anamorphic animation
If you’re a blog reader of a certain age that is close to my age, I’ll need to head you off at the pass: we aren’t talking about this today. Sorry for the false alarm pictured above, but every time I use the word “anamorphic,” that is what comes to mind. If you have no idea what this is, I’m sorry and also you’re welcome.
Are you Very Online™?
Then maybe you’ve seen a video of one of these digital billboards…
…and wondered, “Wow, how do they do that?”
We wondered, too, how you make a flat board look decidedly un-flat, with the vague idea that it was something we might do in the future…and then one of our clients asked us to do that. It wasn’t the first nor last massive technical challenge presented to us by our friends at Old Hat, but it’s one that changed our perspective about how our 3-D work works. And I mean that literally.
Our anamorphic animation journey started courtesy of Old Hat and their client, Duke Men’s Basketball, in 2014. We’d already created their Cameron Indoor Arena to-scale in 3-D for an earlier project, but they’d never asked us to trick anyone’s eyeballs before, so with an arena-sized head start, we approached the research from a few angles. Again, literally. While our production staff rigged up some audience perspectives and figured out the hard parts, some of us (I) stood around an iPad lying flat on a desk and asked incendiary questions like, “What if the camera were here?” while waving our (my) hands in a general area above the tablet.
After only a couple of stabs in the dark, this mind meld resulted in a tried-and-true method of modeling (and camera placement!!) that has served us for years. To keep the mystery alive, I won’t break it down any further than that. And to eliminate some of that same mystery, I’ll say here that sometimes it really is just about trying whatever seems like the best idea even if it also seems silly. It also helps if your Technical Director is a problem-solving genius.
Now nearly a decade old, here’s a preview of one our very first anamorphic projection pieces, which were used to enhance a live in-game experience:
We’ve gone on to make many of these with Old Hat since then for various indoor sports at various indoor arenas with requests ranging from “court-sized gator swims across” to “just fill it with basketballs.” Our most recent projection for Old Hat is Houston Men’s Basketball, one of my personal favorites:
Thanks to all of those, when another of our dear friend-clients Ideaship Studios mentioned the potential for anamorphic animation for some corner-wrap LED boards at a couple of Osage Casino locations, we were more than ready. We got a blueprint of the casino and parking lot, some necessary dimensions, and a nice guesswork photo from the most likely vantage point in the parking lot (Thanks, Brian!), and here’s what we made. First, the mock-up of the casino with the animation projected onto our model of the board and then the real thing:
It’s all a little nod back to when CVWmedia rebranded and came up with a collective tagline: “Yeah…we can do that.” It’s a state of mind, and it turns out, nearly all the time, we can do that. Throw us your CAD files, your pixel dimensions, and an idea—or let us do the idea part—and you, too, could be immersed in an aquarium or peering into a recessed room of bouncing basketballs or hovering over downtown Houston or standing on a scary platform above the abyss or swimming in a glass thing that slowly fills with nacho cheese. That last one is my personal wish for a project and also for life.
Reach out here for all your anamorphic needs!