Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Project X Anti-Gravity Early Protoype

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6 comments:

djbrokenwindow said...

Wow. That looks good, and it is only some of the swinging that makes it hard to suspend belief that the whole thing couldn't be a weird non-gravity room.

It seems like two of the main ways of faking zero-g are:
orient the gravity some other direction than down (using film and turning the camera)
show a person from the perspective of being along the axis of gravity (looking down on them, or up at them, while they lie on a clear piece of glass, as in the Barbarella preview toward the end)

Both could probably be done with mirrors placed inside clever 'viewing windows' --thus avoiding having to use video.

Another technique could be:
If a person were floating dimly-lit in water (a pool), and viewed from directly above, they would have a lot of the free-floating look of zero-g, though the movement through the water wouldn't be as frictionless as through air, so pushing-off across the space or tossing objects wouldn't look right.

How about viewing a harnessed person from *beneath* their suspended body?

January 15, 2008 at 10:20 AM
Marc said...

If we did use video recording and if we made the cable (and background) a specific color like blue or green (or even black though that means nothing on the x-tronauts can be black), we could use a chromakeyer to make the cables disappear as well as add whatever we want behind the x-tronauts. This might be useful in making an astronaut antigravity training video.

It would be even cooler to chroma key in real-time, but the hardware to do that can be pricey. There are a couple affordable boxes on ebay second hand. Having this would allow us to film anyone (including audience) in front of a colored wall and project into another room the video of them with something else behind them. We could even do the weathercaster thing where they could see themselves on a sidescreen.

January 15, 2008 at 4:03 PM
djbrokenwindow said...

I bet you could find a chromakey software/hardware solution that would end up the cheapest.
One thing I noticed about the first Bowie video (Julie's post) was that they show him with the camera at a 45 degree angle and not showing the floor. waving his arms around, you get that basic loss of context that leaves you arriving at a sense of he's-got-no-gravity. It is a cheap effect, but interesting film editing trick.

I wonder if the chromakey thing worked, then putting two different layers of people in one frame might just negate any residual gravity-esque moments, esp if the cameras were at different angles to their subjects. I bet some electric fans might help fabric drift a little, too.

Chromakey!! Can't wait to see it!
I think it requires a little careful lighting to make the blue work... yay!!!

Again, it would be cool to do it in a baffling non-video way, even just for a moment. That is the thing: when you confuse a sense of the direction of up and down (gravity) for a viewer just long enough that they can't orient where 'real' gravity is, you basically suspend belief long enough to create the illusion. The longer the viewer looks and picks up on consistent up/down clues, the more the illusion is dispelled. My theory, at least...YMMV (your mileage may vary)

January 15, 2008 at 9:29 PM
djbrokenwindow said...

Come to think of it, there is probably some deceptive choreography to figure out here. IOW, how does a person in a harness and bluescreen/chromakey move their arms and legs such as to obsfucate the true direction of gravity?
??
Technically, an excellent fake-no-gravity dance move would have something like one leg touching the ground and the other limbs distractingly "floating", at best. hmm.

January 15, 2008 at 9:32 PM
Marc said...

In fact, Julie has already shown us how effective an anti-gravity walk can be. It works quite well and seems to be mainly about drawing the viewer's eyes away from the floor, making the arms and face (and sometimes one of the legs) very expressive while keeping the planted leg more static so it can be ignored.

I agree that finding a way to perform it live would be so much cooler than a video effect. I imagine it might be effective to have one person in a room harnessed and one person using the space-walking technique. Then add a rear-wall projection of something to help disorient the viewer slightly. On top of that, if we put the viewer in another room looking into the "anti-gravity" room through a little window, it would allow us to control the viewing angle very precisely.

January 16, 2008 at 10:12 AM
Marc said...

You know what might work too is putting the audience on their backs looking up and harnesses astronauts above them. You could project a background on the ceiling. Of course this would require a much taller room than we have.

January 16, 2008 at 10:26 AM

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