I was asked one evening by the Endless Reach guys if I would like to VJ at a halloween party, something subtle and psychedelic. Frankly the idea of spending 8 hours behind a laptop while everyone else has fun wasn’t too appealing.
As a compromise I suggested building a distorted mirror to play a long loop or even horror film at. The result would hopefully be exaggerated distortions thrown around the room.
A little more back and forth chat and I had persuaded myself to build faceted mirrorball skull, 2 meters high, for £50. WOOPS!
From here it was just a case of cutting the pattern (with a little help from Mike Kee), laminating some mylar mirror film to mount board, cutting the pattern out of that and then crying in the corner of the room, surrounded by triangular mirrors.
After regaining my composure it was just a task for some gaffa tape and some ingenious rigging to get the job done and assembled in the party space.
This project had a certain production value from the outset so my “projection mapping” was going to reflect this. A quick photo on my phone of how the projection looked from the viewpoint of the projector lens and straight back to the computer to cut out all the background and white tape. Laminating machines are widely used in homes to save documents from wear and tear, improve their stability and strength. So, keep your projects safe!
Would have loved to have spent longer mapping the beast and to have had a much brighter projector so I could have mapped the lux to each polygon, but for £70 spend, I was ecstatic with the results and even got a remote controlled smoke machine in its mouth. What’s not to love?
Click the pick to see a (very) short video.
Now as if this post wasn’t long enough, I had enough scrap mylar to make myself an outfit.
If you would like to make one yourself, just download the second picture on this post, scale it to A4 and cut it out. This will give you the pattern to make one half of the mask, its up to you what material you use, just make sure it has a bit of stiffness (anything over 300gsm should be fine.)