Projection Mapping
Unfortunately I missed the first two workshops for this project so found myself a bit behind when coming into the studio. However with help from colleagues I soon found myself somewhat caught up with the functional side of touch designer.
The problem in the early stages was lack of inspiration. Since I didn’t quite know the scope of the creative possibilities of touch designer I was stuck for ideas.
Along side studio work for this project I had been messing around with an old till receipt printer:
I had been struggling to be able to print anything but garbled ascii characters but I thought I would still like to incorporate the printer into my peice.
My inspiration for doing so came from the classic internet gif…
I started to think of the connotations of this gif… waste, uselessness. And I also started to think of the connotations of the receipt printer… money. Together we have money waste and uselessness. Initially this brought me to the Royal Family…
At this point I had finalised that the printer would be setup to print directly into the shredder which looked like…
It was a pretty “janky” setup involving fishing line, dangling Arduino (that would become redundant) and a lot of faith. Whilst I was testing with the arduino it became clear that the printer fed faster the shredder could shred so the receipt would start to spool up above the shredder.
My solution to this was to takeaway the arduino and isntead of the printer printer it would no longer be connected to power at all but really the shredder would just pull though the paper off the spool within the printer.
Now that I had this working it was time to workout who exactly it was I wanted to project on the paper ie. who did I want to shred?
These are the people I ended up choosing…
Boris, Prince Andrew, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Jong Un, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mitch McConnell, Lee Anderson, Vladimir Putin, Rishi Sunak, Donald Trump.
A rather obvious selection, a who’s who of some of the worst men in the world today. Hence where I got the ironic title, “Well respected Men” also taken from the Kinks who I have been listening to a lot lately.
It was now time to setup the projection using Touch designer and media to project which I made using after affects.
Using after affects I created a vertical scrolling video of all the faces of each chosen man that would be able to loop seemlessly.
Then very simply using the Kantan mapper in Touch designer I mapped the vidoe to the paper with no other affects.
Now it was time to film and edit, this didn’t take long… mostly because I was running out of time.
I used one of the DSLRs and Some backlighting to create a short video that just showed the piece looping through the video shredding as it goes.
There are things about my video I am not happy about, most importantly I had a lack of footage so had to use a vertical iPhone video at the start. – credit to Nick. Also there were some bits of footage that were slightly out of focus, however I was really happy how the back lighting turned out… very much a last minute addition to the whole charade!
wrapping up
I really enjoyed this project although after missing the very start of it I was quite rushed I am still happy with what I produced. If I had managed time better I would have taken more time over my video production and editing and been more thoughtful to the people I chose or even how I chose them. Ie. suggestions or something along those lines. However all in all enjoyed the project and was happy with my outcome.
LEARNING JOURNAL 