Just wanted to post that my current project, A Show of Hands, will be projected this weekend as part of the Dumbo Art Festival. It'll be projected onto the exterior of the old Empire Stores building, overlooking Brooklyn Bridge Park, by the river.  Just near the intersection of Main St & Plymouth St.

Please come by and say hello if you're nearby on Saturday evening! 

I've been meaning to post these videos for months, but just never got round to it...

Late last year, I was immensely flattered when John Reaves, Alyce Dissette and Hal Eagar asked me if I would be interested in collaborating with photographer Janet Sternburg in creating a multimedia exhibit for the Seoul Institute of the Arts.  Of course I said yes, and by January 2009, I was getting deep into design research.

As part of this process I tried to identify a good transparent projection screen.  In the end we didn't go with this kind of projection design, however, without going into too much detail about why, here's some rough video tests I did.  Apologies for the shaky handheld camera (I was in a rush, and working by myself), but hopefully these videos might be a resource for someone else doing similar research.  

This one shows tests with an acrylic screen made by Da-Lite.  I wasn't too impressed with this one... Low contrast, and didn't deal with ambient light very well. This product definitely wasn't going to be good enough to show Janet's photography on...
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Here's some photos of another project that I started work on during my DPI residency.  Again, this was made possible with DPI equipment.  The photos were taken by Monica Ruzansky in August 2008, when I was projecting onto a building just off of St Marks Place in the East Village.  These are very early sketches of a project that I will continue to develop over the next year.

I put some documentation online from the Giants projections that I shot at DPI.  You can see it here: www.edpurver.com/giants_light.html

Here's a still from the projections on Dean St last month...  Along with a screenshot of the movie that was playing across all the windows...  I made a quick patch in max so that I could keyframe vertices to keystone the three different projectors beyond their natural capacities.

And I keep forgetting to mention that we're having an informal showing of the video that I've shot at DPI.  It's being projected inside the building at 983-A Dean St this Saturday, 26th July.  It's designed to be viewed from the street.  The building is in the middle of the block between Franklin and Classon (nearest subway C train to Franklin Ave).  

Weather permitting, Monica Ruzansky (www.monicaruzansky.com) will be projecting her beautiful photography on the surrounding architecture and up on the roof, where we'll be hanging out and having drinks with anyone who wants to drop by and join us from 9pm onwards.  Hope to see you there!

Last week I did a shoot at DPI with my friends Ariel Efron, Andrew Schneider and Katherine Behar. I went ahead with the setup that I previously described - which is two Panasonic DVX HD cameras shooting through a piece of non-glare plexiglass, with two overlapping retroreflective screens providing the background.  Both cameras were mounted with green led rings to provide a green screen effect.

 The plexi has a matte coating which reduces reflected light, which I thought would be essential in order to prevent the lighting being seen in the camera lens.  However, I discovered that this is more about angle and position of lights and camera than anything else, and the matte non-glare coating makes everything look slightly soft-focus - almost like someone has put vaseline on the lens.  Not what I wanted, but not a disaster, either.  It actually makes the HD video look a little softer and grainier and more like film, so that's really a question of aesthetic.

I tried using a polarizing filter to reduce reflected light, but of course, this just prevents the light from the led's bouncing back and providing a green background, so that was a bad idea.

Anyway, I spent the weekend working in After Effects with the content that we shot. The key is an easy pull (using Keylight), however, there are some slightly dicy shadows around some edges.  This is because of the angles of the lights that were necessary to avoid reflection.  However, I think it's manageable in this context, although would need a lot more work if it was for broadcast.

 
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