Experimental Video #6: Story Development & Experimental Projections

Because of the limitations of not having access to my projector or any form of a projector, I needed to find an alternative ways of creating projections, the idea of using puppet projections came to mind. This involved creating paper silhouettes of the character or elements of the set and using a torch or phone torch to shine behind it in a dark room to create a projection.

RESEARCH:




The first video I came across on youtube by just searching 'silhouette projections'. I thought it was really interesting how there was many layers to the figure. This gave me the idea of creating a character silhouette and playing around with what this could create.

I then came across this video which really got me inspired as it was almost like what we wanted to do but a live action version. here we can see some form of digital cut out of figures agains a black background. through the cut out we see the video behind which were videos of the street.

This then triggered the idea of creating a paper cut out against. black card of the protagonist of our film and then creating a few paper buildings. This would then lead to me to creating the illusion of our ghost wandering the streets of our paper town as we had imagined him, illuminating the buildings.



BEN CHARMAN - London Based Paper Craft Artist/Animator
I came across Ben Charman's work

To being this experimental projection, it involved having to make a smaller version of the paper towns that Ellie was making, I wanted to ensure they were in the same style of Ellie's original buildings so I referred to the images she sent over to do so.

Ellie's Buildings:

         

My buildings:

 

 I noticed that when I turned the lights off there was a nice orange glow from the street lights that shone through and landed directly on the town and used this as my lighting. It gave a really nice warm glow to it. However, before I started playing around with the projections, I wanted to play around more with the lighting available and what I can do with a torch. The only torch available I had was an iPhone torch. So from here I messed around with the shadows created from different angels. the differing intensities of the orange street light in each photo created the illusion of the sun rising or the sun setting, depending at which angle I placed the torch light.

SILHOUETTE IDEA

I was really inspired by both Charman's work and the second YouTube video to create a silhouetted video. So I really wanted to have a go creating a silhouetted video to reflect our original idea. Because our animated ghost animation is a white silhouette against a black background (digital), which will be projected against the paper town. Therefore, the white glowing ghostly body will be illuminating the buildings as he passes by.

I started by cutting out the character design for the main ghost on to black card:

I then had the idea of messing around more with the lighting before I filmed. I got up a YouTube video of colour gradients and made that full screen, I then placed this at an angle to the town so it would shine onto it. To enhance the colours, I made sure all the lights in the room were off but left. the blinds open to let the orange street light in as well.

Because I was stuck on lockdown in Liverpool, I had no access to any DSLR's whatsoever. This meant I was left to use my iPhone camera to get the video and pictures. The quality is not how I would like it but I was able to get across the idea I was trying to achieve. It was interesting working the focus and messing around with the depth of field on an iPhone... it wasn't the easiest or the best as it has its own algorithm to choose where it wants to focus on. However, I was able to get a few photos of which I was happy with. Some of the images focus on the black silhouette with blurred outlines of the town through the silhouette. I originally wanted the focus to be on the town and not on the black outline, however, I quite like the outcome of both. 

         

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Colour Gradient YouTube Video:

GHOST SILHOUTTE VIDEO #1

The video was quite hard to film as I was on my own at this point and had to have the iPhone, filming in one hand and the cut out in the other and try and move him across the town. Whilst I was doing this, I was trying to make sure the focus was primarily on the town and not the black card, but it was difficult to achieve this. But I really liked the outcome as it was like a rough first draft, almost a little simulation of what we had in mind.

When I was looking back at the video I really wanted the ghost to look as if he was actually walking. This led me to the idea which we had previously discussed but never fully developed:


Also from my story board, I drew up a scene where the ghost was climbing through a man hole from the underworld to the above world:

I had the idea of then creating a silhouette of this image:

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From here we can animate the Ghost crawling through the hole and then project this on to the cars silhouette. It kind of fits with the aesthetics of the film and maybe we can mess around with rotating the cut out and the animation together. This could emphasise the transition of one world to another. 

I also wanted to mess around with projecting this on to a little paper townI made to see what the outcome could be…  

I really liked the outcome of all of these projects as it all became a domino effect; triggering idea after idea. I think doing projections like these could be really fun to make and very experimental. I like the idea of mixing media and different types of projection or what we are projecting on. I think the outcome of projecting on both 2D and 3D platforms could look very good together.
I am aware that having such strong back lighting wouldn't actually work with projections from a projector, however for the purposes of experimenting and aesthetics I really wanted to have a go playing around with lighting and with what I had available