The Giant
A projection show about a giant searching for himself, told on a big screen and on a papercraft heart mapped with light.
The Giant is a projection show we made as a team. It follows a giant who stands for someone of our generation: lost in his thoughts, searching for who he is, and slowly realising he is stuck in a loop.
The story runs through water, earth and space. Frozen deep beneath a river, the giant wakes when travellers' music cracks the ice. He lights a fire that spreads until everything fades to black, wakes again in an alien ocean, drifts through space as a shooting star, lands on a planet whose inhabitants dance to his heartbeat, and ends up frozen beneath the river once again.
How it works
Two projectors tell the story together. The first plays the giant's journey on the main screen: scenes built in Unreal Engine and animated with pre-recorded motion capture. The second maps VJ loops onto a low-poly heart we built from cardboard, beating along with the story. The heart was modelled in Maya and unfolded into a papercraft pattern, then mapped with MadMapper.
The visuals were played live in Resolume Arena, with TouchDesigner for extra effects, to music by Fox Stevenson and similar artists. His tracks carried exactly the emotions the story needed.
Built with
- Unreal Engine and pre-recorded motion capture for the giant's scenes
- Resolume Arena and TouchDesigner for the live visuals
- MadMapper to map the cardboard heart
- Maya and a papercraft converter to model and build the heart
- Two projectors: one for the screen, one for the heart
