Project Reflection: Light up Poole Event

In my previous blog, i reviewed the Dracula immersive billboard poster which was the biggest hit in their marketing campaign and gained a lot of positive attention for its creativity of bringing something to life in the space. I definitely believe in todays 24/7 media society so everything needs to bold and a statement and immersive experience extremely visual therefore captures audience engagement.

Light Up Poole is a annual festival of telling stories with light through the digital light art after dark that attracts more than 40,000 visitors. The event runs from 20 to 22 February showcasing the work of local, emerging and international artists. (Our installation was done on the 20th February 2020). As part of our unit ‘stories and spaces’ at Bournemouth University we got the opportunity to showcase our prototype for our light-show – this topic is all about telling stories through interesting spaces. From the start i was immediately excited to start within this project as it something i’ve never done before. Its involved learning new softwares like Touch Designer to learn the concept of projection mapping – it also involved how you can tell stories through many existing materials.

I first came across Lightshow’s when i attended the London Lumiere festival in January 2016. i was fascinated by all the artwork and never thought in a million years i would be doing something like that. It was very interactive – me and my friends got stamps every-time you visited a new artwork in London.

WORKING WITH THE SPACE – ‘DOLPHIN SHOPPING CENTRE’

Our initial response to our space in the Dolphin Shopping centre is can project onto ceiling or can project onto 3D objects (cannot project into shops either side. We found out we will be using 3K projectors onto the ceiling (and surroundings) and light levels will be 10% will be ambient light from the shops. The challenges we faced is our space had shops either side so therefore if we weren’t to use the ceiling we would need something to sort of board or 3D Object to project onto. 

WORKING WITH THE THEME

Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been working alongside a group to create an immersive Prototype experience at Light up Poole based on the theme “Spectrum”. First our group researched the demographics of the audience that attended the public event we will be producing art for. Quickly we realised it needed to be “family friendly” so needs to be accessible, provoking, appropriate to a wide audience, challenging but not offensive.

The next thing was to research the word “spectrum”. The literal meaning of spectrum is “different colours including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet seen when light passes through a prism and falls on a surface or when sunlight is affected by drops of water (as in a rainbow) spectrum”. However our group choose to loosely tie in the theme spectrum with philosophical, cultural and political interpretations focusing on issues relating to our society today.

MOODBOARD DESIGNS 

Many ideas were addressed in our brainstorm session but focusing on climate change stood out the most. This is due to its a big topic and we would be reflecting on real life issues surrounding today like the Australian bush fires. We were inspired by Extinction rebellion movement which is a global environmental movement who use non violent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. This piece would also target “family friendly” audiences as children can be educated and the adults can be reminded.

We thought addressing the issue though warning of showing two spectrum of good vs destruction was the way to go. This is because it showed the true devastating affects climate change has done. We called this piece “Rotating Disaster” where the earth i spinning and on one side it shows the ‘healthy’ ‘beautiful’ globe compared to the destruction side which showed the true brutal reality of climate change. Climate change images – tree burning, ice melting etc. As well as showing the 2 extremes in words we wanted to visually show it in colour symbolism. We wanted to show two extremes of colours with red and orange alerting danger and fire and green and blue imply serene of nature/wildlife.  Overall it shows the extreme spectrum of Impact.

Explore Relationship between Objects/Media

In the design of the product we want to create a 3D sphere to act as globe that gives the illusion it is spinning. We decided to use an exercise ball which we will projection map the earth onto. The challenges we faced is not knowing how to suspend the ball if it is hanging, Alternative we went with was hold the exercise ball by placing it on a bin. We decided to place a white bed sheet over the bin to make it more aesthetically pleasing and give more of a illusion it was spinning. In out test session at poole dolphin centre we released our space was near the doors – it was forecasted a windy night – therefore we need to make safety precautions. We ended up taping the weights onto the bottom of the ball to keep safely on the bin. The problems we faced in creating our installation is it was very low – we needed something for the bin to stand on – this will allow the audience to look up at our piece not down. We used the projection stand to add height – then added the bin on top.

Media video material clips Inspo-

The main video material we wanted was a rotating earth moving. – this will be used as our main feature on both sides of the earth. Then on one side we wanted to finds clips that affect the world cause by climate change (ice melting, tress burning, fire, smoke, pollution). We wanted to do this through layering our compositions through adobe after affects by making the layers more translucent. We found most out footage through documentaries and news taking segments of the clips. After finding the footage the main fragment we wanted in focus on was wrapping the earth in fire.

We also wanted to give the impression that time i moving fast and we need to act fast. We decided to use adobe after effects to create a clock animation at the end of our sequence with the words “its not too late”.

After finding all the video footage we wanted to use it was important to gain important facts and statistics about climate change so we researched and placed the facts between each video material – in the hope to shock the audience and to keep them interacted through reading.

Coming together

After gathering together all of it – it was just time to sequence all the fragments all together on adobe premier – then go to touch designer so it can play a repeated loop. We also then drew the sphere we waned to place our video footage onto. These were a few of our test runs. Part of these test runs we visited the shopping centre multiple days of the week to make sure our idea worked with our space.

Event day

This day came by so so quickly but we got there as a group in the end, heres our final project inspired by extinction rebellion and climate change.

Immersive experiences is a strategy that engages consumers and creates real life experience that will be remembered – getting the consumer to experience the brand. Ive learnt through the past 3 weeks immersive experiences are becoming more relevant in todays society – people want something out of the ordinary. Things people cannot view at home.

Overall, this was an amazing experience to see how immersive media experiences can be so effective in telling stories. I hope you enjoyed reading how me and my group conquered this task without knowing any knowledge of projection mapping in just 3 weeks. This was such a great achievement as we got a tonne of amazing feedback from the public. If you have any questions feel free to reply in the comments – i will get back to you as soon as possible.

Keep tuned for more to come,

Lizzie X