The concept
This project is a visual installation achieved with projection mapping. A variety of visuals are cycled on a plain head sculpture giving an illusion of it being alive and magical.
Depending on the interaction with the installation, a different character, or “mood” of the totem would wake up and talk. The content of the speech went through several ideas with most successful being totem sharing a proverb tied to it’s “mood”.
The project was created in a team of three people. I was responsible for the entirety of the projection and technical setup. The sound design and recording was done by Dominykas Kaukėnas and the sculpture itself was created by Domantas Jurevičius.
Interaction
In the beginning, the interaction happened through three capacitive buttons. A person could charge desired “mood” by holding the appropriate button. Matching visuals and sound were made to make it feel tactile.
Releasing the button too early would gradually fade the totem to neutral state.
Later I made installation activated with voice. I tied each mood to a specific voice pitch range so that people would have to maintain a hum of a specific pitch to charge up the desired mood of the totem.
Face animations
From the beginning I rigged all of the face features to be animated by hand, including a variety of mouth poses. Pressed by shortage of time the quality of animations suffered.
Later I decided to experiment with native face tracking in After effects and apply tracked data to the mouth and features of the face.
Later I decided to experiment with native face tracking in After effects and apply tracked data to the mouth and features of the face.
Even though I successfully tied tracked data to the face, I found it was time consuming to set up the rig so it gets the most out of face tracking. Animations done by hand also had potential to be more energetic and expressive.
Animations in this Behance presentation were done by hand since there's little to no footage of the totem in real world where it had mostly face tracked animations.
Structure of the project
