Arch 443/646: Architecture and Film
unsilent night cambridge 2010 - student video projects
In Fall 2010 the students taking Arch 443/646: Architecture and Film, taught by Professor Terri Meyer Boake, undertook to create the major video installation pieces for the City of Cambridge Unsilent Night. This included projections on the CIBC Bank wall across from the School, projections at Cambridge City Hall and the complete "Fremont" type experience along Melville Street.
The Cambridge City Hall and CIBC projections were achieved using pairs of Christie Digital "Roadster" projectors with superimposed images to achieve the brightness over the distance. Smaller projectors were used for the video projections at the School. The installations in the windows of the student lounge were achieved by projecting on the windows that were simply covered with tracing paper. The interactive piece in the shop used Christie Digital Microtiles and Apple Photobooth to engage the Unsilent Night participants.
The video installation links will take you out to YouTube to watch their films. Most have been uploaded in 1080i HD quality, so please check the settings when you initiate play. Enjoy!
INTRO PIECE:
Sponsor Credit Animation - Alexandra Boake
CITY HALL UNWRAPPED - Terri Meyer Boake
View on YouTube
CREEPY CRAWLY SHOWDOWN - Alexandra Boake
View on YouTube
DUCKY SAVES THE HOLIDAYS - Nicole Bruun-Meyer, Andrea Nagy, Sophia Zhu
View on YouTube
RETRO X-MAS - Andrew Dadds, Peter Kitchen, Mark Kim
View on YouTube
GINGERBREAD HOUSE - Elaine Chau, Anne Cheung, Lisa Wong, Ying Xu
View on YouTube
BOXMAN ADVENTURE - Renee Liu, Yifei Yuan, Bei Wang, Sophia Wu
View on YouTube (second video in this set)
SKETCH - James Strong, Nick Savage, and David Domanski
View on YouTube
CHRISTMAS LIGHTS - Connor O'Grady, Andrew Ng, Jay Zhao, Stephen Wenzel
The video for this installation was "flipped" 180 degrees to reflect the original intent of the authors to precisely reflect the interior of the lounge. It was difficult to work with a film that had to be broken into two halves, split in the middle by the brick pier. The image reflects the reality of the performance. The window mullions and impossible to sync computers made this one more challenging to run for the evening.
View on YouTube.
VIRTUAL VILLAGE - Eric Tai, Carlo Pasini
This installation made interesting use of our Christie Digital Microtiles. The tiles were used to line the interior of the ground floor window of the school. Continuing with the theme of "dual-space interaction", they compiled footage of major world winter, Christmas, and New Year's events, and overlayed the live footage on top of the events. Backgrounds included New Year's Fireworks in Sydney and Hong Kong 2010, Dundas Square during Canada's gold medal game against the United States in the 2010 Winter Olympics, Christmas in Florida's Disneyworld, the Christmas tree lighting at New York's Rockefeller Center, and some downtown Christmas light decorations from London, England.
Almost everybody that walked by waved at the camera, many took photos which made it look like they were tourists in the respective background, and many made fun gestures that were unrelated to the background. A few people took the time to "study" the background footage and took the time to position themselves to interact with it--say, making it look like fireworks were shooting out of their head, or flailing about with a giant shining star on your head. We feel this was mostly due to the generally fast passing by of the Unsilent Night participants--as part of such a big crowd, it did not seem that they had enough time to get into the video.
Nevertheless, there was a great general public impression, the kids, in particular, loved it, many lingered around with their friends to play and experiment with the setup. Although not to the degree we would have liked, we definitely achieved our goal of getting people to interact in two spaces simultaneously. We also thought it was great that so many people were able to see and get photographs of themselves participating in an installation.
View on YouTube.
Some press from the night:
http://www.cambridgereporter.com/news/article/226167
http://www.therecord.com/videozone/304852