MAGIC MIRROR

The assignment was “magic mirror”. We were supposed to use the front camera on the computer and alter the feed in Isadora to create something interesting.

This was my first attempt at visual programming, a task made no easier by the fact that the courses were held in French, so on top of not understanding how the program works, I didn’t understand much of what the teacher was saying and it was a struggle just to find words for the questions every time I had to ask for advice, or to explain what I’m trying to do. But I think it’s good to at least try to go outside your comfort zone every once in a while. If nothing else, this was a learning process.

My first plan was to work with smoke. Either make a smoke effect in After Effects, or look for smoke videos online. I wanted dark smoke to gather on the screen, and movement would drive it away. I did some experimenting with smoke effects, but trying to create smoke in a French version of After Effects proved too time consuming for this, and I couldn’t make the downloaded smoke effects look good so I scrapped that. Time was an issue.

I stumbled upon the Difference actor quite by accident (or rather, I was trying to figure out a much more complicated solution with the help of an online tutorial but I couldn’t get it to work so I asked the teacher for help, and he showed me I only needed this one actor. Yes. Exactly what I’ve been looking for, now I don’t really need the smoke.

There are only three actors to modify the image. First of them is a simple Flip actor to create the illusion of a mirrored image, otherwise when you sit in front of the screen and lift your right arm you would see it lift on the left side of the screen, not on the right. Not a very convincing “mirror”.

Second is the Difference actor. It compares the current frame to the previous frame, and only shows the difference between them as white.  So if nothing moves, the frames are identical and everything stays black. The faster you move in front of the camera, the greater the difference between individual frames and thus more white is seen.

To make it even more interesting I added a third actor, Motion Blur. I like to use this in After Effects so I figured Isadora might have it too, so I typed it in the search field and to my delight it popped up. So, there you have it.

We were supposed to use the Eyes actor, but I really couldn’t fit it in this project. Maybe I’ll experiment with it in the future, who knows...