After a couple of long and busy weeks of teaching, I have another chance to sit down and devote time to this project. It has actually been useful for me to drop in to the H.T. rehearsals sporadically and let different thoughts and ideas emerge at their own pace. This post will contain a handful of thoughts, tests and potential directions.
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Idea 1 - Dancer transforms in and out from Solid to Light and Gas:
After talking with Ruby and Brad, I'm becoming attracted to the idea of the massive heat, chemical reactions and elemental forces stemming from volcanic activity. The fact that an eruption can create weather systems of their own is enough to fuel my interests in how human bodies can represent this illusive (chemical) power. During the last rehearsal that I attended, I shot some footage of Jason doing his skittering dance along a black backdrop. Below is the source footage, followed by a version where the human form slips in and out of recognizability and into color, heat and light. How it might fit in...I'm not sure. Perhaps can talk about this as a possible avenue.
"Spider Dance" - Jason from John park on Vimeo.
(SOURCE FOOTAGE)
Glow Test from John park on Vimeo.
Documentation Shot:
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Idea 2 - Algorithmic Expression of Stage Dynamism
There will be times when we may want the level of motion on the stage to either sync up with, or be in stark contrast to the levels of visuals in the video projection. One way to achieve this is to record the performace with a video camera and (in real time) use Processing to do what's called differencing. This takes the pixels from one frame and compares it to the next. By doing so, we can gauge how much the dancers are moving and get a number value that essential equates to their dynamism. This number can be used to slow-down or speed up video (frame-rate), affect the exposure of a still or moving image in the background, etc.
The bulk of the processing code has been made open-source by programming Guru Golan Levin. If you are running Processing and a webcam, you can run the following code:
http://processing.org/learning/libraries/framedifferencing.html
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