APM Week 5: Midterm, version 1

Concept

Right now, my concept for the LUMA festival projection project midterm is still a little hazy, but I like the direction I’m heading in.

In order to find inspiration to make a projection mapping story for this festival, I researched extensively into Binghamton, NY, where this annual projection mapping festival. This research yielded multiple findings. IBM was founded in Binghamton, and the city used to be a major transit hub. The upstate city also had a lot of other defense and tech companies start there, including the one that invented the Flight Simulator.

However, the most significant finding for me was that Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, hails from Binghamton and lived there for a lot of his life. He even based an episode, “Walking Distance,” on Binghamton, particularly grappling with his nostalgia for its past and needing to move on from his idyllic childhood there.

So, I created my design with The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling in mind. I want a surreal world that makes people reflect on our past, current societal situation, and the future. I feel this is in the spirit of the Serling and his work.

Sketch and Notes

I took notes as I researched Binghamton and Serling. Here they are below.

Based on these notes, I made a sketch/collage in Figma.

TouchDesigner, first take

I tried setting up some effects in TouchDesigner. I would like to include animations of objects from the past, present, and future (airplanes, military, wires/electronics, garments, shoes, etc.) coming out of each portal into another one. That might be too intense for this 20 second project. I need to simplify my look and put too many portals in, but here’s what I have as a rough draft.