I'm working on a set of three moving stereoscopic tableaus. If you read my previous entries, this is the project that used to be Elephant Hide & Seek (the elephant that isn't there). I'm using a tiger instead of an elephant now.
Here are the three scenes:
1. Sleeping Tiger: A tiger sleeps under the covers of a bed. The only motion is the tiger breathing in and out
2. Tiger climbs the Stairs: The shadow of a tiger climbing the stairs
3. Through the Wallpaper: A jungle pattern wallpaper opens up and pulls backwards in space to create a 3D jungle space.
I have begun to work on sleeping tiger. I created a forced perspective bed using two pieces of wood that look like head boards, and pieces of fabric. The wall is made of a ripped up piece of linoleum.
The tiger is supposed to be lying under the covers, and the only motion is that of it breathing. I consulted with my sister (who is a chemical engineer) and she suggested I use a balloon connected to a tube. Fortunately I was able to find both items in the house. To make the tiger breathe I blew up the balloon with the tube, then I held my finger over the opening and let out the tiniest bit of air I could for each shot. The motion came out beautifully. I would like to be able to let out an even smaller amount of air. We (me and my photographer Blake) captured about 30 frames for the motion.
Below: Bed in the process of being made
Above: Still of the bed, composited for red-cyan glasses. The stripey string with the ball is the tiger's tail. It came from a toy truck.
Above: The tube coming out from the bed.
Problems:
The tiger's breathing was a success, but there continues to be wiggle from shot to shot. We use a slide bar for taking left and right image pairs. The bar is not actually designed for stereo photography, but instead for balancing a camera with a heavy lens. The bar is imprecise, and no matter how careful we are it still jiggles. This is a cause of great frustration for me. I'm hoping that it can be fixed with motion stabilization in Flash. Otherwise, I might have to switch to using two cameras, which will have its own set of problems, like trying to match them exactly, and not having access to multiple cameras in the future. For that I'd need to build a dual mount so I could attach both cameras onto the tripod at the same time. I'm hoping that motion stabilization in After Effects will work though.
Below: the shakiness
Last night I had my artist conversation. An artist conversation is not an artist talk as I initially suspected it to be, it's more like an interactive art party/ open house. My theme was 3D art. Everyone here got really into it. There were some amazing red and blue outfits. We took a group photo of all the Elsewherians in 3D.
For my artist conversation I showed videos on monitors around the museum, including "Jello Bonanza" (spinning 3D jello). I also presented "3D Snack." 3D snack is 3D photos of food mounted on ceramic plates. When you look at them with 3D glasses it appears that there is food on the plates.
In addition to viewing stations we had activities. There was a table for drawing 3D pictures with red and blue crayons, which turned out to be a huge hit since a lot of our visitors were under the age of six. There was also a table with red and blue objects to look at and arrange. And, we took 3D photos of people and projected them on a screen.
Everyone here was very enthusiastic and playful, so it was a lot of fun. When I get photos of the event I'll post them.
The preparation was really stressful though. I had trouble printing "3D snack" so it would look 3D. The ink color has to be dead on to work. I found that photos of objects that were red or blue had to be scrapped, but ones that were neutral, yellow, green, or purple were OK. I also had trouble displaying the 3D movie on the monitor. Once again, the color was off. We adjusted it the best we could but it looked pretty flat. But, then we discovered if you step back a distance from the screen the depth increased significantly. So, eventually everything worked, but for a while I was afraid I wasn't going to have anything to show.
This is Amber in her beard. She made it herself.
On Friday night (June 5th) I will be hosting an Artist Conversation here at Elsewhere, at 8pm.
An Artist Conversation is kind of like an interactive art party. For my evening I'm going to be focusing on stereoscopy.
Here are some of the activity and screening station I'm thinking of having-
-Monitor screening previous works of mine (2D)
-Station where people can make miniature spaces with toys, then staff photograph them as stereo pairs and composite them to create 3D images. Project these off a laptop? Or hook laptop up to a monitor?
-Camera-less 3D station. People make 3D drawings using pairs of red and blue pencils, and arranging red and blue objects
-Screenings of 3D works made thus far
-A video or poster about how to take 3D photos
Maybe:
-"Staring through the wall paper." A wall with fabric with repeated small pattern. If you stare at it and relax your eyes, the layers will overlap to create a 3D space, like staring through the wallpaper.
-3D stop motion animation of objects or food (jello molds ideally) spinning against a black background. Perhaps in the log cabin.
-printed 3D photos of objects at life size next to the originals
Need: projector, 4 monitors with DVD players, blank DVDs, red and blue colored pencils, red & blue objects, paper, poster board, laptop with photoshop to hook up to projector, tripod with stereo slide bar, digital camera, 3D glasses.
