Final Piece!

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Luckily, a friend had a dolls house I could borrow and adapt for what I needed in the exam. It has a hand built, and has aged with disuse, so suits the aesthetic already of a 'haunted' or slightly eerie feel. 


I measured the boxes or rooms next, as I needed to calculate what size perspex would fit into the units. This required some pythagorus - maths I hadn't used for several years! The panels would fit in the boxes at varying angles so that all light is reflected back to the viewer.

 To add to the feeling of the piece I wanted to think about how it would be displayed. We have small portable LED projectors and a dark room at school, and considering the limited brightness of the projection, this would be the perfect place for it to go. The projector would be beneath the dolls house, pointing up at it. The lightly frosted panels of glass then would reflect light from inside the house back and slightly upwards at an angle towards the viewer, who would be behind a curtain with a small hole in it to look through - hiding the projector and anything unneeded below the angle of the curtain.


This way, the dolls house will almost float in front of the viewer, with the ghostly images floating inside each room. Each room will play out one or two of the sins I photographed earlier, but on a slightly larger scale… there will be full body movements and performances, not just close ups, as the actors will have whole 'rooms' to move about in in the dolls house. This makes it more of a commentary on the sins, as the audience is looking in on a domestic, miniature scene, observing the sins we all commit. 

I quickly drafted a story of sorts to portray the six sins I was going to place into my narrative (I decided to exclude the seventh, lust, as my acts were my family members) and worked out how they would progress through the house.

 A few days later, over the weekend, I set about filming the footage I needed for in the exam. I ensured my actors were expressive, and moved in an unnatural way to compliment the unnerving feel I was trying to achieve, hence things like how they walked were altered.

 This is an example of the last scene I filmed, scene 5:



For the footage to appear transparent, a lot of work had to be done - this was by far the most time-intensive portion of the project. First I had to create what is called a luma matte, a black and white version of the footage that is hand traced (which some help from the computer) to create a map of where I would like transparency to appear. The purple line is where I am tracing the figures using a tool called the 'rotobrush' - advancing frame by frame and correcting the trace until it has all been separated from the background.


Once this trace was finalised, I had to fill the resulting outline with white and export it for use in the main composition. This generated the following clip, where black will be transparent, white will be preserved:




Once this has been created, by painstakingly tracing around all of the bits of the image I want to remain behind, then it can be used in After Effects to remove the background where video is black in the luma matte, leaving me with this:



This process was repeated with every single video clip, until all of the footage had been removed from it's background - an arduous process, but necessary for what I had in mind! These various clips were then arranged and timed to play at different rates, and scaled so that when projected they were the correct size. This was mostly a process of trial and error, testing every time I changed anything to make sure it fitted properly. 

With all the movement of the projector in between trials, I created this alignment tab to be projected so I could line up the image correctly, roughly lining up with the walls of the bottom two floors of the dolls house I would be projecting onto: 


With this finished, I began work on the intro section, which had to match the slightly creepy aesthetic I wanted the final installation to have. I drafted several ideas before arriving on a scratchy, very angular look. As I already had a classic tv reel countdown to begin the film, I wanted to preserve the film projector feel, with the organic movement it brings. 


To capture this, I drew out the text three times each on paper, scanned it in, isolated the text from the paper in Photoshop, and flicked between them several times a second so that although they were visually similar, they also jumped about and slightly altered with each frame.


In After Effects, I then looped the composition, so that it jitters for as long as I need, not just through three times. I documented this with screenshots:

Import

Isolate text

Bring layers into comp

Cascade layers for 2 frames each 

 Pre-Comp
Time-Remap the Pre-Comp

Add the expression: Loop out ("cycle") 0 
Alter the comp settings and check loop!


In the final film, as I am projecting onto black, I inverted the text colour to be white so it would show up better. The cross underneath sins was also coloured red so that it stood out more effectively. My final intro sequence looked like this, and is projected at the start of the installation playthrough: 


Finally, I repeated this process to add text accompanying every sin in the installation, so that the audience was in no doubt when they occurred, and could see how readily they occurred during a relatively banal exchange between a few characters. 


Displaying the dolls house was the final stage, and consisted mainly of placing some of the dolls house furniture I had acquired within the rooms, and using a hot glue gun to secure in place the perspex sheets I cut by hand to fit into the three bays of the house I would be using. I also cleaned it up slightly, removing any modern stickers or blemishes but preserving the mould and discolouration of the house as I thought it added to the atmosphere I was trying to create. 




In the style of the old mutoscope ('What the Butler Saw' slot machines) I decided to have a peephole in a sheet to spy through at what happened in the house, almost as if you were looking in on a real family behind the curtain shrouding the exhibit. The walls and sides were lined with black card, and the projector shrouded from view below the peephole so it was not necessarily clear where the moving images walking around the dolls house were coming from. All of this was intended to add an element of intrigue and 'magic' to the viewing, and I do feel I succeeded in this - many people were surprised on first viewing the installation when the dolls house came to life. 


The pico projector I used was easily portable and adjustable, but relatively dark an image at only 30 lumens - most normal projectors for work like this operate at closer to 2000 lumens for projection onto real buildings, but as I could  control the light level in the room, this was more than enough power. 


As the final installation will be removed after some time as it occupies an important space in the department, I have included a video recording of it in action here too, in case it cannot be seen in the flesh. Bear in mind the issues with darkness for a DSLR camera though and the relatively strong dynamic range and image noise issues before judging too harshly!