Right at the start of this semester when we went over the syllabus and schedule for this class, I got really excited. As I have mentioned before, I am currently working an internship with Z2 Entertainment, a company that does event production at the Boulder Theater and Fox Theater. I am an engineering major, but I decided that it may not be what I want to do for the rest of my life, so I found Z2 and realized that this is something I could be much more passionate about. There are three disiplines to choose from at the internship: stage management, audio, and lighting. I'm going down the lighting route, which encompasses lighting, lasers, and VJ, which includes projection mapping.
This class has given me the opportunity to learn about Blender, which is a huge way to make money creating visuals for concerts. Then we learned about VJ and projection mapping, which ties the skill together. I learned from the LDs I've been working with that the industry standard for VJ is to use Resolume, and we used VDMX for this class, but as far as I can tell, the skills transfer fairly well and conceptually, both softwares do the same thing.
For this project, I decided to take the approach that would most closely relate to event production. I used visuals from Liquid Stranger's youtube channel, one of my favorite artists who recently played Red Rocks. Since I couldn't build a full stage to projection map onto, I thought using clothes would be an interesting direction to take. I used some relfective pants as one of my props, which ended up being a great idea because it made the visuals show up brighter than the rest of the clothes. This was perfect since the room we set up in wasn't completely dark, and some of the other visuals were not as vibrant.
I got some feedback during the exhibition that this is a good idea in relation to concerts, and it would be awesome if musicians had projection mapped clothes on during their performance. Being able to track the motion of a musician to keep the projections on their clothes is a whole new challenge that is beyond the scope of this class, but it is probably something that we will start seeing in the near future. I have a long way to go before I'm proficient in running lighting design, but once I get there, projection mapping will be the next aspect of the job I want to master.