth. Where there wouldn't actually be anything, at the edge of panties or the like, one deliberately puts a seam or joint in the metal. If one were to actually build such a robot, that sort of thing would be unrelated to its movements. Therefore it's not necessary for the basic expression. I think you can't give a feeling of a robot that can't move to the viewer. That's the difficult part. One can tell just by making a rough sketch first whether or not it will be possible to make that into a robot. Some things are suited to it and some aren't. A match whose outcome you can see in advance isn't so interesting.