I think in early cinema when they first
experienced moving pictures they were
almost scared they didn't know what to
think I was like is this actually
happening fast forward to present day
and people are accustomed to seeing
anything happen that's what was exciting
about boxes I think actually being able
to create a physical world that people
could actually walk into and see that
was mysterious this is a groundbreaking
piece you know this is something that no
one in the world has ever done before
and we had done it with such care and
such crafts and so something to see so
refined and polished this is a huge gift
to the community to see what's possible
mixing design storytelling and
technology I'd always kind of wanted to
try projection mapping for a while as
soon as I got involved with robotics I
realized that there's an opportunity to
apply projection mapping to moving
objects it's kind of projection mapping
on moving objects from a technical
standpoint from an aesthetic conceptual
standpoint it's a story about the
principles of magic and illusionary I
like the simplicity of the really basic
magic tricks just a coin add of a
tablecloth all these tricks were
referenced and put into a graphic
language for the project
I think there's like 10 principles of
magic we chose five transformation
fellow was good to intro on that and to
show one canvas transforming changing
its structure and levitation was the
second one which is you know the
campuses start to levitate and then
showing the levitation of objects
through the canvas from one to the other
the intersection was the third concept
going off of that principle want to put
the campuses together and then figure
out how the graphic shapes could extrude
out of it Figg depth and volume
teleportations pretty obvious no
magicians teleporting from one end of
the stage to the other so we want to
demographic shapes and then kind of
evolve the graphic shapes throughout
that section you know escape we wanted
to have him abducted by the geo by the
campuses and then to escape to salvation
the intention is for it to be one
seamless experience on set there's two
large industrial robots each holding a
4x8 foot canvas bot and dolly created a
way for animators in Maya to control
robot and we call it BD move we can
control just a canvas or a plane in Maya
we can animate the path that the canvas
takes and an algorithm determines every
rotation on each joint of the robot I
start and CG with creating a flat render
and then project that out back into the
physical world to create an installation
that can be experienced in a room
physically we would kind of work out the
robotic moves first and kind of figure
out like what is the relationship
between these two canvases you know
sometimes we have you know a canvas over
another canvas so we obviously want to
make object pass from one campus to the
other we kind of combined the
illusionary of projecting on moving
objects and creating depth and spatial
you know spatial relationships with a
thematic design that was you know
founded on optical art gia monk and I
both share a love for op art is
imagination it's really expansive so
combining that with the technology that
we have a button dolly we were able to
pull this project off the biggest design
challenge was just learning how to work
with these four by eight campuses that
are in motion and coordinated motion it
took me a few months to wrap my head
around them because I'm more of a
traditional graphic designer I mean no
one's ever done this before
right and so that was the biggest hurdle
ideally we would have everyone come and
just experience it in the room the
reason we decided to make a film was
just to get it out there and let the
widest audience see box we wanted the
camera movement to feel like just a
spectator walking through the room in
order to do that we used motion capture
we had a person watch box and move
around and we track their motion and
then applied it to the camera in Maya
which then gets exported to our robot
scalp holding the camera there already
is a lot of sound in the room here the
motors on the robots you hear the actual
massive robot moving the sound design
was necessary to make all the graphic
illusions that we are producing feel
equally real I don't know where the
future of filmmaking is heading
hopefully we'll be doing a lot more work
that isn't just pure CG that we're
shooting things practically with
miniatures and people and mechanical
contraptions I think the more live
action that we can use in filmmaking the
better shooting something with the
camera allows you to make mistakes and
turn them into something that's even
more interesting than what could be
planned