Month: December 2017

The Event

Below are some photographs taken of the 2017 Lincoln West End Lights Display illustrating the type of content that was created for the event. As you can see, displays ranged from fairy lights to clever use of candles and even a few projected window displays like mine.

With the displays that did use projection, most tended to use stock footage or extracts from well known Christmas films. Although this served its purpose, I was proud that I had chosen to create my animated Christmas scenes myself, as opposed to just sourcing stock footage from online.

My Finished Animation

Below is a rendered copy of my final animation that consisted of three Christmas themed scenes. The animation was played on loop and projected onto the front window.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflection

As you can see from the above video, when conducting my project, I found that the baking paper needed to be aligned perfectly to avoid distortion in the video. Although I had tried my best to keep it straight, I noticed half way through the night and as seen in this video, that one sheet of paper had fallen slightly, creating a small gap that distorted a part of the image. Nonetheless, I was still very pleased with the final quality of the projected image, which is hard to get a feel for in the photographs.

When creating my animated scenes, I used a canvas size of 3840 by 2160 Pixels, to retain image quality and avoid a poor resolution when transferring the animation to a bigger screens. Overall, I was fairly pleased with how well the baking paper worked and would definitely recommend for anyone looking recreate something similar.

Improvements

One of the main problems I encountered when using the HeavyM software, was trying to get the composition to fit the window without stretching or cropping out part of the video. Due to the size and shape of my composition, when I attempted to map around the entire window frame, for some reason the video did not seem to fit right. Subsequently, I had map just sides of the window and have the animation positioned in the middle. Although I would have had liked to have the animation fit the entire window, for the sake of participating in the event I had to make best with what I could. In the mean time, I will need to look further into this to see if there is something that I can do to get around this, whether this be adjusting the dimensions of my original assets or dividing the space into separate animations.

Another small problem I encountered was with the positioning of the objects in the original composition. When the video wrapped round the window the rocking horse became slightly hidden behind the window frame and would have looked much better having been moved slightly to the left. To fix this, I could simply move the horse on the original composition and ensure that with future projects like this, I test project the finished composition, to see if any adjustments like this need to be made.

Thinking in terms of improving the audience experience, if I was to create a project like this again, I would like to look at ways of making the piece more interactive and visually interesting. For example, one display featured a video of a child blowing bubbles with an actual bubble machine positioned just outside of the house. Although simple, I thought the idea was very clever and added that extra element of interactivity.

 

Creative Commons

To source the various components of my scenes and build my own assets, I made use of Creative Commons to find royalty free images which I could adapt and transform for my project. To achieve the walls of the first scene, I layered some textures sourced from Creative Commons over my basic shapes and played around with the saturation till I achieved a rustic log cabin atheistic. When creating the fireplace I took elements from existing images and layered a brick texture on top, adjusting the skew and perspective to give it greater dimension.

Lighting & Shadows

When creating my scenes, I wanted to make sure I had a good understanding of different lighting conditions and how these can affect an object’s shadows.

Generally, the smaller the light source, the harder the shadow will appear, the larger the light source, the smaller the shadow will appear (McKenzie and Overturf, 2009). Moreover, the direction of shadows and where the highlights appear on an object are indicators of directional lighting (McKenzie and Overturf, 2009).

Hard Light/Hard Shadows: 

• Bright sunny days produce high contrast images.
• Shadows created have clearly defined edges (hard shadow).

Soft Light/Soft Shadow

• Light produced on an overcast day is low contrast.
• When light rays are scattered they hit the object from different angles, resulting in a soft shadows.

Taking these basic principles into consideration, when constructing my scenes, I made sure to keep in mind the lighting of the scene, so I could adjust the shadow strength and shape if needed. For example, when the plane in the toy shop window flew across the composition, I knew to increase the shadow size as the object got closer to the light source. Moreover, when I placed the stockings around the fireplace in the first scene, I added a subtle warm glow around their edges to replicate the reflection of light from the fireplace.

Animations

With each of the three scenes, I wanted to combine a mixture of stationary and animated objects. Below, I have briefly outlined the process of animating the various elements that made up each scene.

SCENE 1

For the first scene, I decided to play around with the scale and position of the composition, in order to create a simple camera panning effect. To create the flickering lights, I simply added a glow effect and masked a small section of the Christmas tree. Next, I increased and decreased the glow intensity, key framing each movement and adjusting the timing to get the desired speed. I repeated this several times for the different parts of the tree, adjusting the key framing slightly each time, to make the lights appear as though they were flickering randomly.

For the log fire, I sourced a royalty free clip of a fire burning from online and positioned the footage to fit the gap in my constructed fireplace. I then feathered the edges to remove the harsh edges and added some smoke shadows. 

SCENE 2

Compared to the other two scenes, I wanted the toy shop window to be the busiest and have the most animated elements. I began by creating the rocking horse, which was just a case of key framing the rotation, after adjusting the anchor point to ensure the horse rocked from the bottom. To animate the plane flying across the scene, I needed to divide the plane body and propeller into separate layers, so I could key frame the propeller spinning round without affecting the whole plane. After doing this, I then linked the two layers so they travelled together in unison. When creating the toy train, I followed a similar process, diving the main body and individual wheels into separate layers, so I could animate the wheels rotating round.

Just like the flickering Christmas tree lights from the first scene, I key framed a subtle glow on the garland lights to add an extra festive element. Moreover, with all of the moving objects, I made sure that their shadows followed the same path and adjusted their scale or opacity when necessary to look more realistic.

SCENE 3

For the final composition, I wanted to create a snowy outdoor scene with a few subtle animations. Taking a basic silhouette of Santa on his sleigh, I key framed the position to have him fly past the moon. For the tree lights and garland, I applied the same glow effect just as I did for my previous scenes. I added a neon star light to the roof of the house, adjusting its skew and adding a soft glow around the edges. Finally, as with all of my scenes, I finished by applying a snow fall particle effect to the entire scene to create my snowy setting.

 

Bibliography

McKenzie, J. and Overturf, D. (2009). Artificial lighting for photography. 1st ed. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning.