A New Direction

Melissa and I decided that it was time to take our Big Screens project in a different direction for a couple of reasons. Shooting in the rain is miserable. Then crit group revealed that we had shot a collection of really nice stock footage, which wasn’t very exciting.

After a long review of our visual assets, we settled on a new idea: a fight between nature and industrialization. We planned to take our footage and use AfterEffects to mix it together in unusual ways. This proved time consuming and somewhat frustrating.

Our big breakthrough came during a test screening at IAC. As an experiment, we played some of our time lapse footage via Processing, and found that it looked really good. This opened the door to creating some of our visual effects using Processing, instead of AfterEffects. From that point forwards, we shot only in time lapse. Since time lapse is just a string of still images, effects could be added frame by frame. Processing can export animation frames, so a series of exported Processing frames can be layered over a series of frames in AfterEffects. Below is our midterm presentation incorporating these new ideas: