Looking Within

Setting: Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville, PA

Miyazaki Week

Turning the notion of "spectatorship" on its head, we captured live footage of the audience watching a film, and projected this content, altered with animations and effects, onto the wall of a building directly opposite the theatre. In this way, the spectators became the subjects. 

Initial ideas and concepts of our project included creating an "invisible building" through projection done on all sides of the building, creating a "portal" that would allow people passing by the building to experience something they don't physically exist within, modifying shapes of shadows using interactive projection, and creating "giant monsters" in an environment that would intrigue, mystify, and revive a sense of exploration and imagination within viewers. 

After several brainstorming exercises, we decided to create a projection on the back the theatre that would use face recognition software and would layer animations and effects on top of footage taken of the audience watching a particular film. We decided it would make the most sense to abstract this footage and focus on the light changes during the film screening. 

We made several trips to the theatre prior to installing our final projection. We tested the webcam with different films to see how light and animation versus real people films affected our recording output and our ability to see people in the theatre. 

In order to better understand the physical layout of the space and how the power and connections would be made we created a physical flow diagram. 

Our webcam, the Logitech C615 webcam, was not able to utilize the low light in the movie theatre (once a movie was playing) to be able to recognize faces, so we decided to work with the available light and hue contrast from the live feed, and layer animations and effects on top of them. Some of our sketches and renderings for these animations can be found below. 

After creating our creatures we transferred them into After Effects and then exported them as PNG sequences that we planned to put into our code as a loop. 

After feedback from our first crit on the project, we decided to move in a simpler direction and overlay separate animation files with the footage from the live feed streaming of the theater webcam. Images from our final set up of the projection are shown below.