Deeper Focus - Oil Pastel Landscape

The final part of the experimental process was to get the landscape moving in the oil pastel medium.

In order to accomplish this I reserved a room for myself and set up a projector that connected to my laptop. I advanced my reference animation frame by frame and aimed the projector at a particular portion of the wall. I then set up a camera directly above the projector so that it was facing the same piece of wall. I set up lights on either side of the wall at (roughly) 45 degree angles. A layer or orange paper was taped down with a large acetate sheet taped over that.

The paper taped to the wall with oil pastel being applied.

The projection over the oil pastel layer.

I was originally using animation that was very light in colour but I found that I needed to re-render my reference animation so that all the blades of grass were high contast from each other. Leaving them yellow or green simply didn't work on the projector regardless of how much fiddling I did with the projector contrast levels.

Panorama of the workspace - 2 computers, 1 projector, 1 camera, etc.

The animation process itself was smooth but I will recommend that anyone trying a project-against-a-wall system should think carefully about how high they place their paper in relation to their height. I found that the paper was set up a bit too low for standing comfortably. 

Unfortunately I only managed to get 10 frames finished due to time constraints. Each frame took between 20 and 30 minutes to colour so the work was fairly tedious. I wish I had more time so that I could have finished the loop but at least this gives me an impression of how well this concept can be executed.

Pastel Grass from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.