The latest AniMotion
live painting, digital art and music show is presented by Aurora Nova at George
Herriot’s School as part of the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The power of original
painting created in real-time and projected onto stunning architecture
accompanied by live music is a special collaboration between projection artist
Ross Ashton, virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and acclaimed visual
artist and painter Maria Rud.
The location for this
magical outdoor experience – Venue 316 of the Fringe Festival – is the
quadrangle at George Herriot’s School. The high impact art is being projected
onto the side wall, of the beautiful 17th century chapel – which
becomes part of the world renowned Festival, famous for showcasing new,
innovative and thought-provoking works.
Says Ross, “We are
extremely excited to be performing at the Fringe and exceptionally fortunate
that Dame Evelyn was also available so that we could all work together on
crafting another special and ground-breaking AniMotion work”.
Ross created a projection
map for the side of the chapel building which provides the detailed canvas –
including all the architectural quirks and nuances which is laid over a
lightbox onto which Maria paints live.
The images captured by
the camera are fed into a laptop running Millumin, a software originally
developed for VJs which can edge blend and map, and which also provides a
number of other useful and cool functions that Ross has custom manipulated to
produce elements of the AniMotion magic.
The content is fed out to
two Panasonic PT-DZ21K projectors, beaming a blended 25 metre wide by 18 metre tall projected
image of the painting process onto the side of the chapel
Maria initially
experimented with a number of ideas and established which shapes and colours
worked best with the dynamics of the building. Then for each performance, the
creation of the final eight painted works is entirely improvised – and slightly
different – for each show.
The AniMotion concept
has been developed by Ross and Maria, an evocative fusion of technical wizardry
and highly organic art which is completed with the additional resonance of live
music.
For the Edinburgh shows, Dame Evelyn performed a
series of modern classics including “Michi” by Keiko Abe and “Prim” by Askell
Masson. The music and the rhythmic style and strokes of the painting finding
its own distinctive harmony, in turn creating a highly emotional engagement
with the audience.
The one hour performance
at Edinburgh
has a capacity of 300 people, and so far they have been extremely fortunate
with the weather!
The projectors are being
supplied by Alastair Young of War Productions from Edinburgh, the cameras are from Ian White and
Progressive Broadcast, and the d&b sound system is delivered by Warehouse
Sound, co-ordinated by Ann Sullivan.
Also integral to the
production team are Evelyn Glennie’s sound engineer Andy Cotton and Ranald
Nielson who is co-ordinating the video production.
Ross comments, “The fluid nature
of the performance is something audiences really seem to embrace. The idea is
to eliminate walls between the audience and the creative space, so anyone
watching is encouraged to become closer to us via the work proces and as
they see and appreciate the mechanics of what we are doing. We want their
movements to be as free as possible which ensures that no two shows will ever
be the same. The reaction on social media has been a great testament to how
effective this approach can be”.