People:
Photographer, Photoshop compositor, Still life station manager (can help with lighting), 3D glasses collector, Camera-less 3D station manager.
I'm sitting in the Elsewhere library right now. It's maybe 92 degrees out, yet the building seems to have trapped the night cold; there is cool air radiating from my easy chair.
I've done some tests for my "tiger on the stairs" tableau. I made a quick version of a miniature staircase from bits and pieces, and photographed it from different distances to see what would look best. Three feet away seemed to give enough depth without being so close it would strain the eyes.
I also did a video test. I wanted to see what an object would look like rotating in 3D, so I spun objects around on a record player. The record player gave a very smooth motion.
This image is squished, (I still need to figure out how to export mp4s from HD in the correct ratio), but the squishing actually adds additonal depth to the image. This animation is shot at 30 fps, and looped.
My work process:
I've been trying to work in a cumulative and experimental fashion rather than a linear one. I'm testing 3D processes to discover what works best, rather then plowing forward in a traditional film making procedure of building sets, shooting and editing. I hope that this method will allow me to work organically and make new discoveries.
One of the things I am interested in is the life of spaces. Spaces as living breathing entities. The residue that remains from past events.
I am also interested in the perception of time. I find that my experience of time and memory is non-linear. Many of my memories are misfiled. Some events which clearly occurred long ago feel closer than events of more recent times. I remember events less according to time than place. For example, I have a separate time line for the events that occur at my parents' home versus ones that occur at my home in Austin. It is as if each time line were a video, and I pressed pause when switching between the two on my VCR. Time passes back home like time lapse photography, new houses pop out of the ground, snow is replaced by violets, rooms are remodeled.
Here at Elsewhere, everything is centered around the past. Tours are given four days a week. The guides chant the same story about how the building used to be an antique store, owned by a woman named Sylvia who collected objects for over 50 years. Before that it was a boarding house. But it is also very much about the present, about the artists who reside here now and their collaborative community and artistic endeavors. What does it mean that other people were before us? How does it (or should it) affect our experience? What do we owe these people? Do we have an obligation to memorialize their lives?
I have always had trouble getting rid of objects. Partly because of their intrinsic value; they are worth money and it would cost me money to replace them. Partly because I don't want to waste them. But also at a deeper level, I feel a certain obligation to the object. If someone has given it to me then getting rid of it feels disrespectful to the giver. If the object comes from a particular experience then it becomes a physical memory of the event. If it has a face (stuffed animals in particular) I have given it a part of myself so that it can "live." It is particularly hard to part with these soul vessels. To extract myself from these objects. In a way the unwillingness to part with objects represents an attempt to achieve immortality. While the owner of an object may die, it remains. To get rid of a deceased person's possessions is to kill them further. Here at Elsewhere, objects that were tied together in bundles by the owner, Sylvia, are precious. It would be a sort of sacrilege to undo her handiwork.
In my work I have been experimenting with stereoscopic film because it preserves both space and time. I am interested in finding ways of using the medium that address the multiple lives of spaces, and to create a sort of ephemeral object.
I'm finally getting the technical aspect of stereoscopic (3D) stop motion animation to work!
I've been using a slide bar to take stereo pairs, and then compositing them in photoshop to create a 3D image which can be seen with red-blue glasses. The slide bar allows me to take a left eye image, then slide over to take my right image. This method is called "Cha-cha."
The distance between the two photo positions is called the "base line." The interocular distance (distance between eyes) for adult humans is about 2.5 inches, so this is the standard base line distance. If you make your base distance wider it will create more depth, and if you make it smaller it will decrease the depth.
This is the stereo slide bar that I'm using-
I make my stereo images by taking a left eye picture and then a right eye picture. I take them into Photoshop and turn the left eye cyan, and the right eye red, then add them together to make the 3D image.
The final image can be viewed with anaglyohic (red-blue) 3D glasses. The lenses filter out different color ranges so each eye sees a different image.
Creating images with the slide bar:
I was initially having the problem that my images were distorted; part of the image was rotated clockwise out of sync with its pair and another part was rotated counter-clockwise. Confused? So was I. I was pretty frustrated, so I consulted with our in-house photography expert, Joseph. He suggested that the camera lens might be angled such that it wasn't parallel with the slide bar/ viewing plane. We got it ultra parallel and the distortions went away. In other words, stereo stop motion animation is now working.
So, now that the technology is working at the most basic level, I have been able to do tests with it.
I am interested in creating ephemeral tableaus and spatial illusions. There are two visual concepts that I have been playing with. One is a flat surface becoming 3D, in this case wallpaper pattern emerging from a wall. The other is shadows moving over a 3D surface.
Here's a still from the wall paper concept. I painted this with gouache, then cut it with an exacto knife and pushed parts of it forward.
