In many ways the last year of my project has been about scaling up my voxelisation method. Click on the image below to see it fullsize. You’ll have to attend the end of year show to see the final life-sized sculpture.
Digital Arts MA09
Private View :
14 July 6-9pm
Exhibition Continues:
15–17 July 10am–7pm
18–19 July 11am–4pm
The Basement
Camberwell College of Arts
Wilson Road
SE5 8LU
For more information and map go to the show website.
I’ve block painted the model with help from Nicola, and have made an important decision which is not to try and make the colouring realistic. The reason for this is that the form itself has a certain crudeness (due to inevitable misalignments and the low resolution of my process) and to add a realistic face on top of this would look strange, and pull the sculpture in a punch and judy direction. The face has been roughly modelled and I quite like the lumpen-ness of it all.
As i was painting one thing that I noticed was that the wet paint bought out the form more, as the contrast is greater, for example the right black leg below. I may do some experiments with varnish next week.
Incidentally there was a huge lump of sculpture in the same space as mine last year, of a sort of toe. Half figurative half abstract, it was one of my favourite pieces in the show. I can’t remember the name of the artist, but it was someone from TRAIN research group at Camberwell.
By keeping the painting crude and not adding realistic features to the face, I hope that the line between figuration and abstraction will be emphasised. As people walk up the stairs below the sculpture I hope that the coloured lump comes to life as a vaulting man.
In terms of balance I did a trial last week downstairs, using boxes for support and I it seemed easier than I’d anticipated. Given the hands joining the balcony is strong enough I think that all the weight will be supprted on the one leg with just a single wooden strut to stop it from tipping sideways.
For now, back to tidying the studios in preparation for build week.
Geoffrey Mann is a Scottish Product Artist who graduated from the RCA a few years back. He has received a lot of acclaim for his Long Exposure models which share some similarities with mine but are rendered out of porcelain, plastic and glass. Geoffrey takes a film of a motion (usually moths or birds in flight) and then traces out each frame as a silhouette. These shapes are then passed into a 3D modelling package and are joined together to form a continuous model, these are then rapid prototyped and then cast in a fine material. By reducing the motion to slices he avoids all problems with watertightness and bad meshes. I should thank Geoffrey, whose work I discovered at the beginning of the course, and whose name long exposure sculptures I also used, as it was the most simple and effective way to describe what I’m trying to do. It is interesting that like Peter Jansen, Geoffrey has chosen to place these forms mainly within a craft & design context, something my hulking cardboard models are not suited for.
Flight Takeoff
Nocturne moth, Long Exposure series, Nylon, 2009
More recently Geoffrey has started to look at human forms in motion. This one is a forward hand spring of a gymnast friend of his, rapid prototyped in polymer.
Geoffrey has recently expanded his website with lots of great images and magazine articles.
I’ve cut out all the card. And glued the sections. I stacked them and took some photos. The bulk was impressive, approximately 2m high and wide and deep.
The two challenges left are
Painting – I’m aiming to put detail on this model to try and capture my likeness, and to emphasise the folds and undulations in the model.
Support – all this bulk rests on a single foot sized section (shown below) and the hands resting on the balcony. I’ll need struts of some sort to support the sides, or weights attached to the leg to shift the centre of gravity. I can’t get into the detail of this until the build week when I can work in situ. In the mean time I can paint all the sections.
I’m half way through my final life-size model. Here is the initial sketch idea.
The piece was inspired by walking around the college and finding a suitable dramatic location. – the central staircase. A friend suggested the idea and I liked it immediately as it worked on several levels. Including referencing a famous photograph by Yves Kline:
I used the same method and filmed video footage and modelled this in Poser.
One of the problems of the piece was how do the hands attach to the balcony? This is a major point of weight distribution so has to be modeled accurately. Unfortunately Poser doesn’t allow you to fix hands in place across a pose, so after roughly fixing them by eye I had to export the model in two parts. The body and the hands seperatly. The hands could then be tidied in Rhino to fit the balcony and then added back into the finished 3D model.
I’ve decided to make this action continuous – or as continuous as possible (consisting of 80 frames). So all the space passed through is modelled. This creates a more fluid form, paradoxically also more static. I may paint this figure realistically too, so you can see the facial features. I’m pleased with the form – it reminds me of a flamenco dancer. This type of reading is not available to analysis until the sequence is actually modelled, which makes the process somewhat perilous, but at the same time exciting.
