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Efflorescence
Directors and cinematorgraphers often work with carefully crafted colour palettes in the movies they make. Take the warm tints of a Woody Allen movie, or Stan Kubricks love for the colour red.
Unfortunately, this effort often goes unnoticed by the untrained eye. With Efflorescence we wanted to bring back people’s attention to the craft of filmmaking. Create an installation that allowed people to view movies through a different lens. Creating a form of synesthesia, pairing two senses that are usually seperate.
As per brief of the three-day “introduction to programming” course at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, our team of Luca, Monika and Daan were assigned to program with a sound library in Processing. All of us interested in film, we thought it would be nice if the project should not only be audible, but also very visual.
When we set out to design a way to let people create a sound for a movie in a digital program, we asked ourselves: why not let the movie make its own soundtrack? How might we design something around that idea?
Inspired by 16-step sequencer synthesizers, we divided the screen up in 16 vertical parts to sequence through with our program. The average colours of those parts would create the sound: the hue determines the base scale, the saturation measures the pitch and the brightness establishes the volume at which it’s being played.
As a final touch, we decided that — although this was part of a programming class — such an installation has no place on a computer screen. It needs to be experienced fully. It needs to captivate our visitors. This is when we set up a physical 3d-model and used a projector to map our sequence on it, with both sounds and colours.
We led the visitors in a dark room with a comfortable couch to lay back and experience our installation. Sometimes showing the actual movie and colours being analysed, sometimes just creating a short moment of zen by allowing them to experience the installation.
Unfortunately, this effort often goes unnoticed by the untrained eye. With Efflorescence we wanted to bring back people’s attention to the craft of filmmaking. Create an installation that allowed people to view movies through a different lens. Creating a form of synesthesia, pairing two senses that are usually seperate.
As per brief of the three-day “introduction to programming” course at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, our team of Luca, Monika and Daan were assigned to program with a sound library in Processing. All of us interested in film, we thought it would be nice if the project should not only be audible, but also very visual.
When we set out to design a way to let people create a sound for a movie in a digital program, we asked ourselves: why not let the movie make its own soundtrack? How might we design something around that idea?
Inspired by 16-step sequencer synthesizers, we divided the screen up in 16 vertical parts to sequence through with our program. The average colours of those parts would create the sound: the hue determines the base scale, the saturation measures the pitch and the brightness establishes the volume at which it’s being played.
As a final touch, we decided that — although this was part of a programming class — such an installation has no place on a computer screen. It needs to be experienced fully. It needs to captivate our visitors. This is when we set up a physical 3d-model and used a projector to map our sequence on it, with both sounds and colours.
We led the visitors in a dark room with a comfortable couch to lay back and experience our installation. Sometimes showing the actual movie and colours being analysed, sometimes just creating a short moment of zen by allowing them to experience the installation.
