Projecting outside from inside.

I hired out a normal indoor projector just to see how powerful they were. I compared what it can display indoors and outdoors. I also wanted to see if the increase in scale distorted the motion of the film itself because seeing an animation on your laptop screen is very different to seeing it displayed on a wall let alone a building.

The projection onto the wall was as expected. Bright, visually loud and much faster! The increase in speed was quite amazing I thought. The face darted from the left to the right in rapid time which gave me as the audience bit bit of a visual kick. The character appears as a heavy, fleshy form and the brain is not expected to see something like that move so quickly and therefore is quite a sight. Much like the punchy visuals you'd find in a fast pace film in a cinema for the first time.

In the image on the right here, I accidentally knocked the projector to one side as it sat on the floor and it projected the animation onto a corner wall that was slanted inwards. Here I realised the benefits of having the wall at a slight angle - it makes the animation move faster! The angle of the wall throws the character straight into the right side of them screen and packs an even harder punch in the animation itself. This is something worth noting because when I do find a building to project on it may not be flat so I'd need to know how to improvise and make do with whatever surface I may have.

To follow on from that and play with this discovery, I displayed the animation right up against the edge of the wall so that a quarter of the displayed image was projecting at angle. The right side of the film was stretched all the way up the side of the wall and ended at the back of the room as a big display. Much like before, the film sped up because the character in the animation had to shoot across over to the side of the room to make it to the other side of the screen. This made the entire animation even faster than the first display I did. Strangely enough, being out of focus was not an issue and the speed of the film hid that issue away.

After playing with that I then went on to explore the main thing that I wanted to do in the first place which was to see if this projector was bright enough to show my animation outside onto a building. To my surprise the projector did a brilliant job at displaying my film onto the neighbouring building from the second floor of my studio space. The projection was bright! But there was a bit of light pollution which made things a bit harder however I could still see clearly enough my character bouncing away on the wall. Again the speed of the animation was faster because the display was bigger which is what I hoped for after the first couple of experiments. This gives me a lot of confidence in displaying my animations onto a larger building with an proper outdoor projector.

The character was scarier! The big bulbus eyes and flappy tongue swung even more wildly that it packed a heavy punch when you saw it in motion. This was good though because it meant that bigger WAS better when it comes to projecting animation onto a building! The character was scarier, bolder, punchier and far more ridiculous which helped enhance the entire theme I'm going for with the humorous twist. If this made ME think it was scary then I can imagine what passers by must have thought when they saw the display.

I really like the idea of an animation like this just popping up out of nowhere. Just Like a joke, the experience is better felt when it is unexpected. Also the visuals will be more startling and will have a lot more character because it will be unexpected just like in Wodiczko's swastika onto the South Africa House.