Rampage Restitution

 

Rampage Restitution was a projection mapped installation at Portland Winter Light Festival 2018 where larger than life monsters destroy and rebuild an illustration of Portland with the help of festival attendees. It combined pre-recorded footage with real-time, interactive video feeds and digital painting to create a site-specific, interactive film. Here’s the description from the festival catalog:

BUSTED! The Monsters from a classic 80’s arcade game came to Portland to pull their shenanigans here (as if we don’t already have a housing crisis). They were eventually subdued, and now must perform community service to rebuild what they destroyed. Watch them put their massive scale to good use in a time lapse projected on the PGE Building near OMSI. Plus, since we need to fill those buildings, attendees are invited to come play with assorted props and see their silhouettes appear in the newly created buildings.

The canvas for our projections was a blank white building across the street from the main entrance to OMSI:

 

To create Rampage Restitution, we first did a digital illustration that was designed to fit perfectly on the building’s two facades:

We used that illustration as our registration for all the digital content. In the studio, we painted the illustration in our monster costumes and recorded a timelapse video. We also used is as a backdrop for our rampage during the same filming session:

At Lumenal Code, interactivity is a big part of our artwork: we want viewers to be participants in the artwork. For Rampage Restitution, we thought it would be fun to give festival attendees the opportunity to act out scenes in the apartment windows. Across the street from the projections, we set up a shadow booth, filled it with props, played bumping dance music, and invited Portland to get weird. The top-left apartment window was a live-feed from the shadow booth, and each other apartment window showed still images in timelapse that we captured from the shadow booth. Here’s a short video showing some of the many amazing moments we captured:

The shadow booth ended up being a huge hit with the kids, many of whom were not even aware their shadows were being projected to an audience of thousands across the street:

 

In addition to the shadow booth, we also set up an iPad and did live digital paintings of the city. This made for a colorful, ever-changing scene out on the street: