Smallness — the form of being small, the action of having to contort oneself, and how that works when it has to happen consciously, with no immediate threat or reward. This idea came out of considering more formal elements of small bodies along with “smallness” as a symbolic item (as it’s used in movies and other media,) and smallness as a relatable concept.
Started as this:
Started testing which looked like this:
Looked at some images closer to this:
Changed my setup to something more “official” (magic arm, real camera, fed all to laptop)
Struggled with output, the actual program (I took one coding class and my brain is bad at absorbing those things so just about all of it came out of AI and other people,) and defining the rules of the “game.” Lots of just odd looking problems like this:
Things started kind of working, here are some of the first tests:
After the first critique I wanted to keep working on the problems I had (random artifacts, measuring people in a way which prioritized small frames, etc…)
Here’s a test reel from the first few moments that the program was working semi-correctly:
Kept working and ended up with a cleaner smalling game. People stand against a green screen, everything green is chroma-keyed out, and the surface area of anything not green is measured against the previous size (a person standing at full size when the program starts is 100% of their own surface area, if they bend over, they might be at 65%, etc.). Time is variable and depends on beating one’s own high score—if 10 seconds have elapsed where the participant hasn’t become smaller, the game ends. Set it up for the showcase with the giant touchscreen monitor and a bunch of connections that I barely understood (thank you Golan)
Did the showcase. Here are some favorites:
here’s a larger grid:
here’s some photos my mom took:
here’s nica:
here’s golan:
