POLYGONS

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POLYGONS is a personal custom installation work dedicated to the jazz fusion genre, starring Himiko Kikuchi’s song, “Look Your Back!”

The Final Product

The production of this project involved a few programs. To be specific, Adobe Illustrator was used for creating the character assets, TouchDesigner was used for creating the dynamic backgrounds, Adobe After Effects was used for animating and compositing, and MadMapper was used for properly setting up the projection work in this four-panel installation (which can be seen on the right side in the video.)

Behind the Scenes

Creating a Pipeline

First things first, the best way to start a multi-panel installation such as this one, would require a pipeline that can get all the assets rendered out and portrayed on our physical space.

To start, we need to create the assets in Illustrator. I like to use lots of reference, such as models on Pinterest and design aesthetics I can find with Google and DuckDuckGo image searches. Surprisingly, Google’s relative image search can be extremely beneficial at times.

Design-wise, when forming compositions for projections, it’s incredibly important to note the shape and forms we’ll be projecting on. I keep this as a blocked out template in both Illustrator (to make sure the characters fit within a frame) and After Effects (to make sure the characters don’t unintentionally cross composition frames.)

Part of the reason I enjoy this step of the process is because we often get very different types of compositions to work with, and we can make the separate forms work together to form a cohesive idea.

When the art assets were finished with the creation phase, I moved to After Effects to begin creating these composition concepts, and it was very fun to play around with.

Now either I have extreme OCD, or I just always tend to organize my layers. I treat them like files in my computer — I want to know where to find them when I need.

This way, using references on a separate layer, I can create paths to form shapes and keep each character I create on a separate layer. This tremendously helps the animation process and makes our pipeline seamless between Illustrator to After Effects.