Further Research

I have done further research into the urban artist Swoon, who is an influence for the wallpaper cutouts I have done for each season. Since the colour painting was a disaster, I researched further to see what the possibilities are for the cutouts.

There are two ways in which I can adapt a style to my cutouts:

1) Urban Artist Swoon technique:

The above image is a paper cutout combined with additional paper with colour and detail. The cutout appears to be a large orb of light emanating from a young woman. The girl's eyes are innocent and tender, nervous and unsure, looking up from her traditional quincinera attire symbolising her recent initiation into womanhood and an age of coming.

(information researched from google)

Here is a close up of the detailed area:

As I have large cutouts, I can use this technique and add detail and colour to some of the areas. Rather than doing the whole wall, just having a section on each wall will add a focus point to the walls and I would not need to add colour to the rest.

2) Slash - Pencil Under the Knife:

Slash is an exhibition to artists who do more than put pencil to paper. The show displayed at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York features a range of new work by using paper.

These two are the most that appeal to my project.

The one of the right is by Andreas Kock's site-specific explosion of black paper, 2009 and the one of the left is Eddy by Mia Pearlman, 2008.

With this technique I can layer more cutouts and add them to the ones already on the walls and create a 3D effect.

Stage One of Special Study is Complete!

The hand-built turntable is a Success! Over the Easter break, I tested the turntable to see if it was still working successfully and every time I tested it, it was working GREAT! Which was a relief.

The photograph below shows how the whole thing looks:

Below is a video of the turntable working successfully with the projector on top:

As you can see from the video that the turntable can hold the weight of the projector and is running smoothly.

Projector Test

This is a photograph that shows how the projection would look at the location:

The projector was placed in the middle of room and that photograph shows the maximum size of the projecting.

This means that I cannot animate anywhere else around the projector. But as I have built a turntable myself, I am able to project from left to right so the only areas I will not be able to project are the top and bottom. So when I add detail to the cutouts, I can focus more on these areas.

Colour Disaster

I started painting the cutouts on the spring wall. As I was about half way and I didn't like the look of it so stopped. I had thought that by adding colour, the cutouts would like better. However, the colour has degraded the whole piece.

Here are two photographs that back up my above statement.

As you can see that the photograph without colour looks much more bolder and better than the one with the colour. I simply just could not carry on painting, therefore I packed up and left.

When revisiting the location, I got the feeling that this is something that you can see in a Nursery and therefore does not work with what I am wanting to achieve. I want the piece to look Urban, rather than 'kiddish' therefore I have decided not to add colour and leave the cutouts as they are. But first, I have got to rip down the cutouts I have painted and make them again.

Colour Experiments

Before applying the paint to the walls, I first did a few colour experiments with the paints that I had purchased.

Here are a few photographs of the colour experiments:

Black:

Blue:

Brown:

Red:

Spring Green:

White:

Yellow:

By doing the colour experiments I can use them as colour templates when painting the walls. For example, if I would like a particular colour from any of the above photographs I can just look at the colour template and know what colours I used to re-create the same colour.

Winter Wall Complete

I have completed the last wall, Winter. The photograph below shows the complete wall.

The back wall on the right side of the photograph was also supposed to be part of winter. However, there is a hole in the floor and is quite dangerous. Whilst doing the Spring wall I did place that board over it, however it is still dangerous, therefore for health and safety reasons I choose not to use that wall.

These next set of photographs are of the other walls completed:

Spring:

Summer:

Autumn:

Now that I have completed the cutout process and am happy with the way it looks, I will start adding colour to it.

Summary of walls

So far, I have completed the Spring, Summer and Autumn walls. When I'm at the location and looking at the walls, you can tell that they are landscapes and can make out what they are, however I believe that colour is important to specify each wall differently and the colours will also emphasise the seasons.

For example:

>> Spring: greens and browns

>> Summer: bright green and strong blues

>> Autumn: oranges , brown and reds

>> Winter: white, faint green and blues.

So hopefully, once I have added colour to the wallpaper cutouts, the walls should look much better.

Autumn Wall Sketch & Progress

This is the sketch plan for the Autumn Wall. This wall has no windows or boxes, however it is a just a stud-wall therefore it has plasterboards on it rather than bricks like the rest of the walls.

For this wall, I decided to create a landscape view. The tree on the left is continued from the summer wall tree, however it will be an autumn tree instead.

The photograph below shows the top bit of the tree of the Autumn wall.

The photograph below is a close-up image of the river that will be on the Autumn wall. Rather than just having it blank, I decided to cut out streaks that would represent slight waves in the river.

This is how the Autumn wall looks at the moment. I still have to work on the top right side to complete the landscape look.