I'm realizing it needs more depth. There are two ways to create more depth. One way is to make the space actually deeper. The other way is to move the left eye and right eye photos further apart. Unfortunately, the slide bar I purchased can only go as wide as the distance between human eyes, which is the distance I've been shooting at, so I can't make my pictures any farther apart. I would need to either invest in the bigger Bogen slide bar, or build one. If I built one it probably wouldn't be as precise, and could lead to shaking from image to image. So, my best bet will probably be to add actual physical depth.
The other concept I've been working with is that of shadows moving over a space. I want to animate the shadow of a tiger walking up a staircase. I did a really basic test today with an actual staircase, a piece of cardboard (just square, not tiger shaped), and the kindly help of Elswhere intern and photographer Alexa.
Here is a still-
And here is a video clip, (slightly squished)-
There was some shaking, so I'll need to find a way to get the camera position more consistent from shot to shot. Also, the depth is limited, so I'm going to try constructing a miniature version of the staircase with extra depth/ forced perspective. I did a cross-fade from frame to frame to try to soften the shake and give a more ephemeral feeling.
About this staircase: This staircase leads up to the third floor, an uninhabited space filled with what I'd consider to be the creepiest installations in the building, like an old (an unfortunately unusable) bathroom that has had its own dust glued back onto it. Before Elsewhere was a museum it was an antique store, and before that it was a boarding house. People inhabited every floor. The other night my housemate Sarah said she heard footsteps on these stairs after everyone else was asleep. Pretty much everyone here believes that there are ghosts here at Elsewhere. I remain skeptical.
On Friday night we had a party to celebrate the opening of our garden, "Urban Green." Here are some photos. For some reason Vox has decided to turn my photos sideways. I guess Vox is feeling a little kooky tonight.
Sarah the Bee and Valerie
Joseph
Jessy as Phosphorous.
Bobby and Danna the Bush
Billy as Nitrogen, those are supposed to be decomposing animals.
After struggling to get work accomplished at my tiny desk, I finally accepted the fact that I was going to need more space in order to actually make a film. I got permission to transform "the hotel lobby" (area ont he 2nd floor with a couch, dressers of linens and old paintings) into a work space.
Here's my old space-
First I got the help from two kind fellows (Bill and Dan) to carry the couch to the 3rd floor. Then I searched through the junk rooms and attic and excavated a table, and parts of two shelves. I hammered the shelves back together. Here are some photos of the new space. I probably went up and downstairs about 30 times today. Very tired but pleased.
Photos of new space-
I find myself sleeping a lot here. Maybe it's because there are no windows in my room so I don't know when to wake up.
Last night I had many dreams:
-I was babysitting children at some sort of youth center. They were all children I had babysat for in the past and were really too old to need a sitter but still needed some attention. I felt a strong sense of love and caring for them, and a desire to make sure they were happy. There were also paper cutters around and a constant risk of the children sticking their hands in and cutting them off by mistake.
-I was in a car with two men, driving down the road near my parents' house. I was giving them directions about where to go when suddenly the house in front of us stretched out into the road and tried to hit us like it was a huge fist. I made the driver turn into reverse and speed backwards. More things kept jumping out at us, monsters and gigantic objects. I pushed the driver out of the way and took over. Some how we got to a place where everything was safe, and forgot about the whole thing.
-I went to a castle which was ruled by two royal and mythical twin sisters. On the side of each of their heads was half of another face, a replica of their sister's face. I think they were siamese twins that had been separated. Their castle had opulent wallpaper and they gave me handfuls of jewels. (This is at least my third dream about siamese twin sisters since coming to Elsewhere).
-I was walking around a city with two friends who were filmmakers. We found a famous director standing on a balcony shooting a film. We stood and watched. Then, the director turned around and recognized us. He described us each by name and what we did. He had seen our work at a festival or something. Then the front desk from Elsewhere appeared. New artist residents were arriving, a famous pair of dancers. They wore black and white and seemed to be from another country. Now I was wearing black too, and they invited me to dance with them. I did aerial balancing tricks on top of their hands that I had no idea I was capable of, somersaults in the air. I was light as a feather. We made sculptures with our bodies. It was an amazing sense of motion, and I felt proud of my newly discovered dancing abilities. I could tell that the film director was impressed too.
Recent Comments
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Leah said:
[this is good]Hi Jeanne! Did you get my last comment about doing manual 3D images in photoshop?? How bout using a cable... read more
on Tiger Triptych -
Amber pb said:
been really pushing for this trend to take off. Thanks for supporting the cause jeanne! read more
on How women stay warm in Canada -
Jessabill said:
count me in as a helper if you need somebody. -Billio read more
on Artist Conversation Friday night -
this is beautiful. thank you for creating it. read more
on Bed compile