Behind the scenes of the Trailerpark Festival

This weekend I got an email from Lasse Andersen a.k.a. Same Same, a fellow visualist from the Dark Matters collective in Copenhagen. He was pushing their last video from the Trailerpark Festival 2011 but since it was so freaking nice I asked him a bit about how it was made and about the people involved in the project.

Throughout the video you see visuals created by Dark Matters and Hvass & Hannibal using VDMX and Modul8. Two visual styles that comes together very nicely.

[00:00 – 00:51] This is a good display of the interaction created by Yoke. The box with the two circular holes contains a Kinect that tracks hand movements. These movements are used for controlling 10 interactive compositions that could put on top of other visuals. The hands controls the worms, the big bouncing balls, etc. If you look later at [01:34] you’ll see a nice bulge effect applied as well. OpenFrameworks and OpenNI was used to process the tracking data from the Kinect and Unity 3D was used to create the interactive scenes.

[01:48 – 02:06] I really like how the different sections of the set are made to look like they are moving. It looks great with the abstract patterns but it really gets uncanny at [01:58] where you can’t even spot the lines of the set anymore. I was discussing with Lasse whether it was a just a lucky coincidence due to the way it was filmed but he pointed out that it’s also because the anatomy imagery is so bright and busy that it fools they eye.

Here’s a video of the rehearsal showing the bulge effect.

The set was constructed by Bo Benzon at Arkitektur Ministeriet. It’s made out of 50 plywood pieces (122×244 cm) and was designed in 3D and cut on an CNC router machine. The one ton set was assembled on the floor and it took 20 people to erect it.

The group spent about 750 hours putting this together including the four days of live projection at the festival.