Summer Wall Sketch & Progress

This is a brief sketch of how the summer wall would look like. I don't have a lot of space on the wall to work with as there are two windows on the wall. But the idea for the summer wall is mainly based on the activities that are taken place during summer. These activities will be animated onto the wall at different loops. The activities will be rock-climbing, canoeing, sky-diving, camping, etc. Therefore in order for these activities to take place, I choose to create a waterfall landscape which would be a site to visit during summer.

This is what I have done so far for the summer wall. I still have some more to add to it. But this is generally what I have got completed so far.

I just need to add the waterfall and the rocks on either side and then this wall is complete.

This is a quick video preview of the summer wall under construction:

Once the wall is completed I will complete this video.

Spring Wall Progress

I have been working on the wallpaper cutouts for the Spring Wall over the last few weeks as a starter whilst working on the turntable. Now that the first stage of the turntable is complete, I have managed to complete the cutouts for the Spring Wall.

Here are a few photographs taken during the cutout process:

Rather than cutting out the wallpaper cutouts at the location, I decided to cut them out at home as it takes quite some time and also because it is extremely cold at the location.

This process is quite tricky as I have to get the measurements accurate of the cutouts so they can be pasted onto the walls easily. Therefore, I worked from the measurements I had taken a couple of weeks ago and also used an image of the wall so I had a visual idea of how the cutouts would look when pasted onto the wall.

When I had completed majority of the cutouts, I laid them out in a bigger room to get a visual appearance of the full wall.

Once I was happy with the visual appearance, I took the cutouts to the location and pasted them onto the wall.

Here is a quick preview of the Spring Wall Construction:

I will be using the photographs taken of the Spring Wall Construction for my Final Piece as a stop-frame animation, where the cutouts will slowly appear onto the wall.

Stage One Complete!

The first stage of the Special Study is complete: Building a turntable.

The above video shows the complete turntable in motion. All the wires are soldered onto the strip board permanently and therefore will not disconnect when being moved around.

The next stage of the Special Study is the coding that will instruct the turntable when to rotate, how much degrees to rotate and then to stop.

For now, Stage 1: Construction of Turntable is complete!

Squirrel eating animation

I have added to the squirrel animation, by getting it to stop running and eat an acorn and set off again.

Here is a preview of the animation.

Squirrel Animation

Before I create the full animation of the squirrel, I decided to create a really short animation of the squirrel running across the screen.

Here is the video clip of the animation I have created. To give a sense of visual to the animation, I placed it in-front of wallpaper cutouts were the animation would partially be placed on the wall. I have also added colour too the cutouts as I will be adding colour to the wallpaper cutouts.

I have created another quick short animation of the bird and squirrel together.

NOTE: Ignore the black artefacts left in the first cycle, these are due to Flash CS4 exporting and is a long going issue that a lot of Flash users encounter and there isn't a solution for it just yet. However, the every time I export the file, I get different artefacts in different places and sometimes more places than others. But for my piece, I am not so concerned with it as the artefacts will add to my urban installation as ink prints of what was seen during my display.

Squirrel Silhouette

Squirrel Silhouette

The next animation I will be creating is the Squirrel running down a tree, picking up an acorn, eating it, and running back up the tree.

The image above is how the squirrel would look like.

Wallpaper Cutouts for the Spring Wall

Here are some more photographs of the wallpaper cutouts I have done so far for the Spring Wall.

The photograph above is the layout of how these cutouts will look on the wall. I still need to add more to it yet.

Here is a photograph of the main tree that will be on the left side of the spring wall. It is 100" long and therefore will fit to the height of the wall.

Because the tree is huge, I had to cut it out on several pieces of wallpaper. At the moment it looks quite plain. I might add more to it, or I might add spring buds to it in order to show it is Spring.

First set of wallpaper cutouts for Spring

Before I start cutting out the wallpaper cutouts for Spring based on the measurements I took of the walls at the location I sketched out what the Spring wall would look like including the measurements.

This photograph shows the first cutouts I have done.

The top 2 cutouts are for the right side of the sketch drawing. The 'grass' along the bottom of the above photograph is 105" long and is 22" in height. I will be adding another 4 inches to the flat ends of some of the grass strands.

This is a close up photograph of how I will be placing some of the cutouts leaving about 5mm gap between the cutouts.

What is my Special Study?

Materials Used to build Turntable

As my hand-built turntable is almost complete, I disassembled the platform to take a photograph of all the materials used to construct the turntable platform.

This is the photograph taken of the materials used:

On the left is the framework used as a race-track for the ball-bearings.

Top middle: Metal plates used for a TV stand, below that I have a metal clog that I place onto the end of the stepping motor which then rotates the top right hand board which fits onto the clog. The bottom right board is used to sit onto the stepping motor securing it with the 4 screws and nuts that are on the left of that board. and in the centre are all the ball-bearings I use to smoothen and balance the turntable when it is rotating with weight placed on top of it.

