Making Future Magic: Light Painting with the iPad

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

It’s hard to imagine that a mere nine months ago the world had not yet been introduced to the iPad. To point, I recently saw a young girl in a stroller playing some kind of interactive teaching game on, yes, an iPad. My first thought was, That’s not a toy! followed quickly by, Ah, but it IS! (Albeit a very expensive one.) The world is filling up with glowing screens, the audience is broad and the uses abundant. And when you see new technologies enabling playfulness, there opens a portal into what makes advances in media great.
With that, I’d like to share a collaborative effort between creative communications company, Dentsu London, and London R&D design company, BERG. Making Future Magic is a stop motion film prompted by the question “…what might a magical version of the future of media look like?”

This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world. We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3D light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

The first 1:40 introduces the making of, and the real film kicks in thereafter. You can see more shots on Dentsu’s Flickr, and read more about the build here, and the project here. [via Today and Tomorrow]