A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

Ever since I stumbled upon anamorphosis I have wanted to make one for myself, to decorate my home with, and especially something that would spook visitors. This specific idea formed in my head about six months ago, but it was not until recently that I got to realizing it.

To keep this simple I will not try to retell my entire thought process, as it spans over months and months, but instead what I ended up doing and why.

Planning

I made up my mind to put the anamorphosis in my bathroom, so it would be visible when sitting on the toilet. This because the picture only looks correct from one specific viewing angle, and as I have such a small bathroom you have to sit down no matter what you need to do.

The print would go on the wall next to the seat, opposite the door. Because I wanted the picture to be highly distorted face on, which almost is the whole point, I wanted the real observation point to be almost from the side. This meant putting it on the wall would be perfect. To make things even more interesting, you actually look at the wall through the mirror above the sink.

With the help of masking tape I quickly deducted that the image could be 67×67 centimeters and still fit into view. I made it perfectly square for easy editing later on.

The motif would be myself visible through a window in the wall holding a camcorder, as to make the experience not only wondrous, but also a bit traumatic. This picture would also look like it was an actual hole in the wall, with the right perspective in the image. A fun detail is that I did not own a camcorder when I decided this, I got one just before summer this year, for general purposes mind you.

Execution

I positioned the camera where I thought people would most likely have their heads while sitting down and took a picture of my tape square, this is required for the editing later. To be able to recreate the camera angle and lighting of the scene I measured the position of the camera in relation to the wall and ceiling, as well as the position of the only light source in the room.

When I happened to have a friend over and nothing else was planned, I used him for the photo shoot. We went into the cellar and looked up a nice spot. With us we brought the following:

• A work light with breaker – to see what we were doing
• A detatched desktop lamp with bulbs – for lighting the scene
• Frosted glass from a ceiling lamp – to dim the light
• My DSLR including a cable remote
• The camcorder
• Extension power cords and a power strip

At the location we rigged the camera, measured the position, tried out the lighting and snapped a bunch of photos. We actually got it wrong the first time and had the camera looking into the corridor instead of facing the wall, so we had to redo it. The second time we emptied a storage room just inside the corridor and crammed my friend and the camera including tripod in there, a tight fit! This way we could get the correct angle while keeping the right distance.

Back at the computer we picked out the best photo, being the one with the least blur even though I had better faces in some of the others, and distorted it so it would fit the marked area in the bathroom. I had to clone a part of the wall to fill out a corner, nothing too complicated. See the below representation of the steps to get an idea of what I mean.

To get the anamorphosis to work while looking at it through a mirror I had to mirror the image before printing. I used my B&W A4 laser printer to try if it would actually work, and it did!

You need to have your head at the right place, but then it looks quite convincing! It is a bit more sensitive to your viewing angle than I expected, this due to the short distance between you and the picture, but hopefully it will startle at least someone :)

Below you have a short video depicting the process, also available at Youtube!

To get things ready for print services I have spent the last few weeks revising my impossible figure templates, scripts, and actions. This to convert them and all future art from CMYK to RGB and the aspect ratio to 4:3. While at it I adjusted the signature, background, website url, line colors and weights, added copyright text (tiny!) and made some actual updates to a few pieces. The process took more time than I had planned since I kept coming up with more changes I wanted to make, forcing me to go back and change files over and over again!

Another difference from before is that I will post images in the PNG format, a lossless format which generates reasonably small file sizes, this because PNG rocks, and compression artifacts don’t. I have finally managed to update all old posts to reflect this change.

I mentioned that I had updated some of the figures themselves, I will list which ones that has had the biggest updates:

• Tribar7
• Tribar6
• Tribar5
• Pillars

I ended up really happy with Tribar 5 and 7!

Oh, and as of today it is exactly two years since I finished the first impossible figure in this collection!

Yesterday I got a very interesting email from the user Loniek of hlawka.com. He finds optical illusions and impossible figures interesting, and thus he has painted one of my figures as a perspective anamorphic image on a corner of his… studio? It seems he’s a photographer, but it might be his combined garage too as there’s a car in there.

I found it very heartwarming and tingling to see someone recreate one of my figures, especially on a wall! Very inspiring too as I’ve been fascinated by anamorphosis art for quite some time, and this sparks my imagination!

He recorded and published the process at Vimeo, and the video is available in HD if you click over to the site! I have also embedded it below :) Awesome!

Thank you very much for sharing this, Loniek! :D

My first and only MP3 player is a Creative Muvo 128MB, which has survived lots of things since about 2002. Airplane travels, rounds in the washing machine, too many bus trips… it has been very reliable, though without a display or even a shuffle feature it leaves you wishing for more.

This Tuesday I got a new MP3 (etc) player, finally. Yet again a Creative, but their Zen X-Fi 8GB. When looking for a new player I wasn’t so much browsing for MP3 players, but something that could do a little more. The Zen X-Fi can play back video and it has a very nice speaker built in, those were the feature who made me pick it. Now I have various videos I’ve made on the device as well as a bunch of Anime episodes. I’ve successfully watched two episodes so far, and it works very nicely at 2.5″ and 320×240 pixels. I love it :) But enough about the player.

I remember seeing a whole lot of the transparent monitor pictures online, very well made too, and when I discovered I can easily change the wallpaper on the player I just had to try this.

So, here it is… the translucent media player!

If I ever buy myself a laptop, I will do this for each and ever place I put it in! Well, maybe not.