Here is the final contraption in the gallery. I would say that it matches how I had envisioned it in the concept very well.
There are a few things I didn't quite foresee when creating the concept though, like the fact that something spinning right in front of your face can make you a bit dizzy. I think it helped when people were able to step back a bit and look through the viewfinder.
For the Base, I ended up getting an umbrella base like this:
I bought a wooden dowel that fit into the base, and drilled a 3/8 inch hole into the top of the dowel. Black tape was wrapped around the dowel for greater aesthetic appeal.
I stuck and metal rod though a wheel similar (but not the same) to the one below, and drilled four holes around the circumference so skinny metal rods could stick into the wheel and be able to now spin.
Tent poles were stuck together to form a ring which was then places atop the metal rods. This formed a circular structure to which the printed paper was formed around. Once all 51 of the images were finished, they were compiled within a .PSD file and printed on one long piece of paper.The paper was then attached to the tent poles with tape and the contraption was nearly complete.
Hwaryoung suggested I make a device that restricted vision to all but one frame at a time. After I mapped out the dimensions, she was able to get two pieces of plastic laser cut for the viewing device.
Here was the sketch I started with. It's obviously very loose, as I knew I would be changing it lots as I started to add value in and I didn't want to spend too much time on details that would be erased anyway.
Here I've started to add color and value in. As you can see, I was largely focused with making it clear that there is one bright house that sort of "spreads" the life and color of the painting.
Here is the final image. The composition changed drastically, I felt like it was lacking depth and could get a lot more interesting. I think the foreground element helped a little with it, and it also allowed me to throw in a bit of atmosphere.
Inspired by photos of slums from around the world, I decided to create a concept of color and plants radiating out of one house within a drab slum. I started by looking for good reference of the kinds of densely packed living situations I would try and show.
Here's the basic (see-through) concept for the contraption, people will be able spin the little rods and make the whole thing spin around, therefore seeing the animated progress of the art creation.
My aim is for somebody to be able to stand inside it and control the viewing of the images themselves. I figure they can spin it as quickly or slowly as they wish to best suit their viewing experience.
Scientific and technological research has increasingly focused on marketable ideas that effect the bottom line rather than pursue ideas that can have just as profound an impact on people but may not be as profitable. Many applications of emerging technologies are not being pursued and many valuable ideas are discarded because they are riskier or seem less promising than those that can bring in more revenue.
This leaves an opportunity for artists to pursue research topics that haven't really been able to get traditional funding. Artists often have unique skills and perspectives that research can benefit from, so they should inject themselves more into scientific fields rather than commenting from the sideline. Artists in residency programs have traditionally been a good way for greater collaboration between artists, scientists, and engineers, but modern artist-researchers should continue to be creative in their exploration of modern scientific pursuits.
Below is a rendered video of the fruit, though I want to try and render with different settings to get rid of some of the specular pops that keep coming up on the lime.
To blend it a bit better with the background I did what's called a "light wrap". It basically blurs the fruit just a little on the edges so it doesn't appear as a completely separate element (which it is because I rendered the scene on 3 different layers). A good tutorial for creating a light wrap in AE can be found here: http://lesterbanks.com/2012/01/create-a-simple-light-wrap-in-after-effects/
The 3 render layers I used were the fruit, the table, and the background. To simulate depth of field in after effects, I first created a gradient like this in photoshop:
In after effects I added a lens blur to my table layer, then attached the above gradient as a mask. This allows the table to be blurred where the white is and remain in focus where the black is.
I also rendered out the fruit with plain grey shaders so I could show the models without any color. In after effects, I just turned down the opacity on the colored fruit to reveal the black and white.
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