Projection Mapping

This hand drawn mapping film was the culmination of a series of projection experiments (some of them below) I did at NUCA. I’m not entirely sure I can remember why I was doing these - I guess I had some sort of application in mind. It was certainly a bit of a learning curve getting to grips with the technique and the level of precision required for it to work properly. The sketch below is an illustration of the projector setup for the hand drawn mapping, although I ended up doing it slightly differently.

I didn’t use any physical masks on the projector at all, and the vga splitter was actually a ridiculously-expensive-and-hard-to-get-hold-of-at-short-notice piece of kit called a DualHead2Go, which basically doubles the width of the laptop output so you can spread it over two projectors. Which is what I did - one projector projecting the footage of me drawing the triangle, masked off to the shape of the hanging triangle using Modul8 VJ software, while the other projector is projecting the footage, unmasked, in all it’s glory, onto the back wall. I then filmed this whole setup and programmed Modul8 to transition the back wall projection into a live feed from the camera I was using to film it, which then generated the feedback effect. Make sense? Good :)

All of these videos are based on the same principles, some slightly less complicated than others. The triangles in the video above were hung from my kitchen ceiling in Norwich and the projector was set up to project a photoshop file of a simple triangle shape which was then manipulated live in Modul8 to match up exactly with the edges of the hanging shapes. One frame of this manipulated shape was then rendered and taken into after effects to be animated, and then the resulting video projected back on to the hanging triangles - the idea being that the camera movements alone create the illusion of the shapes floating in space. The hand drawn version was essentially the same technique, but I was trying to get away from the horrible neon glow of the initial tests, so I decided to film myself doing the shape manipulation instead, cutting out the need for any fancy software and resulting in a much nicer home-made ‘Gondry’ feel.

Again, same technique ^ but this time filming the subject in front of it’s output for yummy feedback. Below is a stop motion experiment where I was trying to create the illusion that the hollow side of the cube was actually solid by projecting light onto the inside.