Friday, December 31, 2010

Post 6: See the whole storyboard to date as a slide show

I keep a Complete Updated Storyboard on my Mobile Me Gallery. Click slideshow on the bottom to play it.
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Monday, December 27, 2010

Post 5: The Storyboard

        While the gears of the City Public Works Department groaned and ground their way into action, I started working on a storyboard in Photoshop with a picture of the building and images I had, or that I lifted from the internet. A first draft was about 75 images sized at 800 x 1280, and was tested by projection on a "screen" made of a 25" x 36" print of the façade. Lining the features was fairly easy, and I realized a few discrepancies were not critical. Over the next few days, the storyboard expanded to about 150 images, with both easy color effects and short sketchy action sequences.
  The working storyboard can be found on my Mobile Me Gallery and played as a slideshow to get an idea of the action.
  Everything is still subject to change, but it basically opens with a title sequence projected on the dark building in red:


 It will be eventually animated, possibly using Text-Os-Terone to save time.
   Then a red antique velvet stage curtain with swaged top slowly fades in. After a few seconds, the audience on the sound track gets rowdy and impatient, hollers and whistles, so hands appear to quiet them:


 After a while, thumbs up, boom-boom-boom, and  the red curtain opens slowly to reveals the building facade as it normally looks at midday:


 Then, the suns turns and sets as the shadows move, reflects in the windows, night falls, the windows light up, people move inside in a shadow theatre style, car lights come by, lights go off. Through the night, cars come by with boom boxes paying rap, a low rider stops with neon tubes and jumps up and down, police cars with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring chase robbers shooting at each other. The windows light up, they open and people lean out, yell, throw a chamber pot. Two cop cars with flashing lights stop the robbers right in front of the building and arrests them(again in shadow theatre). Everybody leaves as dawn comes and a new day starts. 
   I actually just found in the library archives an old black and white picture of the building in the 30's, when it was a lock and key store, and the whole sequence could possibly be done in Black and White, sort of "Elliott Ness Untouchables" style, in front of that old Cliff Howell & Co store:


   We could then go through a sequence of "easy" hue variations and light "filter effects:


   We could also go through seasons, rain, snow, thunder, lightning.
   Lightning hits the building, and it catches on fire in the middle second floor window. The fire spreads upstairs, then downstairs, the second floor windows blows out in an explosion:


 Flames come out the four top round holes, the bottom window blows out, the fire roars loudly, then starts to diminish, and slowly dies down as sirens blare and a red fire truck finally arrives too late…
   The burnt out blackened shell is taken over with bats and pigeons flying around:


 Weeds grow(poppy and cannabis of course)and weave though the windows, a green snake also weaves though doors and window:


   Crack appear near the top cornice , and the building starts falling apart:


 The cornices and columns tumble down, crushing the snake under a pile of rubble:


   The poppies dry up and the snake turns to bones as bats and pigeons fly around again.  A dog skeleton comes by, hikes his leg, squats and craps, as toads look on and croak.
   Then there might be a fantasy sequence of a skull appearing from the wall and a mushroom growing into a big poppy that finally explodes:

       

 A blank sheet of paper appears with a faint outline of the old structure. A hand holding a pencil makes a black and white drawing of the old building:


 then a hand with a paint brush colors it.   Fade out to black for a few seconds. Wild clapping on the soundtrack like the show is over.
   But a blueprint of the building slowly fades in, the ground fades in, a construction sign appears:


 and the building goes back up as it was piece by piece, with turning shadows and construction noises:


 It would be nice to have a crane lift and set the pieces.
 I found that great picture of a red 1957 Cadillac, and thought it would be interesting to back it up full speed in the "garage":




Another idea has to go with a globe rolling by as a plumb line swings as a pendulum:




Then, mechanical puppet hands could appear, grab the cornices, and pull the building down and distort it like rubber, then let it go as it bounces up and down:




A leather balloon could fall from the roof and bounce up and down. A hand could possibly bounce it, or it could start bouncing crazily against the sides of the frame as a billiard ball:




There could be a sequence with several snakes weaving in and out of doors and windows while bats fly around:




   The Pierrot powder box my dad gave my mom as a dating present could roll by as tall as the building as the plumb line swings




  A pretty sexy doll could do a twist, or dance to Elvis Jail House Rock (Animata Animation):



   A tin monkey could climb a rope while a japanese boy looks up, a top turns and fall, an Ace tumbles. The frayed cable breaks, and the monkey falls on the ivory boy and smashes it to pieces:



  There could be some kind of clock sequence with gear turning inside:



  Banners could unroll from the top cornice while a horse comes by:


  As a final sequence, the bats knocks a hand grenade off the ledge as my 350Z drives up from the left and hits the powder box:



 The grenade bounces off the trunk of the car  and explodes off screen while I get out of the car on crutches and take a bow:






  All the people that helped with the show get out of the car and bow. Then the curtain closes:




  Credits roll, and we end urging people to "GO GIVE A PINT":





