Motion Pictures: Final Project (#4)

For my final project that was featured in our Cabal Gallery Show, I decided to do projection mapping on Polaroid Film. My theme was to take aspects of the original Polaroid images that were in motion when I took the picture, and bring them back to life with a projection! Here is a list of the parts of each image I brought back to motion:

Home: a fire in the fire place

Tennessee: trees going by in the window, so it seems like the car is in motion

Castle Rock: waves on a beach

Rondo: lights flickering in the chandelier

Dream Lake: ripples in the lake

Cranes Castle: clouds moving in the sky

I included pictures of my final installment and there are links to youtube video recordings of each projection on each Polaroid. The projections were hard to capture in a video, so the quality isn't very good. I think it looked a lot better in person, then on these videos!

and My process for making this projections was a long and frustrating one, but it definitely paid off. I first chose 6 Polaroid that I took while something I captured was in motion at the point of taking them. I chose from a plethora of Polaroids I have taken over the years so I have pictures form 2016-2018. After I chose the images and decided what I was going to bring back to motion, I looked up on youtube, videos of the thing that I wanted to put in motion. I then used a youtube grabber website and downloaded the videos offline. Some videos were harder to find than others, such as the trees out a car window I had to do lots of digging to find. In Rondo, I used blurred out candles flickering to get the effect of lights flickering with a reflection for more effect of motion. The clouds and the fire place in Cranes Castle and Home were the easiest to find. After I downloaded the videos, I uploaded the video, with a photograph (taken on my phone) of the corresponding Polaroid to After Effects. I then overlaid the video onto the part of photograph it matched with. I then lowered the opacity of the video so I could see the restraints I needed to abide to on the Polaroid. I then used a mask to cut out the video to the exact size and shape of the space it needed to cover in the projection. In this step, some areas were easier to mask than others. For example, the fireplace was the easiest as I only cropped the video into a smaller rectangle than it was before. Cranes Castle was the hardest to mask because it had so many dips and curves with the trees and the top of the castle. I just had to zoom in really far to be able to get the mask right. After I finished the mask on each, I deleted the background Polaroid image, so only the masked video remained. I then exported the video out of After Effects. I had problems being able to play the exported After Effects file, so I had to re-upload the video into Premiere and then re-export it. After all of this, I had my final video I would use in the projection. Then came the setting up part for the actual projection. I would put all 6 final masked videos into VDMX and syphon them into Mad Mapper. I used 6 different rectangles in VDMX and also in Mad Mapper to be able to separate each video and project it onto each Polaroid separately. Then I just used Mad Mapper to do final adjustments to the projections to make them line up as perfect as possible. After I did all the final touches to editing the videos, it would take me about 2 hours to just set up the projection to either practice, make sure each projection looked okay (I had to change a few videos because the projections didn't show up well on the Polaroid during the first go) and also for the final projection.

It felt like everything that could go wrong, went wrong during the project. Even during the show, the projector was so sensitive that even the vibration of people walking by would un-align the projection. I had to always keep an eye on my piece and adjust it every few minutes to make sure it was all lined up. But I am really happy I stuck with it and powered through those issues and was able to get the final product that I did. I feel like I am better at using all the programs I used for this project now. I am really happy with how this project turned out, and it seemed like people observing it were too! It feels even better seeing my final product after it was such a challenge that I was able to overcome. The show was so exciting and I could feel that rush, the high, of people liking and wanting my work! Thank you for giving us this opportunity of the gallery show! Hope you enjoyed my piece!:)