Magic Lantern Studio launch
Client : Magic Lantern Studio
A shop dedicated to selling antique and facsimile copies of pre-cinematic toys of the 1800’s
Style : Simply bringing to life the content of these pre-cinematic toys and recombining them. Using a luminance keying to collage the different images together in a live mix. Introductory sequence constructed with Adobe After Effects.
Issues: Projection screen was a very complex shape (a jungle clearing) and the distance behind it was too short for rear-projecting at the right size. At the launch a weaker projector was employed by the shop which was also rear-projected. Their projector didn’t compete against the lighting as well as I would have liked, It wasnt 100% happy with the result on the night. I should have taken the entire video infrastructure on by myself using my own projector.
Technical Notes: The footage above was shot afterwards using my projector, projecting from the front. I made a mask to blacken the unwanted part of the projection and thus remove the typical rectangular screen image. That was acheived by getting the shop owners to photograph the cut-out window and email it to me, then I turned it into a silhouette in Photoshop. I have decided that this Shape-masking idea is a welcome change from the goddamn rectanglular frame. If I can’t get a Video image to fill up a whole wall, I will make the edge more interesting at least.
Note how one layer of the video content has strayed from the mask (The edge of a spinning wheel at the top)… I included this error just to highlight the Masking edge.. Click the frame into full screen. You will see how close the mask edge matched up with the leaf edges in the screen window. This was amazing considering that the camera used to photograph the screen window was a typical snapshot camera with a wide angle lens. It was also done fairly closely and not 100% perpendicular either… I used bulging and trapezoidal distortion in Resolume to correct any camera distortions.
The footage is meant to showcase the imagery in context rather than my mixology. As I was alone doing this documentation, I couldn’t VJ whilst filming.