notes from the bigfug

Rather tired this evening. Was up in London yesterday meeting with Martin, and Miriam from K&C council to discuss another projection project for this years InTRANSIT festival (of which the Holland Park haunted walk was a feature of last years). It’s a honour and pleasure to be asked to take part again, and we’ve got something completely different planned, both in context and location.

Long day today hacking long MySQL search queries together. Got there eventually but it’s actually been a while since I’ve had to do some tricky SQL and found myself being a bit rusty! The shame…

Despite all that I rallied against the urge to have a quiet evening and got on with filming the first demonstration of PatchBox v2 in action. To keep everything as simple as possible I set up in the front room of my flat and proceeded to decorate the fireplace:

Here’s a frame where I’ve drawn out ten screens. Originally I wanted to really get into detail and do around twice that number (using some as an example of masking out certain areas) and doing the thin edges, but I decided to keep it simple.

There’s one large screen covering the wall and smaller ones for each panel of the fireplace, a few in the grate, and a cheeky one on the front of the speaker.

Took a little less than ten minutes to set those up. I’ve found it’s good practice to name each one as I go along and then lock it so I don’t accidentally get confused with the screen handles (you can just about see them on the edges of the ledge screen, which is currently highlighted).

I also didn’t get much into masking. There is a single mask applied to the top of the grate to match the half circle shape, but that’s it.

So, applying some video we get:

This! I thought about creating some content specifically for the demo but time is so short these days that I decided against it to enable me to get this out of the door.

There is a nice bit of fire in the fireplace, though!

Again I didn’t get into the many advanced blending and masking options available, let alone using shaders! As you can probably tell, it’s already quite complicated enough!

I do demonstrate fading out of groups of screens, which gives a nice transition effect, but the other fun stuff will have to wait for another demo!

After cutting it down, and speeding up the screen drawing part, it’s already about thirteen minutes long, which is more than I’d hoped: was aiming for ten tops with an introduction. Ah well, will have to do some judicious editing, however I’m keen to show the real-time nature of its operation, so we’ll see how we go.

Unfortunately there’s no time to work on it now until the weekend. Off to see "No Country For Old Men", the Coen’s latest tomorrow night…

Tags: PatchBox