Stylus, Putting Style Back in Projection Mapping

Urban Projections are run by multimedia artist & facilitator Bec Smith. As well as facilitating commercial clients and projects, they also spend a large chunk of their time developing creative projects which encourage participation in the arts and promote social change. For a number of years Bec has been working alongside talented graffiti and modern mural painter Peter Barber of Urban Canvas (no ‘urban’ relation intended), developing interesting methods for combining their art-forms.

“Initially this began with incorporating elements of Pete’s drawn work into Resolume, via pre-produced content from After Effects, which were then triggered live. This was great, especially for more complex projection mapped pieces, such as Bloom, but missed the point of why we love to collaborate - we both get a buzz from not knowing how a piece will turn out, from creating something live which lets us both bounce of each other, right there and then in a moment”.



They had been making digital murals with the early, DIY versions of Tagtool and Node kit, dragging it out onto the streets and surprising local folk with dancing characters and shapes on the side of buildings. “It was a little cumbersome though, especially with the amount of hardware needed to run it. In early Autumn of 2012, we heard that Omai were developing an ipad version of the drawing system, so contacted Maki from Tagtool, who was only too happy to supply us with a pre-release Beta version of the app. Amazingly, it lets multiple ipads connect wirelessly and all collaborate into one drawing session. We quickly realised that combined with Airserver and Resolume’s syphon compatibility, we could now pipe Tagtool into Arena, allowing us to mask, crop, map and add pre-produced content with real precision....and all in a really compact package”.

That was the start of a beautiful thing. Without further ado, they set to work combining physically painted artwork with projection and digital drawing, breathing life and movement into still image.

“We tend to approach this technique by having a really simplified guide which Pete uses as his template to paint from, onto the wall. We flash up a basic line drawing and Pete takes it from there. I can then build a multitude of mapped masks and footage with the transparency preserved, to stack image elements on top of each other. I really love the versatility of resolume and tend to use the plug-ins and generators as much as possible to achieve the look, rather than pre-producing footage. This gives us more freedom for collaborating during the performance.

The first in the series of the ‘Stylus’ videos shows the early stages of their adventure with this technique.

“We are so excited by the possibilities that are being presented through the combination of traditional painting techniques with AV manipulation. We are flat out at the moment experimenting with new ideas and working towards some really exciting projects including loads more street artwork with mobile projection bikes, and an event at the Saatchi Gallery, London ”.

For more information, check out http://www.urbanprojections.com & http://www.urbancanvas.co.uk