Assignment 01: Classroom Mapping

Concept:

Our first assignment's concept evolved over three weeks. We chose to use a blank wall in our studio class room so we had to come up with ideas to make our project more engaging. Since our classroom felt more like a warehouse, we wanted to transform the space by creating a window and projecting an alternate world through it.

Next we found a 1950's style T.V. screen while searching for inspiration so our minds jumped to the idea that shows are like another universe in themselves. The T.V/Movie stars we watch on our screen more often then not are living double lives and when these stars pass on we still continue to connect with them in some way; thus, fictitious worlds created by these actors and actresses are timeless.

When we had decided to go with this theme, we set out to select an actor or actress that represent this timeless quality. We scrapped the idea of the T.V. itself since it was too literal and came up with something more figurative--an hourglass shape.

Process:

We 3D modeled an hourglass form using Maya. Then we exported it as an .obj and imported it into MadMapper. Next, we took a screen shot of the model and used that as a template to create our content in After Effects. While creating our content, we searched for gifs of our selected actor/actress from the 1900s. Then we masked the primitive shapes of the hourglass and positioned the gifs within the mask. The gifs were arranged from their early years to their later years. Finally, we hid the template image and rendered a video of the gifs with alpha for transparency.

In MadMapper, we imported the hourglass model and positioned the rendered gif compositions on top. To incorporate the universe theme, we layered multiple videos that represented a starry worm hole. We created a template for the lines and animated them to follow a path around the hourglass to outline the shape of an infinity symbol. Since the top and bottom of the hourglass was flat, we found an image of the moon to place halfway behind the hourglass to produce the curved shape. To add extra detail, we added falling sand over the hourglass and reduced the transparency so it wasn't overbearing. Lastly, we found popular music-video footage that best represented the actors and actresses.


Final Result: