Final Project

For my final project I assisted Patrick on Rhino as a technologist.  Some of my duties included finding the two large rental TVs as well as creating the Logician's Drawings that were to appear on the TVs.  I also helped find a few of the commercials that were viewed during the first scene shift.  My major duty was mounting, positioning, focusing, and controlling the three data projectors, each with their own challenge.  

The first challenge was creating projection as large as the cyc.  We tried two other setups before determining that we needed to bounce two projectors off of two mirrors to create a 45' wide projection.  The hardest part about this setup was blending the two projectors.  Because there are so many variables (various distances, zoom, lens shift, height, air movement of they cyc, etc...) it was hard to blend the images.  We finally resorted to putting a wide dark line were the images were blending.  This was after I used tape on the mirrors to shutter cut the projectors to match.  Another issue with this setup was how to black out he projectors.   The dowsers that we have were too tall and would have created a shadow on the cyc, so we ended up dropping the full black curtain in front of the mirrors to black out the bounce.  

The second  challenge was projecting on the wall in the final bedroom scene.  We ended up mounting the Barco on a down pipe off of a line set so that we could fly it in only when we needed it.  Through the use of keystoning and the creative use of blackwrap and gaff tape, I was able to crate a mask so that the projector only projected on the wall.  The other issue with the Barco was that while it did contain a shutter, it was a chop shutter not a dowser shutter.  This meant that the image was either on or off, there was no fading between the two.  To solve this issue, Patrick added a black fader to Jitter so that the operator could fade in and out the projector.  Once the image was faded out, the internal shutter was used to block the projector black.