Blurring the line between art and branding, bicoastal directing collective Brand New School teamed up with Adobe and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, to create a Flash-driven interactive wall mural featuring imagery that is motion-activated by nearby viewers. The wall went live Monday in London’s Piccadilly Circus following an installation at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, NYC.
As people walk by the 25’x10′ projection, layers of eye-popping graphics–triggered by the viewer’s movement–appear. The piece showcases Creative Suite 3’s library of effects, including Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, and other applications. It recently debuted at a launch party for CS3 that was held at Skylight, an 18,000 square foot gallery space located in the Soho district of Manhattan.
The murals are designed so that when a person walks from left to right, there’s an evolution from simplicity to complexity. As someone moves in that direction, more animations are triggered and the density of the imagery increases.
One interesting aspect of the project is that the advertising and the product are integrated: Brand New School used the product being sold to create the wall mural. “Each layer is inspired by the actual software,” said Jonathan Notaro, creative director/founder of Brand New School. “Something might look like it was made in Illustrator, and something else was a product of something you can do in Photoshop. This was an exploration in the aesthetics of what you can do in CS3. It’s a mixed media display that hits the different disciplines of image making and mixes all those things together in an intriguing way.”
Bicoastal Obscura Digital, along with Goodby and Adobe, developed the mural’s mechanism that tracks a person’s movement as they walk by. Studio For Interactive Media cofounder Justin Bakse, who acted as the action-based scripter, commented, “The mural knows to hone in on the person who is closest to it and disregard other information. The mechanism assigns people multiple layers of code that is used to create designs and put them in motion. The result is a dialogue between the person walking by and what’s happening on the projection screen.”
Hollywood Leaders, Theater Owners Gather For CinemaCon At A Critical Time In The Industry
The future of theatrical moviegoing is at a critical moment. More people have been going to movie theaters this year than last, but the foundation is delicate. Annual domestic box-office grosses are still down about 20% from pre-pandemic levels, competition from streaming has only intensified and there are very real worries about what consolidation might mean for the release schedule as Warner Bros. stares down new ownership under Paramount. It's under these precarious conditions that Hollywood executives and movie theater owners are gathering this week in Las Vegas for CinemaCon, the annual exhibition and trade show made famous — or at least slightly less obscure — by Seth Rogen's show "The Studio" and his "old school Hollywood buffet." Real-life Hollywood executives have bigger concerns than throwing a party, however. A critical time for movie theaters As "F1" and "Top Gun: Maverick" producer Jerry Bruckheimer said last week in a statement: "We are at a defining point in the future of this industry." Bruckheimer, "Oppenheimer" producer Emma Thomas and "Sinners" director Ryan Coogler are teaming up to do something about it. Just last week, Cinema United, the trade organization representing some 60,000 movie screens in the U.S. and abroad, announced that Bruckheimer would be chairing their newly established filmmaker leadership council, with Thomas as vice chair and Coogler as one of its inaugural members. Other members include Brad Bird, Celine Song and Jason Reitman, who will advise on issues facing theatrical moviegoing, including windows, referring to the number of days films play exclusively in movie theaters before being available to buy or rent at home, and consolidation. "Our industry is strongest when it works together... Read More