A German artist group that specializes on projection mapping.

http://www.urbanscreen.com/

As Above, So Below by Light Harvest Studio creates wonderful structures on and under the Manhattan bridge
http://vimeo.com/32756536

very clever use of ‘animation’ on different surfaces and shows that pocket projector’s can be very effective.
http://vimeo.com/43239312

I haven’t used my blog much in the past, because I’m just simply not used to it and forgot about it. I ‘m going to update it more frequently during my R&D task.

The R&D task says to create something, an art installation, animation, app, anything, that fits the brief’s theme ‘Liberation’. Liberation can be interpreted in many different ways and because this task is linked to the biennial Frequency Festival in Lincoln, it would be good to link ‘Liberation’ to some kind of digital device. Our tutor in Digital Media gave us therefore 3 key points to start researching from. Knowledge Sharing seemed best to me.
The storyline of my animation short is as follows : Terrorists attack a building and shout “God is great!”. A white man sees this and concludes that all muslims are terrorists and spreads his opinion to his fellow white people. A muslim man greets him nicely on the street, but the white man rejects him by saying that muslims are terrorists and that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with terrorists. At home the white man logs into a social media site and writes a post that says “muslims are terrorists!”. His post soon gets many comments stating that he is wrong and that muslims are not automatically terrorists. He clicks on the links embedded in those comments, that lead to news sites showing muslims demonstrating for gay muslim rights, demonstrating against ISIS and demonstrating for women’s rights. The white man learns through social media and news sites that muslims are not automatically terrorists and that many muslims demonstrate peacefully and for good causes like women’s rights and against the terror group ISIS.

The last scene shows the white man greeting nicely the previously seen muslim on the street.

The animated short is meant to make the audience think about the recent terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in France. Many people started to hate muslims and riot to banish muslims out of their respective country after the attack, simply because the attackers shouted ‘Allahu Ackbar’ which means ‘God is great’. It is easy to conclude that their religion has driven them to do these horrible attacks, but the religion itself with its beliefs and rules has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. I want people to think about this and realise that muslims are not automatically terrorists. In this case the knowledge shared about good muslims on social media and news sites helped to ‘liberate’ the white man’s mind from his falsely informed hatred towards muslims.

This project is going to be challenging in every way. The story itself is already a very sensitive topic, therefore I need to take care to not offend anyone. I decided to do my animation in Maya. I do have 3d modelling experience in Cinema 4D, but I have to teach myself how to animate in Maya. This is something I wanted to learn for a very long time and now I use my spare time to watch tutorials and try some things out in Maya. My animation will be projected onto , preferably, a church wall.