A big advantage of the continuous decision was that the slices for the model are much simpler to cut out although the large size has made it slower – the slices are larger than the card so need to be broken into segments – still 1 month of construction looks possible.
I built a maquette to try and figure out how to break the model down. It doesn’t balance on its own so I’ll have to consider some struts or suspension to secure it.
When making the model I’m considering several factors
1) Accuracy – I’m trying to make them as accurate as I can
2) Time – I only have 1 month per model
3) Weight – I need to be able to break apart, transport and rebuild the models.
4) Materials – I’m trying to waste less cardboard.
5) Strength – The model needs to be durable
The previous half-size model was made from solid layers of card. As this model is twice as large I’ve reduced weight and material usage by hollowing out the layers – and also on the really large parts missing out every other layer (using support strips instead). I’m confident that the papier mache will smooth over these gaps.
I put in a proposal for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad this morning which is a huge Arts Council project to build up to 12 art works which celebrate the Olympic ideals and UK sport. The commissions are for …wait for it….£500,000 but anyone could apply. At this stage they are looking for brief ideas which will be awarded £5000 to be worked up into a full scale proposal. Here are my application images and text:
My proposal is a piece of art made of athletes.
Three sculptures would model the space passed through by athletes in three Olympic events; 100m sprint, shot put and high jump. These would be grouped together in a park where the public could experience the magnitude of these events in close up. This is something I think we miss watching sport on the television.
The 100m sprint sculpture would be 100m long, life-size in full colour. The track would be marked in seconds allowing the public to measure themselves against Olympic athletes – every stride of the athlete frozen in time. They would be able to follow the bounding approach of the high jumper and then walk underneath the arch of the jump, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. The huge effort involved in throwing a 7kg weight over 20m would be captured in the third sculpture.
I have chosen these events to represent the three main strands of track athletics; running, jumping and throwing. The images I have provided are of a young girl, but I would like to model British record holding athletes for each of the events. It is important to me to show exactly how incredible the efforts of these sports men and women are.
These ideas have developed from my work in Long Exposure sculpture carried out at Camberwell College of Arts. The action is videoed and then closely modelled in 3d software. My sculptures are then hand made from cardboard layers and papier-mache, and I’ve provided an image to give you an idea of how fascinating it is to see motion broken down into parts. Of course the Olympic sculptures would have to be cast in something more durable, possibly fibreglass, to withstand the knocks and bruises of a British park. There are several UK companies who are experts in creating full colour large-scale models of this kind.
The location I have chosen is Crystal Palace Park, I can see the broadcast tower from my window. Not only does this have an excellent National Sports Centre and plenty of space to install the sculptures, but just nearby are the Crystal Palace fibreglass dinosaurs, which like my sculptures are also frozen in time.
I think this proposal would be a great challenge to make, and result in work which the public could really engage with, bringing art and sport closer together.
Here’s the video I made for the Symposium and the text that accompanied the mini show we had afterwards.
This video briefly introduces the work of artist Tim Pickup on a Digital Arts MA at Camberwell College of Art.
The final outcome of this project has been to render life-size, full colour sculptures of the space passed through by a human being in motion; effectively a long exposure sculpture.
The bulk of my time on the course has been spent working out exactly how to use a mixture of java programs and 3D modelling packages to convert animated motion sequences into a format that can be physically rendered. The final sculptures are constructed from over 1000 meticulously cut out and glued pieces of corrugated cardboard, which are then covered in papier-mache and painted. Apart from being a fun hands on solution, the contrast between the high-tech ‘behind the scenes’ calculations and the low-tech finish adds a friendly element of intrigue to the pieces – just exactly how were they made?
Throughout the course I have carried out experiments in long exposure digital photography and video as a means of checking progress, and have also contextualised my work by examining historical artists and scientists. The key inspiration has been the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, and the way in which twentieth century avant-garde artists, and in particular the Italian Futurists, interpreted his images almost exactly 100 years ago.
I have chosen to model two actions which both address issues of balance. One piece models the artist falling off a plinth (or has he been pushed?), and in the other the artist vaults over the balcony of a stairwell. Both pieces could perhaps also be read as metaphors for my future life as an artist, which too is in the balance.
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At the symposium Jonathan Kearney raised an interesting question:
Is it possible to make the viewer experience a sense of time displacement?
