Title
myth
Project Abstract
our project myth is a technology-based shadow puppet live performance which tells a story of a King overcomes the devil in his heart. Accompanied by the app called max, we explore different possibility with colors, lights and effects in addition to the traditional shadow puppet performance.
Project Description
This project is a narrative about a king who was stuck by different rumors and he decided to went on a journey to kill the devil. At the end we left an open ending for not knowing whether the king killed the devil or not. The concept behind the project is: we want to convey the message that try to look straightly at difficulties and try to coexist with them. Because there’s always hard times in life that you cannot kill them all at once. Learn to not avoid them and not to be controlled by others words. So the king represent any one of us and the devil represents the difficulties we encountered. Our inspiration come from the dementors, a devil character from Harry Potter series.
Perspective and Context
we experimented our performance with different possibilities of colors and lighting, which I think is the core of the Lumia performance. But most of Thomas Wilfred’s work is abstract, we are creating a concrete narrative and explore how the light show performance could enhance the experience of shadow puppet.
Development & Technical Implementation
At first we want to create the scene like this:
（screenshots from Harry Potter movie)
But it turns out very hard to achieve the first effect because we do not have real actors for this performance. The delay and slide effect is not so ideal when applying to the human shaped paper. For the second effect, it’s also hard to achieve because first we do not have enough people for performance, second, of we use a the light source come from back by the torch, the performer’s arms and hands can be easily seen.
after considering this, we decided to change or style:
（screenshot from Harry Potter movie)
This is quite doable for us: we need different layers of shadows. For some of the characters, we need to include the real thing in the performance, but for the others, it’s only shadows appear on the screen. However, the question with this kind of style is that it does not make the best use of Max.
Our group started as creating different scenes. We first decided there would be three main scenes: the first one: the king is bothered by rumors around him. The second: he decided to go on a journey to find the devil. The third scene: the king fighting with the devil. We made the assets together: we use black paper cards to cut the tree shapes and the human shape. We uses a different kind of paper, similar to the texture of tissue to make the shape of devil. And we used little pieces of papers with shapes of bats to indicate rumors around the king.
Then we divided up our work and I took the responsibility of making video effects. I add rotate, delay and slide effect to the first scene which the king was bothered by the rumors and cannot be himself. In scene two, I add color changes to indicates the long hard adventure to of finding the devil. For the last scene, I set the tone darker and when the conflict happens, the screen starts blinking.
The code: :https://gist.github.com/JiayanLiu27/e911824cb8eca4074b1b18075bdf2461
https://gist.github.com/TheaSang/85b97f92a144c0b42f15dd8ecacd2541
Performance
I don’t no whether the performance went well or not because the image on the small television screen we looked at when performing seems to be very different than the one on big screen that our audience looked at. Because I was the one to control video effects, so when I looked at both screens when performing, I sometimes confused about how the effect would be. Was it too dark? or was the contrast not enough? I also took the responsibility to move the torch light, so it was hard for me to concentrate on both. another problem is that Max has a lot of uncertainties. I reopened it, and it became a totally new world. The video effects is not the one we did in rehearsal.
Conclusion
I think we didn’t do enough research on Lumia performance to figure out what’s the best material and the best way to perform. After seeing performances from our classmates, I think liquid is really a good material for Lumia performance and the shadow puppet is not so ideal. Also, it’s kind of difficult when you tried to tell a story compared to just focus on the transformations of abstract shapes. The first challenge is the audio: when we want to add an extra dialog, we need to make sure that it is able to be heard. The challenge is the video: if we go too crazy about the effects, the figures might be hard to recognize. So my biggest take away from this is it’s better to create an abstract film with Lumia.