SarahB

Sparks

Animation short by Josep Prat Sorolla effectively employs primary colours and minimal geometric representation:

Sparks is a personal and experimental animation project about the collision between color, geometry, chaos and order. 

• THE STRUCTURE OF NATURE •

Calvin & Hobbes: the big bang

Project by Gabriel de Laubier turns a comic strip into an interactive 3D scene:

3D rendition of a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip (orginal strip by Bill Watterson). Backface culling and flat-shading are used to give life to the cartoon drawings. You can see it in realtime on Sketchfab 

Shadow Theatre

Computer graphics research from Jungdam Won and Jehee Lee can calculate human poses required to create desired silhouettes for performances:

Shadow theatre is a genre of performance art in which the actors are only visible as shadows projected on the screen. The goal of this study is to generate animated characters, the shadows of which match a sequence of target silhouettes. This poses several challenges. The motion of multiple characters are carefully coordinated to form a target silhouette on the screen, and each character’s pose should be stable, balanced, and plausible. The resulting character animation should be smooth and coherent spatially and temporally. We formulate the problem as nonlinear constrained optimization with objectives, which were designed to generate plausible human motions. Our optimization algorithm was primarily inspired by the heuristic strategies of professional shadow theatre actors. Their know-how was studied and then incorporated into our optimization formulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of target silhouettes and 3D fabrication of the results.

Work In Progress Gif Series by Sarah Brown

“Textured canvas with breezy leaf. This diptych captures the surround sound play of light and shadow from the sun, and in the gif, movement of the natural world from air currents. There are always 2 stories: the moving, evolving story and the moment in time story.” 

What are you working on right now? Click here to submit studio shots of your work-in-progress. We share our favourites every week here and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using #AkimboConnects.

John Paul George & Me

Musical project by studio any features tshirts for kids with capacitive touch print designs to be played like instruments:

Addressing the topic of interactive wearable textiles, project “JOHN PAUL GEORGE & ME” is a collection of wearable musical instruments for kids. Each T-shirt represents a specific instrument and all together form a rock ensemble. Through the seemingly “magical” clothes that produce sound by touch, the project brings to children an interactive musical game, encouraging and stimulating their musical interest as well as their collaboration with each other to perform music. The project is a collection of T-shirts, inspired by and designed after the standard rock trio, that includes guitar, bass and drums. Each shirt has a distinct pattern, based on the attributes of the instrument it represents. The patterns were silk-screen printed, on plain T-shirts, with conductive paint. This electrically conductive paint is a flexible, washable textile chemical mixture which is non-toxic and water soluble. Each shape forms a uniform conductive space, sensitive to touch.

A microcontroller attached in a removable pocket in the back of each garment, is connected to the shapes with conductive thread and senses the touches. The signals produced, are in turn sent to a mobile application via Bluetooth LE (Low Energy). The application itself is multi-platform and runs on both Android and iOS devices. Its purpose is to receive the touch signals wirelessly and playback sound in real-time. Multiple T-shirts can be connected to a single mobile device, or each band member can use their own. The device can be connected with headphones and external speakers to amplify the sound output.