Thursday, May 10, 2007

Technical Documentation

For this project the initial technical issue was how to collect the photos for display. The new website served this purpose perfectly, and uses PHP, CSS, and simple HTML. The files for the website are hosted here for documentation purposes.

The next issue was how to display the photographs for the midnight showing. For this purpose we used Flash to design a movie, and had the photos fade to black one at a time. The movie was made by using the window outline as a background and then laying the images on top of the location of the panes. Each of the photos was then copied and one copy was turned into a transform that faded to black at the same time that the first copy disappeared. The window pane template was then replaced by a solid black layer, so that all that is seen upon projection are the images slowly fading to black.
This method, while it does work, is incredibly time consuming and prone to human error. In the future it would be better to utilize Actionscript to automate the process.
The corrected version of the Flash movie and the .fla file are hosted for display purposes.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Midnight Screening of Museum of Yesterday

Here is a video of our final midnight screening for the Museum of Yesterday projected on the front of the Union. The paper sheets in the window proved to be a great projection surface and the frame design Mike made fit well on to the window. The actual visualization however was very uneventful and had some technical problems.



Here are some more images of set up on site.





Shadow Play






Above are images of Kang, Monarch and Mike setting up the paper on the windows of the Union for the projection. This took about an hour, but looked really nice once they were all set in place. The video below shows Kang, Alejandro and Mike improvising with shadow play while Kyle finishes up the visualization which was supposed to be ready that day, but was not.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Final Frame Design 1


Based on what I was able to sketch out on site I combined my drawing with the photo I took and this is the frame design that came out. The top and middle parts should fit almost perfect if we can line up the projector right, but the bottom might still need tweeking.

Projection Frame Design




In order to have the projected images fit neatly into the window frames we discovered that taking a photo of the space and formating a frame out of that would not be enough because it didn't factor in the curve of the window or the distortion that would have on a projected image. So Mike went out and tried to make a frame that would fit by projecting the computer screen on the Union and drawing with Photoshop. This only partially worked because since we are using the whole frame now, the projector needed to be moved back and placed higher. Thus the view was obstructed by the lower part of the fence and 2 tables or a taller pedestal will be needed for final display. Here are proposal images as well as the partial drawing made by Mike on the physical surface of the Union