Circulate

#004

This was the first Mesmeric where I questioned how slow I could make the motion whilst retaining interest, as it is a delicate balance with viewers attention spans. One of the unofficial rules of the Mesmeric series is to (where possible) avoid hiding loop points in fast cuts or motion blur – which often leads to slower and more satisfying motion in the end. For this piece I wanted to blend between 2 different geometric states and 4 different textural sets which could not feel rushed hence the longer loop time.

For this piece I took what I learnt from ‘Breathe’ and added a twist, literally – reading that description of the Mesmeric might help understand this one better. The principal idea and structure of the geometry is the same however I took it a step further by applying it to an irregular shape which would have differing widths in the ribbon state but would have a uniform radius in the tubular state. The surface ribbons were created by taking a dodecahedron which I projected onto a sphere and divided like a tennis ball to create 2 interlocking surfaces – the outer edges of these segments were scaled inwards and projected back to the sphere form multiple times to create the irregular concentric splines that I needed for the flat ribbon state.

Once I had this base of concentric flat ribbons, I was able to rebuild them in a way that would allow me to rotate the profile axis of each segment – kind of like a custom twist deformer which would still allow me to the curl ribbons into tubular cords. The twist and curl to the tubular shape was then set to be driven by a simple linear mask that would pulse through the different forms and textural changes with additional elements like the fabric fibres being added at the end (also driven by the same linear mask).

© 2024 Mark Lindner