So I got this poster freshman year and always liked it because the colors are high contrast and super saturated so depending on the lighting in the room the poster can look different. When I set up some colored LED lights in my room this summer noticed the whole image looked like it was moving when the lights quickly changed from color to color. This is where I got the idea for my project. All three of my concepts are similar revolving around animation of a static image using changing color.
My first idea is to create a poster similar to Carnovskys work using overlapping RGB colors and use lights that cycle through RGB to animate it. each frame would be red, green or blue and this would allow me to create three frame loops. I’m thinking I would start simple and make a ball bouncing or a person walking.
If I can’t get the result I want using just three frames my backup plan is to use EL wire to outline the shapes I want to animate and use an Arduino to control which parts light up in order. This would allow me to create longer loops because the number of frames per loop is under my control. If I end up going with this plan I would do something with more motion like a greyhound/cheetah running.
What do you think will be the most difficult challenge to overcome with this project?
Maybe the most difficult aspect of your project for you would be making your idea into a poster that you could hang. Would it be a 3D piece or more of a 2D piece where changing the light in the room changes the picture? I think either way would be really cool.
I think that a difficult part of this project will be to have the correct things showing at the correct time, I think that might be difficult at first but you will need to experiment and see what color on the canvas works the best with a specific light.
I think that the biggest challenge will be coordinating the colors to create different images (if that is what you are going for) I think that a lot of planning would have to go into determining which aspects of the design will be the correct color.
I agree that the timing of everything is probably the hardest part, especially if you have it based on using different colors. If you can focus the LED’s clearly enough you might be able to have a series of different poses/pictures in the same color but not see them all at the same time.
I think one of the hardest parts is finding a fluid animation using just 3 frames. I know you mentioned that colors that arent red/green/blue wont mask out perfectly, I wonder if you used secondary colors between the correct colors in the animation sequence if that would still look okay and provide you with more frames. For example, having a purple frame between the red and blue frames, Im not sure if the adjacent frames would be faint enough or still be too prominent.
I think a limitation is definitely the amount of frames that you can work with. If you stick with the poster concept, you could possible have a series of posters where the animation moves among the poster? You could also try a flipbook concept and see if that could give you more frames.