PICTURES OF THE
FLOATING WORLD
Client:
Self-Initiated @ Common Works
Year:
2018
My Roles:
Coding, Animation, Writing, Storyboarding, Editing, CAD/CAM
DESCRIPTIONPictures of the Floating World is an experimental animated film inspired by the Japanese art form Ukiyo-e. Every frame of the animation was transformed into a woodblock print, creating a film that explores the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary digital production.
I co-wrote and storyboarded the film, produced all of the animation and developed a series of custom software tools to support the production process. Working in Flash, I created the animation before developing plugins to batch export thousands of frames as vector artwork ready for fabrication. To make the project feasible, I wrote custom programs that analysed image sequences, identified and removed repeating frames, and automatically arranged the remaining frames into optimised layouts for laser cutting. Once the woodblocks had been printed and scanned, a second set of tools reconstructed the animation, reinserting the omitted frames and rebuilding the original sequence.
These automated workflows significantly reduced the amount of material, fabrication time and manual labour required to produce the film, creating an efficient digital-to-physical production pipeline that combined animation, software development and CAD/CAM processes.
The completed film consisted of 3,312 frames across 53 large-scale woodblock prints and was exhibited internationally, including at Somerset House, the Vienna Biennale, the V&A and the Crafts Council's Real to Reel film festival.
Custom software to automate production