after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.
visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.
true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.