Building blocks

For one week only we had full run of the biggest workspace at Chelsea, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our strongest idea for the motion graphics project involved building a miniature city so we started with that in mind and decided to see where it took us.

We collected a large number of cardboard boxes which we subsequently assembled into some form of representative city.


The next stage was to play with projecting imagery onto the boxes to see what effects we could achieve. One successful test involved hooking up a camcorder to feed back live the image of the 'city' against the plain background, to give the impression of it being endless.



We decided to see if it was possible to project a different film onto each of the different surfaces - to resize video clips and have many playing simultaneously, through the same projector, from the same master file. This way, we could create a moving miniature city.

We collected over 35 individual minute-long clips of London scenes, featuring both moving or static subjects. Having connected the projector to a laptop, we used Final Cut to create a composite video file with most of the clips arranged in sizes and positions that allowed each one to marry up with particular boxes. This was painstaking but by the end we had 25 clips projecting onto 25 boxes.