Floor Projection

One idea that came later in the process of designing and thinking about assets to project was a looping video that would project onto the floor. I thought this would be a great idea as it adds a little flair and interest just as you walk through the door that would attract attention and engagement from everyone immediately. However, I was aware that it could easily be annoying and tedious if it looped very quickly and was bombarded with movement. So with that in mind I set about creating an interesting, engaging yet subtle piece to project onto the floor in front of the main entrance and this is what I came up with:

I think it turned out really well. The black background means that no light will be projected there essentially making the black space transparent. this makes it so that only the elements in colour will show up on the floor. 

I wanted to go with a simple, handmade sort of style with it. This style has been present with all the video assets I have created. They all have a tactile, physical aesthetic and tone what with the sounds of paper and rustling that is tied into each of them. With that in mind I wanted to make it look as though all the text was written on and then rubbed out. Either that or physically placed into the scene. This goes along with all the stings used in this piece as well. They all appear in an organic manor and disappear in that way too. There are no fades or impossible effects. They are all physical and tactile.

With that in mind I wrote the text out using my chosen font and then used a stroke effect to make it appear as though it had been written on. I used the pen tool to tract out a quick path that would cover the whole sentence. I then made it only have a black stroke wide enough to cover the pixels that made up the word. And then went into the shape options at the top of the screen and added a "Trim Paths" effect. This added a start and end property to the stroke that could be manipulated with keyframes. I then simply had to animate the start keyframe from 0% to 100% and that would create the effect of the line moving along its own path until it reached the end where it took up no pixels. This would be slowly revealing the word in an organic manor and create the illusion of it being written on by hand.

This same technique was used to create the erasing effect. A much thicker stroke was drawn on with the pen tool in a zig-zagged line. This was then animated in the same way except this time I animated the stroke on instead of off. This meant that as the stroke came into being it slowly wiped the text off the screen. It is a simple effect that didn't take much time to set up yet really added a lot of depth and realism to the motion and a lot of life to the text. When motion blur and subtle amount of fast blur were added as well it really finished it all off and made it look really nice.

Once again I am really happy with how this came out. Two minutes I think is a perfect amount of time. It isn't so short as to become annoying and tedious yet also isn't too long so that some visitors miss the points of interest. It is engaging enough throughout without becoming annoying which is a fine balance but one that I think I managed to strike well.