GMU:Spacial Information Lab/Death of a Moth

DEATH OF A MOTH

INSPIRATION

The Death of a Moth by Vrigina Woolf

The essay is about an afternoon in which Virginia was watching a Moth trapped in a window-pane, with no escape. At the beginning she talks about how a moth is not as gracious as a butterfly nor as somber as some other moths that prefer to go out at night. The moth in particular is enjoying its flight in the afternoon, in the sun light though it is about to be gone. At the end, I understand, she deserves to die for the night is coming.

IDEA

The original idea was to release a moth and a human being in a squared room. Both were going to be tracked and the human was going to be followed by light. I wanted to play with the fear induced by the moth to the human and so that the human would be in the position of the moth, having that feeling of being trapped.

The essay basically speaks about a moth trapped in a window. Since in the lab we are working with movement and we cannot record or track the moth yet the idea has to be changed. I was excited to see how the tracking of faces looked. It was decided that instead of just using the whole body we would only use the face. The idea is to record the face reading the poem and then have a moth stuck inside the mouth, this last one would move according to the mouth. It is true that the moth will be forever trapped in Virginias words forever and why not... our own voice. (That moth that once was declared to be death is to live forever).

POSSIBILITIES

• Light and darkness, shadows in between. (In case of recording body movement)

• Fear.

• A continuos dance between both subjects. (A play inside the mouth of the reader)

• Use of textures in the face and the whole environment

---

WHAT WILL WE NEED?

• 2 hours to record.
• Clip Micrphone
• Printed Essay
• Essay Timed (10 minutes)

---

FIRST APPROACH

Since we had some data recorded from the first day we had the opportunity to play a little bit with the bodies. Instead of using Blender I used Maya and it was a bit hard. I had to learn a lot of new things and in the end a friend helped me and explained me some stuff to get it going.

RECORDING PROCESS

The day we had to record was a bit chaotic for the system was not working in complete right conditions, Marcel warned us about this. Even though, the results were actually very satisfying though we couldn't actually use that material because there was a problem with the program and it would save the data. We had to record next day.

I exported some of the data to maya and started playing with the face. These were part of the results.

RENDERING EXPERIMENT

I don't know yet how to work with Blender so I am using Maya, a program that is more familiar to me. I still need a lot to learn about it but I rendered the face using different textures and the results are really amazing.

RENDERING RESULTS