Individual work | Chenyu Sun
Concept
Shadow play is a classic Chinese traditional culture, it is a character silhouette as a performance form of folk drama. Some people behind the scenes control, and tell the story, but also music, sound accompaniment. A variety of cultural and media participation in the shadow play on behalf of China's precious traditional culture.
However, now because of the lack of contemporary culture on the importance of traditional culture and the new way of entertainment of the shadow play, so that gradually fade in people's attention and life. When I look back on the shadow play, I felt its wonderful and magical. In order to arouse people's attention and participation in traditional culture, by improving the technical means of shadow play to better and more interesting in life with people to interact, let contemporary people experience the new form of the shadow play.
What is more important is that the side of this interactive experience reflects the use of their own stories and limbs to perform shadow play, shadow characters are also the hearts of traditional culture, the shadow of the foundation. The timelessness reflects the contemporary people for the cultural impact of the confused and two sides.
How it works
1. Combine Kinect bone mapping to detect human body movements, links to draw a good shadow play characters, and each action are synchronized to simulate movement of the person behind the shadow puppet.
Equivalent to the traditional shadow opera, the people behind the scenes control and operate the shadow puppet.
2. Movement and distance detection can also trigger the shadow play background objects linkage (the boat will be paddling, birds will fly, the willow lotus will move, and the background color will be triggered back.)
3. Unique sounds will be attributed to every character (such as the men and women, and even the innovative sponge baby) along with background objects (like the landscape seabird lotus root willow boat). When people get close to the object will trigger the action, the characters will also trigger the music. All music ensembles will form the background music of the shadow and the music will play.
These elements combine to innovate the traditional form of shadow play, but also to restore the characteristics of the shadow play, and involved people in interactive participation.
Sound
Sound from the original production of electronic, divided into multiple chords, sound libraries. Each object has a unique representative of music.
listen 9 tracks below
Process of making
Character design
I went to the Beijing local Chinese Shadow Play troupe to pick-up characters information and ask for design advise. They showed me their most traditional, popular and detailed designs and taught me how to understand its interlinks.
Here is final character design. I combined and used the most typical and traditional characters, and one funny character. Include woman, man, red-crowned crane, and SpongeBob.
Background design
The initial idea was to create a Chinese landscape garden like background, so I drew a Chinese mountains-and-waters painting in order to show more poetic and more appropriate for style design.
Dynamic design
Background dynamic: The boat will be paddling, birds will fly, willow and lotus will move, and the the background color will be triggered back.
Character dynamic: Each character mapped their legs, arms, heads and loins.
Music design
For woman: I used Guzheng to represent woman character.
For man: I used traditional Chinese instrument Guanzi.
For SpongeBob: I used electronic dance music.
For crane: I used several instrumental and electronic sound patterns.
For different background objects:
Water: soft pad music for whole background music.
Birds, lotus, boats and willows: used sound samples and soft pad music in order to make music even fuller.
Kinect process
Drawing process
