A Dream Within a Dream
In this project, I made three main scenes, seabed, mountains, and circle animations. This is based on openFrameworks and C++. It is a wonderful combination of circular shapes and mapping!
produced by: JINGYI CHEN
Introduction
My shape is Perforated Wall, it is made of two layers of foam board and cut by lasing cutting and three panels connect with each other at an angle of 120 °. We used small foam board cubes to reinforce it between the two layers and hung it from a hook in the ceiling to make it in a better perspective. It has 9 circles, and the biggest ones are up to 30cm and other smaller ones are between 5-10cm. The most critical point for the creation of this shape is the relation between the circles and the rectangle, and the animations in the circles are most striking.
Concept and Background Research
The very first time I saw this shape, it revoked my imagination about the cavities under the sea. And in those cavities are many tiny marine creatures. So this is the first inspiration of the first scene. I used the function in OFofNoise () to create the light and shadow like sea waves and used the class in OF vec2f to create moving balls to imitate moving fishes. Finally, I created a very quiet and cosy scene, it reminds me of the feeling of standing under the water tank in an aquarium. The light and shadow are ripping, fishes are floating slowly and you can fall into a reverie at this moment.
The second scene is like through a hole to look at the mountains but the animation moves so fast you can't see the complete picture of the mountains. You can only see a part of the mountains in each circle. There is an idiom in China, by which depicts a scenario that people look through a pipe to look a leopard and only can see one speck of it, so they can't find it is a leopard. I want to show the feeling that when people can't see the complete feeling of the whole thing, but they always struggling to observe it with all attention on. That makes the audience nervous and the things behind the peepholes are more mysterious and difficult to ascertain. The mountains are drawn mainly by functions in OF likeofNoise ( ), sin (),ofRandom ().
In the last scene, I want to project some fascinating geometrical animations, so in this scene, I used the circle animations. I think the moving way of spots is similar to the connecting way of the three panels, so it is cross the whole surface. And in the sunken circles I put shiny rotating squares and arcs, they change colours simultaneously. In a dim environment, the bright colours will be more attention-grabbing. In this scene, I mainly used OfTranslate (),OfMap (), OfRotateDeg ( ), sin (), Ofpath and all that jazz.
Technical
This projection-mapped work is based on Openframeworks, using C and Openframworks add-on ofxPimapper. I developed my work in a group of five. We came up with ideas about the primitive shape, modelled it on the computer and fixed it several times after the group discussions. And then we coded everyone's scenes individually. At the late phase of code we made the shape by the equipment in Hatchlab together, then assembled and projected scenes on it. It was a very tough experience, there were so many tricky problems beyond all expectations when we tried to coordinate all hardware, codes, space and accessories.