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.  

Post 23: A Test Walk Through the Royal Portrait Gallery

    As I said in my last post, it has been quite a task building the 3D Gallery, finding dozens of relevant paintings, finding different more or les ornate gold frames, squaring and cutting out everything, and hanging the show. I so far have a Gallery of the Kings, a Gallery of the Enlightenment Philosophers, a Gallery of the Queens, and a Gallery of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's Family. I still have to finish the Gallery of the Revolutionaries.
   But I couldn't wait to see if my idea was really going to work, so I created a wide angle virtual camera, and moved it meandering through the four finished rooms. It is just a first test, the camera is a bit too low, and camera movements are a bit jerky, but that will get corrected, and the paper figures will move and turn to face the camera. I posted it on YouTube: 
            GALLERY WALK TEST

    I am overall quite pleased. The camera movement is not smooth, and is at times too fast, but that can be adjusted at a later stage.
   Well, back to work now to finish the last Gallery!  

Post 22: Building the 3D Gallery

   Turns out it is a lot more work than I expected to put this thing together, but I think it is worth the effort. I finally have the five "boxes" built over the cross shaped floor. This shows three of them, as well as the paper dolls scattered through the space:

  The idea of the vaulted ceilings didn't work out, so I found some stucco ceiling work drawings and combined them with the hatched pattern to create ornate flat ceilings instead. 
  I still have to "hang" all the paintings and add some furniture and clocks, before I can move smoothly through the space with my "steady cam".Just to get an idea, here is a camera view from the door, with the receding perspective through two more openings all the way to the back window:

Post 21: How About a 3D Virtual Gallery of Royal Portraits

   I have been collecting reproductions of portraits of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the rest of the Royal Family. A few do, but most of the pictures don't include the frame. So I have also been collecting images of Baroque and Rococo Gilded picture frames.
   A few days ago, I started toying with the idea of building a 3D Virtual Gallery in After Effects, and using a roaming virtual camera to take the Public through the Gallery of Royal Portraits.
   In order for the brightly colored portraits to stand out, and to keep a surrealistic fantasy look, I wanted the Gallery itself to look like it was made of paper, looking like old Architectural Engravings with black and white outlines and hatching for shading. I had a really hard time finding material, and ended up having to assemble my own by adding hatching to plain drawings out of an 18th Century "Model Book".
    I also thought it would be nice to have a few pieces of furniture, mantels, clocks and other decorative accessories. I made a couple of mock ups to see how it would look:

  I was pretty pleased, so I forged ahead and designed a very large hatched black and white tile floor comprising 5 rooms in a cross shape:  a long gallery, a foyer, and 3 smaller squarish side rooms:

 The rooms will have vaulted ceilings made of four flat hatched sections with drawn decorative moldings:

  I then built the different sections of walls from my templates and fitted them exactly to the rooms. I also decided to give the walls a thickness of 50 pixels and moved the 5 sections of floor accordingly. The entire image is 16000 x 13000 pixels:

  Now, I have to fill the rooms with paintings, clocks, furniture. It is going to take about forty paintings altogether to hang this show, and I need to stop and give some thought to what portraits to place in what room. 
   The largest space should have portraits of the kings of France, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the far end. The domed foyer needs something special, so I am thinking of hanging a swinging Foucault Pendulum from the apex, and hang eight portraits of famous scientists. Room #2 at the far end could be devoted to various portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. It will have a French Door opening to a balcony overlooking the gardens.
   Room #3 on the left side could be devoted to ten Portraits of the French Revolution leaders and locations(Bastille, Conciergerie, etc...). Finally, Room #4 would be devoted to Napoleon and the Restauration.
   As far as camera movement through the Galleries, I cannot help but think of that movie that was shot a few years ago through the Hermitage in a single continuous steady-cam take:
              "RUSSIAN ARCH"
   I could use some of the numerous "paper dolls" I found to populate the gallery  with guests and onlookers in 18th Century garb, and even get a glimpse of Marie Antoinette herself!

Post 20: A Paper Versailles in Construction

    I found a set of paper models showing the evolution of Versailles from the small original Castle built by Louis XIII over the old hunting lodge to the grand palace at the end of the long reign of Louis XIV. The plates are unfortunately not high definition, and that will limit what I can do with it. I have a large scale blueprint of the grounds of Versailles, but the gardens are so huge that the footprint of the castle on the blueprint is actually tiny. Still, I used it as sort of ground perspective to erect the paper castle on in 3D in After Effects. 

     I then did a short animated test of the walls rising out of the ground and the roofs flipping over to see if it was workable:

                                                  CHATEAU 1 PAPER TEST 2


    I do wish I had a better model with more detail allowing for close ups, but this is the small original structure and the castle got much larger over the years:

   I think it is worth the effort to pursue this direction for one of the sequences.
   The plates are designed to be cut out and folded, so it will take a good deal of work separating all the sections of walls and roofs as separate png files:

Post 19: Celebrating the Magnificent Clocks of the 18th Century

   I am trying to come up with enough different visual themes to keep people interested for about an hour (depending on Carlos version of the piece), and that is a long time. My first ideas were more along the lines of a layered historical fresco of the period between 1770 and 1816. But that includes much turmoil, violence and major political changes, and events having really nothing to do with the ”honorees” so to speak: Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

    A lot of people see a Requiem as a “heavy” piece of music because it is a mass for the dead. I want to look at it more as a joyous celebration of the lives of the deceased.

   The purposes of this particular Requiem are clear: of course to burry the ashes of the royal pair in Saint Denis with other French Royalty, but also and foremost to rehabilitate Royalty itself and re establish the previous order, to celebrate the victory of the Bourbons and their return to the throne in the person of Louis XVIII, to celebrate eveything they stood for and the superiority of their ways, traditions and culture.

    Now, I am a Republican, and deplore the many faults and the arrogance that caused the ultimate permanent demise of Royalty in France, but at the same time I love everything that it left behind in terms of Architecture and Art. There would not be very much in the Museums if it wasn’t for the patronage of the Church and the Nobility. The 18th century was the golden Age for France, and I ultimately would rather celebrate that than show the violence of the French Revolution  and the carnage of the un necessary Napoleonic Wars. 

   It is no doubt a bit of an elitist vision of things, but I somehow feel the images should be as beautiful as the music, and celebrate the life of Marie Antoinette and Louis the XVI and the greatness of the times rather than the horror of their death. 

   Case in point, having been interested in clockwork and mechanical devices a long time, I have a "virtual" collection of magnificent 18th Century clocks in images, not being able to afford the real thing... The period was a golden age for French Clockmakers, that strived to come up with more ingenious, elaborate and beautiful designs. Every mantel in every castle and mansion was surmounted by a clock or cartel, and Versailles of course had the most elaborate and extravagant. 

    So I came up with the idea of a "Clock Parade" to accompany the Sanctus, a bit like a fashion show on a runway. It wasn't quite enough, so I added a large embossed gilded dial with turning hands , and my hand made mechanical holding a magnifier that keeps the beat and shows details of the clocks dials at the same time:

        

   I am also testing the idea of using a Title at the beginning of each of the movements, "Sanctus" in this case, using a font based on Leonardo da Vinci's handwriting, which I posted on YouTube:

                                                SANCTUS CLOCK PARADE TEST