Week 6
This week I continued developing my concept on the poster. Seting up a complex code provided by google using IPython Notebook called Google deep dream – a visualiser which utilises googles neural networks. I ran tested out a few different different lines of code to experiment with some visual effects in order distort the image from its original form.
Here is the original and its variations
original
1st variation
2nd variation
3rd variation
Deep dream is a step by step process there are two steps to the process, the smaller steps are called iterations and after 10 iterations the images achieves the larger step, an octave. Examples 1 and 2 are both at the final stage of the process at 3 octaves and 9 iterations, by stoping the process earlier you are able to effectively lessen the distortions if desired. The 3rd example is an exception to the rule as it loops the process on itself capturing and zooming the image and thus exaggerating and building on the previous distortions. This process has the ability to loop infinitely although the more times you run the full process the less discernible the original image becomes. Looking at the 3rd example from the amount of zoom in the image I only ran the whole process twice and as you can see it uses the same code sequence as the 1st variation and already the distortions have become a lot more prominent.
The 2nd variation one is probably my favourite, although not as psychadelic as the others I thought it was a nice balance as it offered an expressionist painting like style whilst still creating a nice level of distortion. It was a little less visually intense and offered more design space to fit the additional poster text.
I also worked on developing the text for the title
We decided to use this films title as our text
From the title I spent a while attempting to illustrate the word “documentary” in the same style as “fear and loathing”
To do this I copied as many letter forms as I could and substituted the rest by creating a unique brush in photoshop and writing the extra letters repeatedly until I came up with a version was similar to the original text.
This is the final result I created,
Although its not perfect I do believe that I did achieve a pretty decent imitation of the original letterforms.
Week 7
This week I coordinated with the other members of the group about working on finalising the poster. We shared our designs and gave feedback on each version.
This was my final version
It looks a little less juicy on the computer because the colours are in CMYK colour profile and ready to print.
Im pretty happy with the end result, I framed the image within a film frame to give it a bit more of a documentary/film theme without having dramatically altering the image by inserting film paraphernalia. Given more time I would have played with the film frame a little more and tired to get it to look a little more realistic and to blend a little better with the image. I also added some effects onto it to give it a bit more of a film grain look.
After some feedback and liaising with the group we decided to go with Ajeet’s version of the poster due to some fantastic sketch work which resembled the original art in fear and loathing by Ralph Steadman.
I also collaborated with Marta to help brainstorm ideas for wall projections during the seminar. I showed her deep dream which she loved and we played around with some effects on more frames, heres another few examples.
As the images were just stills we wanted to involved a bit more movement so I pointed her in the direction of this video
The video is a sequence from fear and loathing in which Someone has run every frame through deep dream. There are very few high quality deep dream videos out on the web at the moment and this kind of project would take more technical code ability than I had whilst also being extremely time consuming and require a high spec computer, so luckily enough someone had already done it!
Other wise I offered to create some kind of slow transition Gif or video in which you can watch the image transform and distort
like this or similar
Week 8
The week of our seminar I met up with Ajeet on Monday to print out the poster and stick it up around RMIT. We decided that we would mainly target building 9 as that would be our target audience however we also stuck them up around common areas in the RMIT city campus.
I also met with Marta to book lighting equipment with the techs and we continued to discuss what would be projected, She decided to create a video which blended the deep dream fear and loathing sequence with a crazy visualiser which Ajeet showed us from the program WinAMP.
After admiring the lighting from the previous group I thought it would also be a good idea to spice it up a bit and use some interesting lighting for our seminar, I pitched the idea to Marta and she liked it so I took it upon myself to design and setup the lights.
Continuing with the theme of ear and loathing I wanted to use a blend of blues and reds to give a candy style took to the stage and speakers. I used frames from the film like as my inspiration here they are,
I noticed that even the title uses a similar effect.
Learning from last week I thought that using red heads might be a bit overkill even with diffusion paper and I also didn’t want the lights to be too visually imposing on the stage. I booked 1 LED, 1 Kino, a dedo kit, C stands and a gel kit. I aimed to use a similar setup to the 3 point lighting setup although I realised that I also wanted to incorporate some unconventional lighting angles and would have to use a few more lights to supplement the three a I would be lighting 4 subjects.
I used the kino with a red gel as my key light, the Led with a double blue gel as a fill and two dedo’s with multiple layers of gel as backlights. I did not have time to actually practise the setup before hand and on the day getting the lights ups with the short timeframe was pretty crazy and so I got very little time to tinker or play with the setup. I found that there I ran out of gel as I would have to double or triple them up to achieve a actual saturation of that particular colour also one of the Dedo’s also did not work but due to a lack of gels it did not end up impacting the setup. Overall I was happy with the result on the day as the lights mixed with one another to create some interesting colours and shadows.