Looking Outwards 3 – Stephanie
Pop-Up Video: Tesla, Synesthetic Hallucination, and Augmented Book Science
So being a fan of Nikola Tesla, this video immediately caught my eye. Tesla was one of the most brilliant and peculiar inventors ever and I feel like this project did a fairly good job of portraying that. I loved the pop-up book and how they used to projector to animate it. Pop-up books by themselves are a beautiful and immersive method of storytelling, but the animation took things to a whole new level. I also loved the way that the narrator interacted with the animations by picking up Tesla in his hand and putting on the hat to become Telsa himself. The gears in the table that showed the date were also a very nice touch, and I thought it was so neat how they clicked and turned like a clock whenever a page was turned.
A Ballet of Quadrotors: Helicopter Spectacular from Saatchi & Saatchi [Vicon, OpenFrameworks]
This video is pretty neat, though it starts out slow. The mini helicopters look like like a cross between fairies and ufos as they float around and flash their lights to the music. I’m not sure what function the pyramid has in all this, but it looks cool. Like a flock of alien fairies converging on Giza or something. The spotlight effect done towards the end was also pretty neat. I was impressed by the relatively high degree of precision in the aerial formations they were in. My brother and I used to have mini helicopters about the same size as these and it was always so difficult to control them. Even though some of the helicopters look slightly wobbly and unsteady during the performance, it doesn’t detract too much from the spectacle. I’m not quite sure what the winking smiley face they made at the end was all about, but that was just a little creepy and uncanny.
Chronotopic Anamorphosis
In this video a guy figured out how to make any moving object look like it is undulating and twisting by using Processing to manipulate video in real time. This illusion is pretty interesting because everything looks perfectly solid and normal until it moves and begins to take on this effect. An especially cool demonstration is when he moves in and out of the door that is behind him. Not only does the door ripple as if it’s made out of water, but the guy moving through it looks almost as if he is a ghost. His outline stretches and seems to curve smoothly around the door, then snaps back to normal once he is though. There are some flaws, like the jumpy lines that pass though everything that moves and the jagged outlines on what should be smooth curves, but even in it’s unrefined state this project has a lot of potential to be used in other really neat creations.