I also used a flat-head screw driver to tighten the clog to the stepping motor and a wrench to tighten the nuts.

This is a photograph of the stepping motor without the platform and also the board that connects to the stepping motor and to the Arduino.

Here is a photograph of my hand-built turntable (without the top board).

Changed idea of story outline

As weeks have gone by, and working on the special study I have been thinking of the main story outline of the piece. Based on how my piece will be displayed on the Degree Show I would like my animation to loop. Since my last updated idea, I have changed it once again. At the moment, I am thinking not to use the video footage of 'fake' break in into the house, this is because my piece will not loop.

Idea for Degree Show at The University of Huddersfield

For my Degree Show at the university, my piece will be based more on the construction side. For example, a stop-frame animation of the wallpaper-cutouts appearing on the walls. Next, a stop-frame animation of colour appearing onto the wallpaper-cutouts, which is then followed by short animations based on the seasons.

In the end of the construction piece, I will make a video footage of the urban installation which will be played after the construction piece.

One Day Viewing of Urban Installation at it's location

Because my actual installation is located in Halifax. I will invite everyone during one of the days of the Degree Show to come and view the installation itself. Viewers will then see my urban installation running constantly. Therefore, the idea of the break in footage would not work and also because I will not be able to display the construction piece as the construction of the walls will already be completed, i.e. stop-frame animation of wallpaper-cutouts and of colour. So then the viewers arrive to the location, they will walk into a room that is full of colour and cutouts. However, to make it interesting and last slightly longer, I will have the short animations looping. For example in Spring, birds flying will be a short animation. Another set of short animations will be displayed for the Summer, Autumn and Winter. When the projector rotates back to spring, a different animation will be played. This time it may be a squirrel after an acorn, etc. Same for the other seasons. So when the viewers are viewing the piece, they will not be looking at the same animation over and over again.

Special Study: Stage one almost complete

The first stage of my special study is almost complete. The hand-built turntable is almost complete. Today we were going to test the weight capacity of this turntable.

But before we were going to test the weight capacity, we ran into a problem. The problem we encountered was that the stepping motor would miss a step which stopped it from rotating smoothly. The stepping motor is programmed to rotate in 4 steps. However because it was missing a step it was not working successfully.

This is a close up photograph of the board that is used to tell the stepping motor how to rotate via steps and what speed.

I have 4 of these blue chips attached to the board, each one represents a step. As I have 4 of these, my stepping motor rotates in 4 steps. However, something was going wrong in order for the stepping motor to miss a step.

On Thursday we spent an hour trying to find out the cause of the this problem, however we were unsuccessful. We then spent another 2 hours on it today and finally managed to figure out the problem. The first problem we figured out was in a line of the board that connected to the stepping motor and to the Arduino and the second problem was in the a couple of wires that were on the board itself.

Before we figured out the problem, we double checked all the wires on the board to see if they were placed in the right place. We also thought that one of the magnets in the stepping motor may have failed to work, and since there is no way to test that, we used another stepping motor but we were having the same problem.

To solve the problem, we replaced the wires that weren't working and we used a different line on the board. As everything was running successfully before, I thought we may encounter this problem again if any of the other wires fail to work later during the progress of the project. However, once we have this working successfully with the weight capacity we would solder the board so this wouldn't happen again.

Once the problem was solved, we tested the weight capacity. Here is a video footage of the turntable holding two Apple laptops that weigh approximately 6.5kg which is more that I will be using. We set the speed of the rotation quite slow in order to make sure that each step was being used.

As you can see from the video footage that it is rotating successfully with the weight of the two Apple laptops. At first, the turntable would stop and jitter in place particular place but that was due to the ball-bearings that were placed randomly. Once I placed the ball-bearings in a track this issue was solved.

We next increased the speed of the rotation slightly. Here is the video footage showing the turntable running smoothly and to a standard speed rate.

As you can see that this hand-built turntable is running smoothly with the weight of 2 Apple laptops. Therefore, it will be able to hold the weight of the projector, which weighs approximately 3.5kg.

The final step for this construction process is to solder all the wires to the board and to built a box for the turntable to sit in and to protect the board and wires so it is portable.

The next stage of my special study is the coding. Via coding in the Arduino program, I will tell the turntable when to rotate, how much degrees to rotate and when to stop, etc. I will also be required to code in Flash because the animations will be created in this software.

Room Measurements

I will be starting to make the wallpaper cutouts for each season at home, before taking them to the house to paste up on the walls. I will photograph each stage of pasting the wallpaper cutouts which then would become a stop-frame animation of the seasons taking over.

But before I do that, I went to the house and measured the room I will be working in and also measured each wall so I can begin the cutout process.

