Blog 7
Week 7
After our midterm presentations, the next thing for me to do was to finish the lighting for the project. I wanted to try and finish the lights for the top portion of the project. One piece of feedback I have received has been to add movement to the piece. This not only makes it more dynamic, but helps the light reflect off of more objects. This will highlight the different aspects of the project more than before.
I wasn’t sure at first how to add the lights to the sculpture rings at the top of the project. I wanted the lights to fade from white to a color, so I tried adding a gradient to a spotlight and then pointing it at the objects. This did not work as intended. The colors would constantly get flushed out by the white light, and they did not blend well. My solution to this was to use two different lights, one for the white and another for the color. This worked really well, you can see the white and colors super clearly and it gives off the effect that I wanted. The different rings being different sizes made it difficult to set up the lights for each layer as the brightness needed to be adjusted, but I eventually got it all evened out. For the movement I added a cube that circles the main dome, and have started experimenting with particles that fall from the sky. These are interesting on their own, but also add to the experience with the colors.
For this week's work, the light and space artists I have previously looked at were not as helpful. I had to dig into new artists and my previous experience to help drive some of the choices I made. I wanted the movement to feel simple enough not to distract from the lighting, but be present enough where they didn’t feel unnecessary.
I think that inspiration struck when thinking about this balance. I wanted to make the particles feel like rain or snow, gently falling but beautiful to look at. I think that his comparison helped me when considering the specifics for the particles. I did not want them to have a color so they could reflect the environment light. I also made them fall slowly so they don’t overwhelm the viewer. This also helped when choosing the size and shape of the particles. For the moving block, I started with the simplest thing I could think of then stuck to it. I made a cube and made it move between 4 points. I then rounded out the movement between the points to make a circle. I then added a simple rotation to the cube for all 3 axes. I ended up liking the original design so much that I kept it.
