Category: Kinetic Light

Project Name: One Day

Group Member: Chen Xiong, Yang Gao, Ying

Progress: To begin with, we are quite struggling with the use of DMX light. It is designed for the stage, and therefore it’s hard to imagine a composition with these. Then we thought about music. Since it’s designed for stage, we would just use it for the stage. We decide to choose the theme song from the movie One Day. The idea is that the music has to have a story behind, therefore we could control the light according to the movie. We picked the song, which was used in a scene when the female and male protagonists were running by the sea. It almost immediately came to our mind that each of us would take in charge of one of the DMX lights. Two lights are for the protagonists, and one for the background setting. Then ideas extend a little bit here. There’s a famous Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet called Liang Zhu, where the protagonists Liang Shanbo and Zhu Ying Tai actually transformed into butterflies after they were separated, and they committed suicide.

So we decide to use both of the metaphors. It took us some time to figure out how to gather the DMX lights into smaller light spots, and how to change the light spots. We test with different materials and ended up with cardboard. We practiced for a lot of times to make sure we do understand the function of the cardboard hoes, and how that affects the light spots. We used contrast colors for the protagonists (light spots). Ying and I were responsible for the protagonists, and Yang is responsible for the background color. If we had more time, we would compose the background better to fit with the protagonists, cause, for now, the background sometimes is too bright to make the protagonists invisible. Here’s the presentation of our work:

Partner: Louis, Candy

After the in-class test of DMX light, we realized that compared to other led light, the span of DMX light is larger and thus is more likely to create a environmental effect. So we decided to imitate Aurora in nature. 

Since the Aurora we encountered before are some documentary videos online , and from the documentary videos/photos, we found the Aurora is usually in a green tone gradually change to other colors. So we found some images online as reference and took the colors from them, in this case, they are pink. blue, green, and yellow. 

The composition mainly consists of gradual fading and changing of colors. The color will first show as green, and add gradually adds on the color of blue, pink, and yellow. At first we tried to place some gauze in front of the lights to show the flow and texture of Aurora. However, we found out the outcome was not very natural: we need to wave the cloth by ourselves and get out shadow into the scene. 

So instead of using we decided to focus on the light and making the light flowing through programming. We approached it by set the appearing time for each color slightly different so that the visual can be more natural and creates the effect of lights moving around. We also found a background music to add on the effect.

The ultimate outcome is very satisfying, we really like the quite and relaxing feeling our composition created. We, however, need to consider the color for carefully as we got feedbacks like the pink in the light is a little bit distracting.