Videos

The videos below demonstrate the atmosphere of our project. The first shows how it would be like to walk through/past the umbrellas, while the second shows the installation as a whole, and looks at how the lights change from calm to chaos.

Event night!! - Saturday 24th September

It's taken me a while to post this one up... been collecting the photos, and now it's taken ages to choose the best ones! 

So we had a good day for the event:

The beginning of the event:

We had quite a few reactions to the installation, many were just taking photos... 

...then there were also quite a few curious ones who would tug lightly on the strings holding the umbrellas down...

The lights were on since the beginning of the event, but they didn't start being visible until late evening, which was about halfway through the event...

If you remember, we also had projections going on the umbrellas... unfortunately we weren't able to test them on site (because there was no power) so we didn't really take into account the slope of the site beside the path (which meant we also had to re-adjust the angles at which they projected onto the canopy). The configuration of the umbrellas were also arranged in a way that sloped upwards, away from the projectors, so we only managed to get the images on one or two umbrellas each, hence they were barely noticeable. These are more 'strategic' photos that showed how they added to the installation:

Blue and turquoise for calm...

...and an array of colours for the chaotic

Really like how the line of umbrellas 'lead into' the folly~

Overall, that night was a very successful event!!

More site testing - with tensioning and sandbags

Went on site again to test today. This time we got to finish tensioning the poles and try out the sandbags.

View from the bridge. Of the eight stands we tried, we made the ones on the path 3m tall and the ones on the grass 2.5m tall.

We planned to have only/mainly the ones on the grass and the lower ones on the path have sandbags, since they kind of supported the ones on the end anyway (we found it difficult to attach the sandbags to the outer ones since the handles were so high). However, after seeing some flip up we'll have to tension every umbrella down. Even just one or two flipping up ruins the whole installation...

Adding in the ninth stand, we could decide which height to have. The top image is with a 3m pole, while the lower one is with a 2.5m pole. It may be a bit odd to have only one of the stands at the back with a 3m pole, but we felt it led to the folly better (more smoothly). The 2.5m one was consistent with the rest, but it looks too solid and dead (my thought personally anyway), as in, there are no variations in the whole canopy.

Sandbags may be a bit of a tripping hazard... like this one that's randomly sticking out...

Effect of the installation without the sandbags... just nice to compare.

We also tried a few poles with the black pole socks. Mike insists they're better than raw scaffolding poles, but we think it's a bit too solid for our liking. The solid black contrasting with the white umbrellas give the poles a huge presence that we don't want. The raw scaffolding is also a bit too rough maybe, but there must be something about the transition from the black to white as you go from the bases to the umbrellas that the metal poles provide. At the moment though we'll stick to the sock strategy as the poles will probably 'disappear' when it gets dark, but we'll probably think of another solution for the next event... see how it goes.

sound and lights/animation

We did a short test of the lights with sound and the animation (neither of them are all finished, but we just wanted to get a taste of what it would be like). We wanted to make sure the animation goes alright with the flashing lights.

A short video that shows what it's like. The projected image is a bit small, but on site the projector should be placed further away so the projection should be bigger...

Projector working from within the case. It's working well. The machine is quite stable and, although the fans make some noise, it isn't very distracting. This is looking quite promising...

testing on site

 Did some more site testing today. To see the layout of the stands and other practical matters.

We started labeling the pole lengths. We will assign a pole to each top plate, as each pole varies slightly in length, and it would be useful for tensioning.

This photo shows one of the bases leveled, as the site is quite a big slope. We really want straight poles rather than slanted ones that go perpendicular to the sloped path. Same goes for the bases situated on the grass:

The wind was too strong to let us open the umbrellas, so they stayed closed most of the time we were testing. There was, however, a time when we did open them to see how they were actually like.
See what the wind did...

The overall effect looks to be quite promising though! Still haven't fully come up with a resolution for the configuration, which heights go where etc. so we'll be testing that tomorrow. And also sandbags!