Just a quick test of a light-sensitive Augmented Reality environment that will soon become inhabited by a colony of virtual snails! Different colored lights will affect the environment in different ways, changing the system’s color balance and thus making certain snails easier to detect by predators.
In this demo you can see a blue light making small forests grow up out of the ground. Eventually this behavior will be triggered by a green light [I accidentally left all of my LEDs in NYC this weekend! ]
For my last project in communications lab I decided to revisit the stop motion genre and see if I could improve upon my first attempt. To put this in context, Joe and I were in full Christmas mode this weekend, and we thought it would be kind of fun to see what would happen if our mini tree, newly purchased for our basement bar, had the ability to assemble itself.
The process I took to create this video was relatively straightforward. First we cleared the filming area and fiddled with some lighting configurations until things looked pretty good to my digital camera (handheld Olympus Stylus 10.1 megapixel). Then we set up a tripod and began bringing the never-before assembled tree into the frame.
After we took about 250 images my camera ran out of battery power, so we took a break and continued later on in the afternoon. During the afternoon scene I inadvertently dropped one of the ornaments which promptly shattered on the tile floor. Whoops! I found that this mistake was actually a lot of fun to fix – I kind of enjoy the shattering sound effect and the ambulance siren
Once we had the necessary images I brought them into Photoshop and batch converted them to a lower resolution. I also had Photoshop fix the levels on each image for good measure. Then I expored the images to Flash – since they were named as a sequence they came right into Flash as individual frames. After a little deliberation we settled on some music, did a little frame-by-frame tweaking (mostly to address timing issues) and voila – instant stop motion video!
Here’s my first shot at a quick animation in After Effects. I’m loving the program so far – to think that I’ve been trying to do so much of this stuff in Flash for all these years! Here’s a quick mockup of our dog Prue (named after Shannen Doherty’s character on Charmed) using her supernatural powers for her own personal gain:
My favorite part of After Effects is it’s ability to easily work with so many different types of media. For example, I found this fantastic program called Particle Illusions that allows you to easily create particle generators that can export into MOV files – these can then be brought right into After Effects to facilitate the creation of Charmed-esque special effects!
Live video shot of minimally wired breadboard. Camera is mounted on a tripod and stays static during entire shoot. I slowly add LEDs to the breadboard, then get up and leave the table. Audio will be dubbed during post production.
Next I will grab the last frame of the video as a static image and extract the LEDs as separate assets. Finally I will take the first frame of the video and use this as the background for the animation. I will then reinsert the cut LEDs as overlay objects to (hopefully) create a semi-seamless display.
I will then animate a small group of gnomes who will come from behind the table, coffee cups, etc. These gnomes will steal all of the LEDs, and may possibly do something silly at the end, such as a faux-Zorro sword swoop on an object in the background. I envision that some frantic music will be playing in the background during their frenzied destruction sequence.
This storyboard describes our first idea for the Comm Lab video project. The basic setup for our story involves Craig and David having a study session late one night.
Panel 1: John arrives at the study session late and apologizes for not being there sooner.
Panel 2: Two individual shots of David and Craig looking annoyed.
Panel 3: John talks about his awesome P-Comp project which involves a pair of digital glasses. David picks up the glasses
Panel 4: David puts on the glasses and the world begins to change. Wavy lines appear, tinkly music begins, and we cut to a white flash.
Panel 5: Craig and John appear as though they are in an anime fight scene. Frantic music plays in the background, and liberal aftereffects are applied.
Panel 6: David sets down glasses and is visible disturbed.
Panel 7: Pan left to Craig, who picks up glasses when David is out of shot
Panel 8: Craig puts on glasses, tinkly music plays, white flash
Panel 9: John and David appear as though they are in a disco dance club. Appropriate music is playing.
Panel 10: Craig sets down glasses and appears upset.
Panel 11: Fiona walks in, apologizes for being late, and throws her bag on table. The glasses get smashed.
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