Style Animations shown on wall

Below are two video clips, one of the silhouette animation (left) and other is the line-drawn animation (right). The animations are shown on an image of the previous wallpaper cutout experiment. I have created these two small animations to see which style technique will work best for the animation when being projected onto the walls.

From both video clips, I think that the silhouette animation works better with the wallpaper cutout. Therefore so far I think I will stick to the silhouette idea for the animations. I will try a few more short animations and see if they work well too.

Style idea for the short animations

Over the last few days, I have been working on one of the small animations that will be projected onto the wall. The animation I have been working on a simple animation of a bird flying from one side of the wall to the other.

When thinking of which style to do the animation in, I had to make sure that the style would work on the wallpaper cutouts that would be pasted onto the walls.

I first tried to do a simple line drawing animation.

Here are the frames I designed to create the animation. I chose to create the short animation in only 9 frames.

This is the animated version of the above frames.

I am unsure about this style technique and therefore thinking about the wallpaper cut outs on the walls, I thought about creating a silhouette animation and see if it works better than the line-drawn animation.

Here are the individual frames for the silhouette animation:

This image below shows the motion of all the frames and how it would form into a smooth animation.

Here is a video clip of the silhouette animation:

As you can see that this animation does work well. I will need to test this on the wallpaper cutout and see if that works well too.

Solving issue: PROGRESS

We have tested the platform to see if it works before attaching the ball-bearings and it works successfully.

Here is a video footage of the working turntable:

However, the platform is slightly unbalanced and does rattle too. Therefore, I just placed ball-bearings in freely to see if it would make any difference.

Here is the video footage showing the ball-bearings:

Once I have placed the wooden rings in place as previously mentioned this self-made turntable should work successfully. The final touch of this production is to make sure that it will be able to handle the weight of the projector. Therefore as a tester, we placed a laptop on the platform to see if it can handle the weight.

Here is the video footage of the laptop tester:

As you can see from the above video that the turntable is working successfully. As my next step, I will attach the ball-bearings and wooden rings. Once this is complete, we will test it again.

Building Platform

Over the last week, I have been building a platform that would allow the projector to sit onto it and rotate when required to. Here are a few images of what I have come up with so far.

The image below shows the bottom of the platform where the stepping motor is. The stepping motor is attached to the bottom board with 4 machine screws and nuts.

The 4 machine screws are also attached to the bottom metal plate. The metal plates in the centre has bearing balls allowing the plates to rotate. I purchased this from B&Q, it is used to rotate a TV once it is attached to the TV stand. However, because it has a weigh capacity of 150kg I only need it to hold approximately 3.5kg. Therefore, I thought it would work for my purpose.

This is how the top of the platform looks. I have attached another board to the top, this is where the projector will sit on. When using your hand to spin the top board, it has enough friction to spin without using any strength which is very good as the stepping motor I am using is only 12volts.

Because I have the steel plates in the centre of this, the top board is slightly unbalanced. Therefore to overcome this issue, I will be making two inner wooden rings placed around the steel plates in which I will place bearing balls allowing the board to spin with balance.

My idea of the two inner wooden rings are similar to the traditional way of handing making embroidery. I will be creating something similar to the wooden frames and attach them to the bottom board, leaving enough gap between the rings to place the bearing balls. However after speaking to some people, I have been told that this way would cause more friction and whether the 12volt motor will be able to rotate the top platform.

I will be speaking to my tutor about this today, and also test the platform without having the bearing balls attached to the board.

Solving issue: Rotating Projector PROGRESS

This is the next step as previously mentioned.

The image below, shows the setup of Arduino and a slightly more powerful stepping motor.

This is a video footage of the stepping motor working successful. As the stepping motor only has a pin, I have attached a piece of white paper to show that it is spinning.

The next step is to build a platform which will sit on the stepping motor and allow the top platform to rotate.

Solving issue: Rotating Projector

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to solve the issue about how to rotate the projector. These are the results so far for the 4 ways previously mentioned.

1> Using a turntable motor:

I spent a good few days looking for the complete turntable motor or something similar, however I had no luck. I did come across record-players and deck turntables, however these were from £200 - £400. It would be cheaper if I just built one therefore this way is discontinued.

2> Using a stepping motor and build the platform:

With help from my tutor, I have managed to get hold of a stepping motor. The next challenge for this is to build a platforms that would rotate via the stepping motor. This way is still in progress.

3> Using a windwiper motor and build the platforms:

I went to a few places in search for a windwiper motor. However, I was unable to get hold of one therefore the way is discontinued.

4> Build the whole thing myself, using a drill as a motor:

This way is still in use at the moment. If the stepping motor does not allow the platform to rotate, I will use the idea of using a drill as a motor in order to solve this issue.

From the above list, ways 2 & 4 are still in process and therefore I have a good chance in order to solve this issue.