stick man
role: conceptualization, visual design, projection mapping, animation
tools: MadMapper, After Effect
collaborator: Gilad Dor
What is this project about
Stick man are the main characters in this projection mapping installation. Multiple videos are projected onto a wall corner, which reveal a hidden world inside a plain space. Each stick man has their own fate that they repeat on an infinite loop. Some stick men walk on a path and disappear. Some keep jump from a cliff. Some just sit and watch. Some tries to keep hanging in there. Behind stick men’s unified face, where are they going? What is in their mind? Are they the same person or not?
Creative Process
goal
create a projection mapping piece
inspiration
sketch of day 1 process
prototype
PROTOTYPE 1 (worked on videos)
day 2 process sketch
testing prototype 1, link to full video here
PROTOTYPE 2 (improved animation)
day 3 process sketch
testing prototype 2, link to full video here
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 4 process sketch
testing physical installation
visual design
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.
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 artwork explores the theme of path: finding path, following the path, or disobeying the path.
From working on this project, I learned that with projection mapping, there are a lot of iteration and testing. It was helpful to test stuff as we keep building more content. What I imagined in my head might not work when we project the content on the physical structure. This project also inspires two other projection mapping installation I am working on now. This project became the start point of a series of projection mapping works about various kinds of mini creatures living in their hidden world.