Week 7

The inspiration for the concept to try and create an immersive experience came from the work of artists, Refik Anadol and Jesse Woolston, whom each create multimedia artwork that are simulations of the natural world and current human experiences which I found very striking and the abstract shapes pushed us to think beyond the obvious.

I began the process for the projection mapping with the concept of doing a walkthrough animation of Fenchurch Street in a stylized contemporary way by designing a Sketchup Model that was loosely based on the satellite street view of Fenchurch street.

Jesse Woolston

We wanted to maintain the layout of a portion of the area and stylizing the look of the buildings by modelling them in a post apocalyptic futuristic way as the first part of the process. The second phase of this was importing the model into Vectorworks which I learned was a CAD software well known in the theatre industry and by lighting specialists. Since Camden was sure of the time this would take I went ahead on this decision as my focus after this was editing it in post on Adobe After Effects as we wanted to give the sequence and end of the world flood feel.

The satellite image of Fenchurch Street as the reference to the model

This was indeed an ambitious idea but we wanted to try and accomplish as much as we could given we only had four weeks. I kept references of the street view to give to Camden as she wanted to create the model on Sketchup while I learnt how to use After Effects by experimenting through tutorials on creating a water effect taking the information in a sequence that was used to give movement and reflection.

process of moving an image with the turbulent effect on After Effects during the winter break

the rough sketchup model

experimenting with the camera

The Storyboards were fairly simple and straightforward as the main focus for the three parts of the animation were camera movement and speed. The first part was a simple birds eye view of a still frame watching the water moving into the space. The second part is where it got tricky because it was meant to be a fast moving sequence through the buildings following the water effect which I was still learning on my own to create. The third sequence was another still frame of a street scene half flooded to mirror the world above.