soymint

Humanimation… what the hell?

Humanimation is an art installation where people can replace frames in a cg animated sequence with their own images. The setup consists of a green screen and a projection screen. Here’s how it works:

The user stands in front of the green screen. The projection screen shows a live video feed of the user, it’s like standing in front of a really expensive high tech mirror (projector, camera, computer, drywall and green paint ~$3000.) The system composites a pose of the animation over the live video. The user matches the pose and the computer captures an image. After some image processing (green screen removal and transformations) the image of the user is inserted into the animation sequence.

As more and more images are captured from users, the cg stick figure animation turns into a cool live action stop motion animation with real human actors.

This project was not only exciting because of developing software using live image data, but I also got a chance to hang drywall and build a green screen setup in the basement (you see, one of the benefits of moving out of LA is that now our house has a basement.)

Here are some photos of the setup (I bet your basement doesn’t look like this):

humanimation setup 1

humanimation setup 2

The cg animation sequence:

The same animation sequence with humans:

Thanks to George Valavanis for the music and to the following humans for the images: Andrew Gard, Beth Vargas, Dan Enright, Joe Botsch, Kate Holowchik, Katrina Davis, Mark Mullaney and Vsevolod Khibkin.