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. People of art, the directors of theaters, in some cases
. don't even understand, what mapping is.
Âut they want to make some special effects in theatre, they want to make beautiful video,
beautiful decorations and beautiful support to their stories.
So not all the projects that I will be showing today are really have something to do with mapping.
Some of them do, some don't, but I will speak about special effects in theatre.
And I want to say that interest to theatre now, by my feeling, is growing strong. It's reviving.
Directors always try to put some message inside.
I mean, it can be good or bad; it can be interesting, or it can be something you have seen already.
But, anyway, there is always a story behind and they want to tell sincere stories.
And what is interesting is that, in cinema, for example, storytelling is now going low.
Again, from my point of view, there is a lot of money and there is a lot of production.
But, sometimes, they don't even put anything inside. Thats why it's interesting to work with theaters,
because their budgets are much smaller, but the percentage of messages inside is much bigger.
A year and half ago we decided to start to do some mapping stuff as an art group,
not just like separate VJs, and occasionally at that time we met our friend, a director, Phillip Grigoryan.
He is a pretty famous young director, who is doing really visually interesting and crazy performances.
When we met, we just told him that we've started to do some mapping,
and probably it can be applied in theaters. He was immediately and totally up for it.
And he said, Ok, I don't know what you mean by mapping. I have no idea, but let's experiment.
Let's try to do something. It went out very interesting.
To begin with, after our first meeting he had to go somewhere.
He was out of reach, because he is really busy.
He is going around all Russia and Europe. And he invited all of us to meet in the virtual space,
in the space of the Second Life. Probably you know it. It's the virtual 3D space where you can log in,
and you are given a 3D doll. You can walk around, speak with other people, interact somehow.
And he is really a fan of it. He is crazy about it.
He said, OK, let's get all logged in, and meet in a special place.
I've built a scene, which I want to present you as a setup.
And I've built everything from 3D blocks in the Second Life.
I've built it on purpose, like 100 km above the earth, where nobody else can go.
So I will teleport you all there,
you just log in. That was really funny, because when we all came to the Second Life,
and we saw the scene… First of all, it was a very strange feeling.
The director appeared in a form of a teapot, and all other guys I know
came with strange appearances, like bugs. He started to show us the place where he wanted our video to go.
That was a very strange, but very constructive meeting,
after which we totally understood what he wanted us to do. And we started to work.
It was our first theatre project, so we had to invent some kind of technology
how to make it. Of course, we could do the videos and the content, but there were two tasks, at least.
We had to map it first; to have some software, which could map it on the decoration.
The second thing was that the performance should go like 3 times a month,
and we could not participate in each of them.
They could go to festivals. So we had to make some interface,
for lighting guys, for example, who could easily, without knowing much about how the software works, use it.
To map it in a simple manner, and then manipulate the timeline;
switch from one scene to another, and make a whole performance.
We decided to make it on the base of a Max/MSP patch, which was written by our programmer, Netzz.
He made it look a bit like this inside. Quite horrible.
But, finally, we managed to build an interface that was really simple, and looked like an Excel table.
So, there was just a timeline with lines:
one for the first scene, another for the second one, the third… and so on,
so you could just switch between them and go forward, make the performance.
To make a good mapping, we had to build a playground. We made a simple geometry to work with
and we made several tests.There was really good integration of video, light and costume design,
because the art director designed special dresses for performance and mapping also.
There was a special skirt that could be mapped. It had several forms,
like - a half circle, a full circle. It could be opened like this.
Here are the examples of how it looked in the tests.
So at certain moments the girl came out and opened the skirt half-way, and it was mapped.
Then she opened it to the full. And it was also mapped.
So, probably I will show you now the final video. How it looked.
Ok, that was the movie from the performance. And it went out quite good - everybody finally was happy:
the crew, who worked on it and people, who seemed to like the performance itself.
. By doing this we developed this program, that now
. we can use in the theaters.
And we started to use it more and more.
We have this simple interface, which makes it possible to ship it, finally,
to the users who can now easily control what's going on on stage.
The next project I would like to speak about is the project
we did for a really huge group of creators, who produced
the performance called Cops on Fire.
It is a very interesting and now very popular project in Moscow, because it was made
totally on a free initiative of a lot of people.
So, it was uncommercial and we've participated in it with no commercial interest,
because there was no money from the beginning. When we've met for the first time, they've said that
they've got a wonderful project, but no money. They were not going to pay anybody,
but if you were interested in, you could participate. And we did some mapping in the project.
We also did some video stuff. So we collaborated as artists,
trying to invent the effects that could be suitable in the project.
These were our first theatre projects,
and the directors really started to pay attention and show interest in how video technologies
could be used in the theatre now; and more and more people
started to call us and ask to participate in something.
And also commercial works started to appear.
So we did this project on the verge of commercial stuff, as it is done already for money.
. But, still it had a story inside. It was a presentation
. of Van Cleef&Arpels watches. They wanted to make it
. a romantic story, the story in the design of
their most successful watches.
For this project we tried to work with Catalyst (media-server), and it worked pretty well.
We made some photos of the setup, made a video and then Catalyst helped us to wrap it in the right place.
Our next project was dedicated to the anniversary of the victory in the World War II.
And it was really an experimental project, because… Normally we celebrate this Victory day on the 9th of May,
and it's a big holiday in Russia, but mostly everything you can see on TV
or in the city is very old-fashioned stuff, which hasn't
changed in the last 40-50 years. It is always the same: soldiers, flowers, ribbons…
And it was really interesting, when one of the modern directors,
Kirill Serebryannikov, invited us to make something really different.
He wanted not to say thanks to the war veterans,
but to remind everybody that war is actually a nightmare, a horrible thing.
So we came there as VJs.
. The setup was: a rear screen,
. and in front there was a net.
It was semi-transparent, so you could project on the front,
on the net, and there was a projection from the rear.
The music was written specially for this by Alexey Syumak,
a good composer, who totally re-made Mozart's Requiem.
It sounds very modern and the construction of the musical composition is very complicated.
So we had to vj with no beat, of course,
trying to feel the emotional side of music and express the idea of the director.
The next project I would like you to tell about is a project that called The Day Schedule.
. It was commissioned by Eduard Boyakov, a famous
producer in Moscow. That was a commercial project already, but still it is also an art project, because
that was a concert of Pekarsky Orchestra;
a very interesting composition that was so-called The Day Schedule and
written by Martynov, an experimental musician and composer, who made really wonderful music.
They wanted to support it with video somehow,
and when we started to think what could be a vj-ing for this type of music -
it's also, you know, a piece of a classical music with a very intuitive rhythm, not so easy to break
with a proper visual rhythm…
So, we finally made up a story of a day from a life of a politician, a guy, who works
in the government somehow. This is his schedule from the beginning, from the time he wakes up till the time
he goes to bed. But he doesn't go to bed, because in the end something happens.
His son, whom he ignored, got to hospital because of the drugs.
And that's what our business is all about. Because everything is developing really so fast,
we are trying different technologies, we are keeping track of what is going on… Trying different stuff
to finally make optimal decisions for exact setups.