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

Post 18: Tackling the "Dies Irae" at last!

    The Dies Irae is basically the most dramatic part of Cherubini's Requiem. There  are undoubtedly other passages when the music heats up a little , but for the most part, the piece is mostly very harmonious flowing counterpoint for Chorus and Orchestra, absolutely beautiful, and totally angelic at times. 
    So I have been playing with ideas for the rest of the piece, but had so far stayed away from the Dies Irae, reserving it for the most dramatic moments of the story, namely the fall of the guillotine blade onto the King and Queen's supremely inbred and aristocratic necks...
   I didn't want to be gory, but wanted to show at least a few drops of Royal Blue Blood.
   I finally got an idea this morning using the coronation portrait of the King for a "virtual beheading", and played with it all day. I think it might work, I just have to keep it going for eight more minutes....

   I loaded the Test on YouTube like the previous one, but "the Copyright Owner removed the Music Track". Apparently, they don't give a hoot about the Introit or the Graduate, but they don't want anybody to hear their Dies Irae for free...
                       Dies Irae Test 1

Post 17: Paper Doll Animation Test

   It actually took a lot longer than I expected to do the Test, and I only used only 4 of the dolls, but I am well pleased with the results, and am thinking of using some of the other dolls for other scenes in different settings.
   This is a very first rough "quick draft", and I didn't make any attempt to synchronize the animation to the music, yet it appears remarkably smooth, which yields me to believe my job may not be as hard as I thought at first, since most of the Requiem is slow flowing music with relatively few dramatic moments. 

  The Dies Irae is going to be the hard one, and I am probably going to play with it next. It will also require much stronger images, and would almost have to be the climactic part of the piece, even though it's hardly half way through. Most music builds to a final climax, that is just not the case here.
  I posted a small video of the test on YouTube:
                                                PAPER DOLLS TEST 1

  But it really doesn't do justice to the full 5760 x 1080 full size triple HD giant video playing on my 25 foot wide spandex screen...
    One could conceive of a scene inside the Palace, may be in the Queen Bedroom(or her bathroom?), another in a salon at the Trianon playing games with "courtisans", or in the Farmhouse with milk maids and animals, or yet another in the Queen Theatre.
   What I can do largely depends on the size and quality of the images I can find, as even though large images are becoming more common on the internet, my 5760 pixels wide canvas is still quite demanding.