Post 25: A New Idea

    I may not have been working on the project directly in After Effects in the last month, but I stayed "in character" so to speak, with the theme of the project while reading several excellent books about the French Revolution, the French Court, Versailles, and a detailed Biography of Marie Antoinette. 
   I learned that Marie Antoinette built near the Trianon a small theatre called "Le Théatre de la Reine" where she would put on plays, operas and ballets with her family and friends. I never had the opportunity to see it, and it was rather difficult to find decent photographs, it is an absolute jewel of a place:

   The look of it remind me in some way of the Antique Toy Theaters I had researched before. I have among my collection of "virtual paper dolls" some Puppeteers, Singers, Dancers, and various figures that could be animated on a virtual 3D stage. 
   So I started thinking of a sequence that would take place partly on stage in the center part of the screen, but also in the side boxes on the right and left side of the screen. I will need to build a 3D virtual theatre in After Effects, and animate the various paper doll characters.
    I was lucky to find three rather large images(roughly 4000 x 2400 pixels) to work from, and started cutting them up in Photoshop to extract the components, starting with the stage set:

    I am not sure at this point whether I will keep them in color, or create a stylized black and white set like the Portrait Galleries.

Post 24: Full scale Test coming up in the Concert Hall

   I have not been working on this project very much in the last month or so because of other projects, and also because I have been waiting for Carlos and his team to take a look at all the clips I have so far and give me some feedback. I don't want to waste time pushing too far the development of something they might not like.
   I attended the performance of Beethoven's Ninth that Carlos masterfully conducted a couple of weeks ago with a large chorus.Seing the chorus occupying every seat all the way up the sides made me realize that it would make it difficult to drape the fabric evenly all across to get a continuous screen.
   I had noticed doing a projection test in the studio that the animation of the camera dancing through the Virtual Portrait Gallery does not play very well on angled side panels, and would work better on a flat screen. Also, the triple screen as we first envisioned it would be quite far from the balcony seats, and people on the far left and far right would get only a partial view. Furthermore, if the screen is behind the chorus, the singers will not be able to see the images, and will have the projectors shining in their eyes.

   As a possible solution to all of these problems, I am considering using instead a single length of fabric 10 ft wide and 54 ft long stretched across the stage high above the orchestra:

   I am not exactly sure at the moment what would be the best location and height, so I asked Adam if and when we could do a projection test during the day, that would allow Carlos and his staff to watch my 6 Test Clips full scale in the concert hall, and give me the feedback I need to continue the project.
   We settled on December 1, so we will be setting up in the morning, and doing the final projection test in the afternoon, hopefully with 3 projectors.
   Since there is no panel left long enough, I went ahead and purchased a bolt of the same fabric we draped the building with for Light Dreams. We will hang it roughly above the podium using eyelets and cord, and see just how things look from different perspectives.