Sparrow Song | Drawing with Light

In January I was a contributing digital artist to a production called Sparrow Song. The production focused on the creation of an interactive art-installation / theatrical environment. The production begins with a short performance where audience members are introduced to various interactive elements in the playing space. After the short "play" the audience is invited to explore and play in the art-installation themselves. 

Mad-Mapper is a very powerful tool for quickly mapping spaces, but it's not always the best tool for theatrical play-back. For theatrical productions artists start by creating a series of masks as tools to isolate or highlight scenic elements with projector light. These masks are in many ways analogous to mattes used in photography or video editing. In order to isolate media in the space, each element that had a unique mediated element required its own mask. Further, each projector out-put also needed to be masked in order to avoid spill or bleed between projectors.

One of the effects that I've used in two productions now is where lines appear to draw-in over time in a video. This effect is fairly easy to generate in After Effects, and I wanted to take a quick moment to detail how it actually works. This process can start many ways. For Sparrow song it started by connecting a laptop directly to the projectors being used, and using photoshop to map light directly onto the set. You can see in the photo to the right that each surface that's intended to be a building has some kind of drawn on look. In photoshop each of these buildings exists as an independent layer. This makes it easy to isolate effects or changes to individual buildings in the animation process.

Here's a quick tutorial about how I animated the layers to create the desired effect:

Now that I've done this several times it finally feels like a fairly straightforward process - even if it can be a rather time consuming one.

Here's an example of what the rendered video looks like to the playback system.

Sparrow Song | SL Chalk Drawings from Matthew Ragan on Vimeo.

Making the asset itself is only a part of the process. After you have a video rendered, the next step is to integrate that into your playback system so that it can be controlled during a performance. For Sparrow Song, the playback engine was Isadora, made by Troikatronix. Here's a quick video that covers movie playback in this system.

Here's an album of documentation photos from the closing show.

Tools Used

Digital Drawing Input - Wacom intuos4

Mapping and Artwork - Adobe Photoshop

Animation and Color - Adobe After Effects
Photos - Cannon EOS 7D
Photo Processing - Adobe LightRoom 4
Show Control - Troikatronix's Isadora