I had one idea to explore this a while ago. It ties in with the method of the Cubists. You have a series of 3D frames of some action. Then each frame is rotated about the vertical axis by a few degrees from the previous frame in modeling software and then all these frames are boolean unioned. Then if the viewer moves around the sculpture at the appropriate rate (walking speed say) does the static sculpture animate in some way?
Ed Kelly suggested that strobe lighting would do the trick. I’m wondering whether the eye could do this on its own (to an extent it is also strobing or sampling reality). The interesting question is then what happens if the person moves around the sculpture in the wrong direction – presumably if this effect works at all the animation should reverse. Something like looking at the wheel of a car go in reverse.
Sometimes when I walk around a large sculpture I do feel as if it is slightly animating, or moving through space, but this is a fleeting effect. I’d definitely like to try this idea out in the future. I will need to choose a suitable action to maximize the effect – if each successive frame covers up too much of the previous then I think the effect would be diminished. Its probably one of those effects where you can’t tell if anything is happening until you really look at it with your eyes – not on a screen.
I’ve been reading a lot of comics recently and have been interested in the art of drawing movement and how comic imagery has influenced me since enjoying Billy Whizz in the 70s.
In Scott McClouds celebrated comic book ‘Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art)’ he distinguishes 4 main techniques for representing motion within a single frame.
Motion Lines
These are the most used – lines following the paths that objects have passed through (or will pass through) in space. Here’s one; The Thing losing it.
Multiple Images
This is the Marey one, multiple exposures.
Streaking Effects
A mix of the above two. Gene Colan began incorporating these photographic blurring effects in the 70’s. Harder to find these ones.
Background Streaking
The camera / artists moves with the moving object – which stays in focus over a blurred background. This is often used in manga comics and also sports photography.
Scott then asks if there could be any other ways?
I think the continuous studies i’ve been looking at may qualify as a different way. Essentially they extend the multiple images until every position passed through in space is part of the final image. Paradoxically despite showing all the movement these images look still, so they present motion in a less obvious way. You have to infer the motion. This image is a view from below of the final sculpture I plan to mkae. It is grabbed from Rhino and then I’ve added a crude blur to try and represent the kind of image you might see in a continuous motion comic.
Science
Here’s the abstract from a Phd on motion lines, from Takahiro Kawabe1 and Kayo Miura1 at the User Science Institute, Kyushu University, Japan 2006
Artists and cartoonists are able to dexterously depict a running person on paper with the aid of ‘motion lines’. We scientifically examined whether the cognitive system can exploit motion lines in constructing memory representations of the location of a running person depicted in a still image. A target depicting a standing or a running person with or without motion lines was presented to participants for 500 ms. Observers were required to reproduce the location of the target 1 s after its disappearance. Data from depicted leftward and rightward moving persons were collapsed. Memory displacement of the target was shown to be largest in the presence of motion lines and a posture indicating an identical direction of movement. By assessing the absolute localization error, we showed that there was no localization advantage toward a target with a symmetrical (standing) posture over one with an asymmetrical (running) posture. Our findings indicate synergetic interaction between the mechanisms responsible for processing of motion lines and human postures in the representation of dynamic events.
So they work.
Film
Motion lines have been appeared in film too. From the Bionic Man & Woman in the 70s, special effects have advanced up to the present cutting edge effects of Bullet Time as seen in The Matrix and The watchmen (both films heavily steeped in graphic novel tradition)
Bullet time slows down the time-based medium of cinema and allows the camera to pan around the motion, which has an effect of embossing the action on the eye, even more than the long standing use of slow motion. Often these sequences are violent, or involve dramatic changes in position – where the action is faster than the eye. By adding CGI motion lines the effect can be hightened further. Spiderman swinging through a 3D recreation of New York is a good example, where a more blurred image increases the eye’s belief in what it is seeing.
Super-heroes?
One other thing that struck me about the models i’ve been making is how often the figures themselves look like some strange sort of mutated comic character – or super-hero. By multiplying limbs or extending the boundaries of a body part, or breaking a form apart I’ve often created super-normal versions of the human form. This is the first time i’ve used 3D software and in this regard it has been great fun to be able to experience these mutations and be able to pan around them in the software.
Here are a few examples:
I’ve completed my half size model. It took one month and cost about £200 for card, glue and paint. Here are some images of the process, up to the stage of painting.
The small part above is a maquette for the whole model, done 1/10th scale, which was useful in working out how to manage so much stuff.
