Technical: Planned projection setup

Some of these details - such as seating and throw distance-  can't really be worked out yet until we know more about our venue. We are also still unsure about the idea of projecting onto the floor, but you can see there is about half a metre of floor projection on this image.

The Catipoce Car Concept

Here's a re-hash of the old car piece I did a while back, better suited to the Noir theme of our Catipoce style.

Joiner Scene Concepts

We've pretty much only just started exploring ideas for the joiner scenes. We need punchy little scenarios full of illusions and well-timed animation. More on this subject later...

Garden boy

Drew up a sketch of a garden boy,

I've been looking at 1950's style childrens illustrations and they have a lot of limited colour and out of line colouring styles.. So I thought I'd play around a bit. : >

I know his clothes aren't 1950's.. but all will be revealed!

Lady In black.

Drew up a ghostly old lady in cloak for the Millers End poem we've been looking at,

Then I stole Jack's BG and put it behind her with a nice blueish filter. : >

Miller's End Concept

Is it a ghost?

Who knows. Now, how do I make a garden look like it's from the 1940s, in a subtle way?

Catty concepts

Drawing some more Catipoce concept art.. If you don't know already I love cats. Big fat cats with funny squishy faces. So I'm having fun drawing up concept art for this character. : >

However We aren't sure how we want the creature to fare on the scare-o-meter.. The poem says that people are taken in by its charm and cuteness.. but its also a thing of terror..

So.. cute and dangerous? Hrmm.

Sai Noir

Playing around in Sai painter today and did a Film Noir-y style piece, just playing with colour and painting style - Just a sketchy piece but its a start!

I hardly ever do environment stuff, its a little scary and big for me -But I will prevail, I wanna be able to do some tasty backgrounds!

The Catipoce.

Read an awesome poem this week called the Catipoce.

Me and Jack have been discussing theme and genre and we thought Film Noir or B-movie horror would be cool-beans.

So I made some font tests and a little doodle of the catipoce.. but I don't know how I want his leggy bits to look like yet - possibly lizard legs, or caterpillar.. or tentacles. . Who knows!

on a side note, I downloaded Sai Painter and its lovely.. I have been drawing on it most of the week, harr.

More Concept Art

Some of these images have made me realise how important it will be for us to really get the BLACKEST BLACK in our projected images. True black will mean we can make parts of us invisible, in theory.

We also realise that in order to effectively have a foot of projection on the floor, the floor space should be covered in a material that is the same colour as the wall.

(look at the floor near the headlights on the car picture - I painted it white, but you can't make dark blue any whiter than dark blue!)

I think perhaps one of those seamless wall-floor screens that photography studios use would probably work well, as then it would be up to us to decide where the line is...if we even want a line, of course.

Disco dancing.

Playing around with lighting techniques in concept art, thus disco dancing... with cats.



I went on from this to play around with animation in Photoshop and did a rough test of the cat dancing.. I love colouring and layering in Photoshop but animation gets a little fiddly.. but I guess like anything it takes time to get used to.

His name is Claude.

Jeffrey Lewis

Here's a fantastic low-tech story-telling performance - just shows how you don't need fancy gadgets to tell a good story - just simple, captivating narrative and style.


Jeffrey Lewis & Champion Jim from trashcan on Vimeo.


We however will be using technology, but we don't want to compromise on storytelling.

Concept Art

It has been a little while since we really had things moving on here, but, well, we're going to have to dig down soon, aren't we?
So, back in Bristol and with the complete absence of a projector, we have decided to focus on the story and artistic side of things without having to worry about lumens or calibration.

After checking out the ins and outs of our new residence, we have found some useful places for practice and rehearsal (and, strangely enough, this place has an 'indoor garden' - you really have to see it to believe it...). We found a nice little room near a fire escape that looks like it has been largely undisturbed since the '70s, with a whitewashed wall.

Today we set up the camera in the room, put on our greys and did a few 'concept' scenarios. The idea is that we photograph ourselves in basic scene ideas and then layer on some art in Photoshop mainly using multiply layers to create a similar effect to a projected image. The layer of the original photograph isn't edited at all - we just slap stuff on top of it.

See our legs?

Nice UNITE carpet too.

The point of all this is to try some different styles, colour palettes and scenes, and also continue to think about what would be feasible with a projected image. Of course the scenes we are building in this concept art are exaggerations of the capabilities of a projected image - the image would be thrown slightly by our bodies, the brightness levels would be different and also from a live audiences' perspective it would be considerably harder to create the illusion - plus...these images don't move! Plenty of food for thought... 

Some of Livvy's art to follow shortly...

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