Implosion of Light 0

So, I've been working on this series for a couple years now.  I'm calling it "The Implosion of Light an Sound".  I thought of that title while I was on a minor shoomie trip a couple years ago and had a crazy vision of CG cube based pixelated images.

I had a residency in Florence Italy and was very moved by these mosaics there.  Particularly the one's in Revenna on the East Coast below Venice.  It contains some of the oldest and "most perfect" mosaics (according to some historians) and rightfully so.

I was particularly moved by the abstract ones and after some weeks of contemplation I decided that I wanted to take that idea and use my skills as an animator and a 3D artist to create a new type of mosaic.

At first I just wanted to make a simple animation using just cubes and animating to music (because I feel more free to be abstract, but audiences will accept it).  I knew I needed to start off with on my own cause it would be a little difficult to explain to someone without an actual example AND it was extremely important to get a "pipeline" (or workflow) working because it would be pretty intense and I wanted to make it as easy as possible.

I was also pretty passionate about making it, what I'm calling, a "Virtual Sculpture".  I started looking into holographic technology to see if I could create animated holograms.  At the moment that technology is not quite ready for complicated animation.  So, I decided to go with making phantograms.

A Phantogram is basically a hologram, but it can only be viewed from a specific angle.  It needs to be stereoscopic 3D (so usually wearing glasses) and it's a forced perspective image meaning you need to look at it at a 45 degree angle to see it in a proper form.  So, if you create a phantogram it appears that the image is popping out of the monitor, table or floor.

It took some time, but I finally organized a pipeline and then I spent the next two months or so animating and creating my "prototype".  And this is what I came up with.