Imhotep Project

Hi Everybody! So remember those videos I made a while back about those phantom images and whatnot? Well, I decided to go ahead and stage a theater piece related based on this technology. So, if you are in the NY area, or if you're in the area this weekend, come check out our show:

The show runs at 8pm from the 16th to the 19th. There's also a matinee performance on the 19th at 2pm.

Also, if you're into the technology part of it (well, you probably are because you're reading this blog), then come a day where I do a tech demo after the show! Those will happen Thursday the 17th and for the 2pm matinee performance on Saturday. The tech demo will probably involve transforming an audience member into a shadow character.

Hope to see ya there!

Liquid Cam

Check out the latest pair of videos! The wide shot:[youtube]tQR-0WRyRFQ[/youtube]

And the closeup:

[youtube]40dxtkyLC94[/youtube]

A little background: Back when I was a Youtube baby, I made a 15 second video on the subject of digitz. Here's the video and the description from the Youtube entry.

Something is always lost when people videotape a person dancing digitz. When you see it live, the dancer's hands and the viewer's eyes do a lot of the framing, but when a person dances digitz for a camera, the absolute frame becomes the frame of the camera.

I made this video by tracking what I thought would be the natural frame that the eye would place on the movements. The hands really come to life when tracked this precisely, and the articulation is better served.

[youtube]_TDP5XtZRBw[/youtube]

Vapor Phantoms

On the 1st of November I turned in a residency application to Harvestworks - an organization in Soho whose "mission is to encourage the creation and expand the dissemination of digital media artwork."The residency is tied to a project. Here's the concept of the project in video form: [youtube]m-E0K8h_Yqs[/youtube]

Cool, no?

The idea behind the installation is that your image is volumetrically rendered live, right in front of your eyes. If you're at the exhibit with your friends, they could walk into the rendering chamber and interact with your vapor phantom, and you could possibly even walk through one another.

Because the signals are entirely digital - this project could be set up to work on the other side of the globe. I could step into a capture chamber in New York and create a vapor phantom in Tokyo.

Well, right now this is all in the concept phase, and it's difficult to come up with any ideas that have much traction w/out a real setup. Regardless, some questions that I think only real testing can answer: Would color work? Could you record and capture in the same chamber, or would the volumetric lighting create a nasty feedback loop? How many projector/camera systems do you need? What kind of detail in objects work and what kind don't? Will it look better up close or far away?

I can't answer these questions now, but I can render some more virtual 3d mockups. Closeups, with color, more systems, etc...

Unfortunately, these animations render very slowly. For parts of the video above, my machine rendered at about a half an hour for a second worth of footage. So I guess this just means I'm going to be learning about this idea very... very...... slowly.

The Imhotep Project

I'm heading up a project that's about phantom people - ghosts, imaginary friends, memories of our past. The idea is to put a real character on stage (played by a real actor) next to a phantom character (played by nobody), and to use these two elements to create an emotionally charged relationship. In aid of creating a phantom character that the audience can take a part of, we're using projectors to cast the phantom character's shadow in absence of a real body. If you're interested, check out the website. It goes over the ideas and goals of the project, and it has a couple videos and a handful of images:

imhotepproject.com

Here's an image that sort of illustrates the idea:

Enjoy.

LED Painting: Hat Trick

Hey all - here's the latest: [youtube]SPRHYtw_cNA[/youtube]

I think I first came into contact with the idea of light painting from this Digg article - although apparently Picasso was doing it in the 20s. The idea is that you set your camera for a long exposure and draw an image w/ an LED (or light source significantly brighter than the environment). The result is that the image burns into the film over the duration of the exposure.

Coming from a performance and movement background, I've always been captivated by imagining what the drawing process must have been like. How many long-exposure shots do these people have to go through? How much practice does it take? Do these people come from a background in liquid, graffiti, photography, any combination of these?

I ask this because precise miming is tough. Try this: in the empty space in front of you, draw a rectangle. Then, put your hand down, bring it back up, and draw the exact same rectangle. It might 'feel' right to you, but try it w/ a camera and you'll likely be off. Now write the word "imagine" in cursive and try to dot your I's.

It's hard! At least for me it is. To assist me, I picked words that has no I's or T's. I also used a hat as an anchor - this gave me a sense of absolute position instead of relative position. I was able to do this whole thing in my first shot.

The video was made using the echo effect in After Effects, basically burning the brightness of the previous frames into the current one. After this, I cranked the brightness and contrast, added a color pass, and plopped it on top of the vanilla regular footage of me moving around.

I'm real happy w/ the result and expect to do more of it soon. Also, I still got the source files on my philty new computer - an upgrade from my 40 gig laptop, where I had to scrap the source for every project I worked on to free up extra space. So, lemme know if you want a peek.

23rd Street Subway Hat