GMU:Performance Platform Introduction/Grace Quintero

Introduction: For the final project in the Performance platform, Eduardo Moreno And I worked together. We came out with different ideas, but the main tool we proposed to use was the slow motion camera. This was the tool that we got along with in a better approach, and it wasn't giving as much headaches as the marker-less motion capture system (this instrument was very interesting, but we had some problems configuring the whole system in class, which made me lose interest very fast).

First idea: Working with the slow motion camera, we watched many videos online, and decided we wanted to experiment with our Flash strobes and see how the light would act in slow motion. We wanted to capture the whole process of flash light coming out of the strobes, and how it is reflected on the objects being photographed.

The come out: We set all our personal equipment in the performance platform in order to capture our idea. https://vimeo.com/321478761

We had several problems, as the light was so fast, the high speed camera wasn't able to capture the whole movement. Every time we shot a video, it took us a long time to find the result. The speed of the Flash light was way faster than the high speed camera. What we learned in the process, is that the speed of the flashes strobes is < 1/1,000,000 second, thats less than one Millionth of a second [1]). The light comes out of the strobe in a higher potency in the first milliseconds and then graduates it's way until it is over. Like shown in the following image:

This way, we would need a much faster camera to capture the whole process with more than just a couple of frames. After spending a whole morning doing this, with many different tries and objects, we gave up when we reached this conclusion. We needed something that could be capture in a 900fps rate.

Final idea: Being Christmas time and having level 1 fireworks (not dangerous one that are also legal to purchase all year around) sold freely in the supermarkets, we decided to give it a go with the slow motion camera. For this, we came back to the lab at night, to capture most of the light we could. As we were going to work with fireworks, and these require a certain security protocol, we decided to take the camera outside, and call some of our friends to watch over the whole lab, camera, and computer.

The result:

We got some amazing shots with different movements of the different fireworks we had. Some were very unpredictable, but we managed to have the explosions far away from the lab and the camera, so it didn't represent any kind of problem or us. All fireworks behaved beautifly and we were able to capture their movement in a synchriniced motion.

As the fireworks seemed to be dancing, so, we decided to edit a video were the images went along with the music. So, here is the final experiment:

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