Nature is a beautiful thing---it needs no augmentation. But there’s a distinction between need and want, and after you watch the video below, you’re going to wish every forest came with its own built-in projection mapping rig.
In a new short film called Bioluminescent Forest, artists Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad (with music by Achim Treu) transform a forest outside of Stuttgart into a glowing, pulsating fairyland. Inspired by the natural bioluminescence of certain plants and animals, the team spent six weeks in the woods, infusing the scenery with man-made light.
With just a few projectors they were able to give frogs, caterpillars, tree leaves and mushrooms a dreamlike glow. In the short film you see leaves radiating with an orange glow, as though you’re watching the photosynthesis process in real time. Mushrooms sparkle, grass flickers, a spider web glistens with light. It’s like Fantasia 3.0.
In less deft hands, Bioluminescent Forest could have easily veered into visual overkill territory. But Van Schoor and Mawad kept it subtle, making smart use of the forest's natural motion and focusing their projections onto one subject at a time. You can watch a behind-the-scenes film, which shows how they achieved their precise mapping. Almost all of their work was done in-camera, which van Schoor modestly describes as "time consuming" (For proof: they tried projecting onto the toad 20 times before they finally got a usable shot). When executed skillfully, the magic in projection mapping is how it can suspend your sense of reality. Blades of grass don’t light up, tree bark doesn’t glow---this is clearly the work of technology. Yet there’s a certain part of our brains that lets us believe maybe this really is what happens when we’re not looking.
[h/t: Creator's Project]
