Continuing with the Unit X project, my group and I have met up on multiple occasions to discuss and explore our ideas. We went to the Museum of Science and Industry to have a look at their underground exhibit in the old sewers, however upon arrival; we learnt that the exhibition had closed a few months prior after being there for many years. Following this minor setback, we decided to opt for looking at the slightly more rundown areas of Manchester.
One of the photographers shown us work by the photographer Alexey Titarenko who uses long exposures to create a ghosted effect with the image. We started to explore this idea through film, since the brief asked for a depiction of movement, but rather than actually shooting with long exposures, we would create the ghosted effect in Post-Production. This led to the switch from projection mapping onto an installation, to projecting onto a wall as we were not sure how to wrap the ghosts around an object effectively and none of our group members had any real experience in creating a sculpture/installation to project onto.
We came to the idea of rather than projecting an entire image onto a wall, we would print out a still background and project the moving ghosts on top of it as if the ghosts were moving within the environment. We eventually realised however, that when white light is projected onto the image, rather than actually appearing white, it would simply light the image up in that area. To remedy this we opted to place our image on a television monitor instead. To keep the size of the image that we wanted, we have chosen to feature only a section of the image on the screen and a have a larger printed image surrounding it to help extend our environment.
As the background was going to be still, this was taken by the photographers who went around Manchester to find abandoned looking or derelict places that would have features we could incorporate into the ghosts movement. For instance, they had to make sure that a wall would be the focus of the shot, yet still have enough of the floor for the ghosts to appear to move around in a 3D space. The filmmakers would then go about filming the actual footage of the ghosts walking across the screen, which would then be given to the animators to edit. To go about the filming we all pitched in to be the walking ‘ghosts’ whilst the film makers directed us in how to walk across the screen such as if they wanted us to walk sadly or to run across the screen. We went to film it in front of a dark background with the ‘ghosts’ dressed in lighter colours to help us stand out from the background. As the camera would be in a locked position, a Difference Matte was then used to separate the ‘ghosts’ from the background by mating out the background from a still image of the background. The keying on the Difference Matte was done badly to miss parts of the ghost off to seem more spiritual; the brightness is upped to create a white outline, and a Gaussian blur is placed onto the ghost so that it glows and finally the ghost is made to be translucent by decreasing the opacity of the object. Additionally the ghost then had to be positioned on the image as if the ghost was actually moving around in the environment of the photograph which was done key framing movement at certain points, as well as making the ghost appear as if they are walking through walls.
For our exhibition we have been told we will receive a 47” screen for our moving image which we will then get the exact measurements for and print of our entire background image to the correct scale and cut out the hole where the screen will go and present it around the screen as if it’s one whole image.
Even though my group have gone through a long process to get to this finalised idea I am confident in our ability to pull it off as we work together as a group.