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Post 4: The Technical Problems

       The building I chose is a fairly narrow and has two floors, so the projector is going to be turned sideways. Its bottom therefore needs to be lined up with the left edge of the building, and roughly mid height, which means that it has to be placed in the left second floor window of the building across the street, which luckily has a clear view of the façade. The image of the building  projected on the building itself has to line up perfectly with the architectural features, so the original image has to be as perfectly proportioned and undistorted as possible. The high power projectors allow more adjustments than the ordinary ones basic key stoning, but we will not be able to test the show beforehand, so I will shot the best possible photo from the middle second floor window across the street, measure the building, and make sure all the proportions are as accurate as possible, so when an image of the façade is projected over the façade itself, there is no misalignment of the architectural lines. 
   Another problem is the fact that the woodwork of the doors and windows is painted black, and would interfere with the images projected, so I am planning to cover it with beige low tack masking tape. The glass windows can be blocked out with beige paper on the inside. The two doors are recessed, and will cause some shadows to be cast, so I am debating whether to use flat foam panels covered with muslin lined up with the big middle store window.
  There are also 4 small trees in planters in front of the building that should be temporarily removed.

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Post 3: My Concept

  I am an Artist, a photographer and a painter, and I like real images that tell a story or evoke feelings, so I will leave the light effects for computer experts, and do something that looks more like reality, only the kind of bizarre and surrealistic "reality" that is all mine… I have thousands of pictures in my digital library, and tons of weird stuff I collected over the years.
  I have seen a good few bad amateur videos of the European shows, and they are very impressive. I like the buildings collapsing to rubble, changing shape, moving around, being filled with water, stuff happening in the windows, the interiors revealed, the fires, the steampunk gears and wheels turning, the hands doing things. But this is a first try, and I am well aware that I am as usual biting more than I can chew at the moment… That is the way I function, I have to stretch my limits… The Festival takes place in a limited area downtown Birmingham, on 2 blocks of Second Avenue North, and the choice of adequate buildings was rather limited. No grand columned public building there to get me in trouble thank god! Mostly two floor narrow buildings that can be covered by a single projector mounted vertically. I picked the one I thought the best for my purpose, sort of a light colored stucco "Federal/Art Deco" facade with fluted columns and round vents along the top cornice:


 I shot some pictures of it, and made arrangements with the public works department to trim some branches that were in the way of the projection from the second floor window of the furniture store across the street.
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Post 2: The Basic Principle

 It is actually fairly simple, now that the software is available to implement the ideas. You start with a very accurate image of a building, and draw an accurate digital Architectural Map of it(basically a blueprint)using paths. Then you can use the building as a backdrop to project images precisely lined up with the architectural features of the building. The easy way is to simply project non architectural moving images on a building. The "geeky" way is to create blobs of light, and animate them to music in various ways along various path to outline, highlight and color parts of the building, deform it, make drawers come in and out"a la Dali".
  Ideally, the show takes place in total darkness, so the building disappears when the projected image is black. You can then really give the illusion that the building tumbles down to a pile of rubble, burns down, rebuilds itself. Anything is possible, people can appear in the windows, in front of the building, birds fly by, the imagination is the limit. 
  Of  course, all of that has to be animated at a minimum of 25 frames per second, using mostly Adobe After Effects. I have a 2500 lumen projector that is fine to project an 8' x 6' image in a darkened room. But I quickly realized that projecting outside on a 30 foot tall building without total darkness required another league of equipment… An 18,000 lumen HI DEF 1080p projector like the Christie Roadster HD18K costs in the neighborhood or $130,000, and rents for about $2200 a day. A large building would require breaking up the image between several projectors. So unless the projectors are supplied by sponsors, this kind of show is all but impossible for the little guy like me… But since the Red Cross say they will supply the equipment, I am going with it.
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Post1: WHAT IS IT?

  I actually never heard of such a thing until a month or so ago, when my friend Christophe showed me some fabulous European videos on YouTube of the new "Sound and Light" shows of the 21st century. They have been staged in Europe for about 5 years now, mostly on public buildings for commemorations and anniversaries.
   He had previously got me interested in working with video projections on buildings and recruited me to participate in the April 16, 2011 "Paint the Town Red Digital Art Festival", organized to benefit the Jefferson County Red Cross. 
  Before he turned me onto Architectural Mapping, I had already started brainstorming about among many other ideas a 3D (cross eyed)video of a moving Hypercubic Red Cross "a la Dali", and put together a short test movie in AfterEffects, starting from an old WW2 Red Cross patch I had in my collections. The chief organizer liked it and asked me to produce a final version to use as an emblem of the Paint the Town Red Festival. We are thinking of projecting it on a huge screen stretched high above the intersection of 23rd Street and 2nd Avenue North.




    After Christophe showed me some of the stuff on you Tube, I was hooked, and wanted to try my hand at it. Here are just a few examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0XKmU5hF5s









   
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