Client: Samsung and Ideaworks, UK

Overview

Recently inspired by the notion of making static imagery come to life, creating a magical art gallery where images morph and shape-shift, transitioning from one image to the next, growing organically from the art itself, we created Living Art.
Our Creative Director, Lauren Millar, wanted to see each art piece transform into “liquid paint”, gracefully flowing and mixing and swirling, ultimately evolving into the next static image, completing the transition. And so a whole new era of visual effects development was born here!
(See the movie here as we’re currently experiencing challenges uploading movies to the CODAworx site: https://vimeo.com/419329812)

Goals

Fusion's R&D team, led by fluid dynamics specialist, Mark Stasiuk, was inspired to create these transitions with computer-generated fluid simulations. So they developed an entirely new fluid effects tool! They used parts of the imagery as proxies for fluid properties.
For example, gradients in luminance were used as proxies for fluid pressure gradients that drive flow, and hues in the art imagery were used as proxies for fluid viscosity that resists flow (can you tell Mark has a PhD in Fluid Dynamics? : )

Process

Because each color in the art imagery has unique color properties, we programmed that color to behaves like a fluid and interact, at its margins, with surrounding pools of color, forming complex, highly organic color flows evolving naturally from the original art piece.
Since Fusion’s new method is image-based, it naturally allows color-fluid "force fields" to be layered in just the way you composite images, and the flow forces can be controlled with compositing-like tools.
For example, color-correction, like gamma adjustments, heightens motion. The potential controls and resulting motions are endless, so the R&D team came up with a wide palette of color flow styles, allowing our Creative Director, Lauren, to select and mix and achieve the right motions for the installation.
This remains a very active area of research in the Fusion CIS art lab. And the latest exciting development allows this process to be interactive! Since the simulation methods rely dominantly on 2D image manipulations, they can be executed in real time and made interactive (triggered by human movement... or anything you want… to any degree you want).

Additional Information

This is also a wonderful example of our fully 3-dimensional color flows; they appear to be layered back into the depths of the screen, even escaping the display's digital frame, creating a very cool 3D effect! Created for an exclusive Ideaworks (ideaworks.co.uk) event in London, this digital art piece appears on Samsung Electronics UK #TheWall (4K, 3840 x 2160 pp) at Samsung's Incredible Experience Center, King's Cross, London - #SamsungKX What a fabulous piece of hardware! And our 'Living Art' is looking pretty good too... : )