Tuesday 7 July 2009

Ciao Tutti!
In the process of creating this blog, I asked the group "What do you guys think a good title would be?" The answer I received was "I dunno, something really cool." And so it was written...

For this first project we were given a very loose set of guidelines (paraphrased from lectures):

1. Use these new 3M projectors we bought
2. Somehow deal with the subject of the famous Sienese Palio
3. Make something cool!

We've got the first two down, and we've struggled with the third one a bit, but I'm thinking the end result is going to be right in line with the title of our blog.

At first we threw around some basic ideas of how we could use this medium to interact with the Sienese people and architecture. Some of our initial ideas were projecting faces onto statues, image distortion with glasses and bottles or possibly a kaleidoscope, a snaking image feedback loop, and projecting onto a flag. After some concentrated evaluation, we decided that a simple and easy, but clever way to go about it would be to create our own flag to parade around the town and project images of intense expressions, flags, and horses that we would collect from the Palio. We even thought it would be cool to sing our own version of the song that each contrada belts out as the march the streets.

Come Palio day we all ventured out into the Piazza di Campo several hours early and set ourselves up to capture the event. I focused mostly on capturing footage of peoples faces, Brian captured flags and the procession, Andrew got some nice footage of the race and images of people, Taylor took some lovely photos as well, and Emilee managed to capture some beautiful audio of the crowd and the songs of the locals.

Our only problem at this point was figuring out how we were going to piece the massive puzzle of media we had collected into a coherent and interesting project. Several of us met Sunday night as we all felt that we did not yet have a solid direction to work towards. Not only that, but we had some dissagreement within the group as to wether or not singing during the performance would offend the locals, and if so whether or not we should do it anyway. We were so uncertain at this point, in fact, that we almost tried to reinvent our project entirely. Some of the ideas we threw around were isolating images of people through desaturation and alphachannels, projecting onto a three-pane surface (Something that was experimented with during our first live performance, the one documented on the main Site Siena page), and keeping the flag stationary. Luckily, the final decision (or most final decision we've come to so far) incorporates the original idea of the flag procession.

As of now we are working on creating a patchwork of images and video of people and their expressions isolated out with blank alphachannels so as to construct our own living crowd from a variety of sources. Brian and I are working on isolating video people, while Andrew and Taylor are working on photos, and Emilee is sketching people based on these images. We intend to walk around the town carrying a flag and projecting onto it as in our first idea, and we will probably use some of the audio that Emilee collected as an audio backdrop to set the mood. I'm really excited to see how it finally all plays out!

With love and a cone of delicious lemon gelato,
~Tyler

No comments:

Post a Comment