Continuing the work done in Bocote, I created this unofficial music video for LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great using a very old stop motion animation technique called strata-cut.
To create this film, I shaved off the ends of heavily figured woods at roughly 24 cuts per inch and then photographed them. The 1,200+ still images where then cropped, tiled and cropped again before animating in adobe premier pro. Here are some before and after stills.
Below are process images to give you an idea of my setup.
Coming off the success of The Imaginarium, we founded Imaginary Labs to conduct research at the intersection of experimental multimedia environments and human creativity. We were awarded lab space in the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory End Station III, the terminus of the original Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
The Imaginarium is now rebuilt, complete with HVAC "borrowed" from the nearby CRAY supercomputer. The Imaginarium will once again become an integral part of ME101 Visual Thinking, a cornerstone of the Undergraduate Design Program.
The original Imaginarium used a projection system located beneath the floor that projected upwards through a fluid filled sphere. We built our first prototype to utilize the same system. However, it turned out that a projector mounted at the top of the dome pointed down onto a hemispherical mirror worked much, much better. Here's an early prototype of that, set to one of my stop motion music videos.
Before relocation to a high school in Los Angeles in 2012, the Imaginarium was used as an ad hoc work space, classroom and experimental multi-media gallery. Check out a few examples below.
This is a stop motion animation (really) for Flying Lotus' "Do The Astral Plane" using a laser cut acrylic color mixing toyI created.
Every element, action and video effect corresponds to a particular sample within the song and syncopated to the underlying beat structure. The individual acrylic elements were photographed independently using multiple layers to create color combinations and then animated together in Adobe Premier Pro.
As featured on cult fixed gear forum fixed.gr.
This was my first stop motion short that experiments with the animation of decidedly inanimate objects. At the time of this post, I had just begun the restoration of a 1960s British track frame, so bicycle parts were on my mind...
Although I chose a bike chain because of its highly articulated joints, it was precisely this degree of freedom that made it incredibly difficult to control. If you ever try something like this, I suggest using a flexible magnetic sheet underneath the parts to restrict their motion for greater control.
A stop motion animation first.
Employing a very old animation technique called strata cut, I created this 30-second short film prototype by sequentially cutting a piece of bocote wood in fine increments and taking a very high resolution still frame of the specially-treated end grain. I then used adobe premiere pro create this short from the 220 individual still frames.
This is my first animated short film, created from a 140-page hand-drawn flip book. The story details the existential dilemma of a pencil and its search for meaning in a world of coffee cups.
The updated version of these light sculptures took off on fab.com in May 2012. You can learn more and buy them at betablocs.com.
Reclaimed Architectural Glass Block + Electroluminescent Wire + Electronic Controls
This is one of my favorite projects, created during Bill Burnett's Formgiving class for the Illuminating Object assignment. Modular Beta Blocs were created from reclaimed architectural glass block and electroluminescent wire that plug into a purpose-designed control box. They are dimmable and can be programmed to a respond in various ways to a wide range of external stimuli including ambient light, sound, touch, temperature, humidity, proximity, etc.
This animated gif shows how a new version responding to sound.
The video below shows the very first prototype responding initially to the sound of bubble wrap popping, then to the vibration caused by me shaking it vigorously.
From a design perspective, I chose to explore the physical principle of Brownian Motion, or the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas. The 25' - 40' of EL wire are fed carefully into a painstakingly drilled hole in each block. The path of the EL wire is primarily a function of the block's internal volume and features, enabled by only minor aesthetic input during the assembly process.
