Stick Man
categories: projection mapping, animation
tools: MadMapper, After Effect
collaborator: Gilad Dor
This is a group project I collaborated with Gilad Klein-dor. I was excited to use projection mapping for the first time.
concept
Day 1: I wanted to create a miniature world that mini human dwell in. I first imagined the installation to be a web like structure (picture reference below). Mini human walk on their paths, and those paths weave into a web structure.
Technical challenges
Day 2: We started by creating a video of a person walking in a square. We used Premiere. We keyed a green screen video of a person walking, and we made him walk in a square using keyframes. We tried to project this first video onto the wall. We realized if we sized the human down, his would walk in a smaller square. Our next step would be figure out the distance we want the little human walk.
Day 3: We tried to create more animation by using After Effects. This is my first time using After Effects. We put few tapes on the wall and tried to map it onto the tape. When we mapped the animation with MadMapper, it was very pixelated and easily distorted. Although we tried to adjust the number of pixels in After Effects or move the projector closer, it was still not very ideal.
design
Day 4: We started to think about the physical installation of the project. How could we take the mini people out of the wall? We first thought about hanging a frame in the air and put tape across. We bought PVC pipes and connect them into a square. It doesn’t look visually very interesting as we expected.
Day 5: The next day, we decided to put tape in a corner, and it looked amazing. The corner space is very inspiring to me. I started to drop shapes onto the wall through MadMapper, just to experiment. Gilad liked it a lot, and he expanded our animation to not only walking but more movement. Through MadMapper, I drew shapes in the projection and created a world that these mini people live in. Those shapes create a minimal, geometric, yet dynamic world. I also changed two tapes from 1inch to 2inch. It makes the mini people less pixelated, and the 2inch tape also pop more to viewers’ eyes to create more dimension.
installation
Reflection
To me, this artwork reminds me a conspiracy that human world is a mini lab controlled by aliens. In this installation, the viewers become the “alien.” How does this perspective affect the audience? The mini people in our installation behave like they have a set destiny of what they are doing, but they are unconscious about their destiny. They follow it without doubt. This art also explores the theme of path, finding path, following the path, or not.