'Black Waves' - an interactive digital installation - Tokyo, Japan.

Waves, the ocean and all things sea have been on my mind this week. I am (slowly) preparing to start animating some of my opening scenes for the film. Some of which include animating the ocean, I have never tried to animate the sea or any kind of water to be honest. But I am excited to try!

I was very lucky this summer as I was able to travel a lot, one of the countries I visited was Japan. It had been on my bucket list for many years and I had a fantastic time traveling round on the bullet trains with my Father.

Whilst in Tokyo, we visited the Borderless teamLab. I had seen pictures and videos of it online and was very interested in visiting. I am so glad we did, as one of the rooms, 'Black Waves' came back into my mind this week and is making me think about different ways to animate water in my film.

A description of the exhibit taken from their website;

"The movement of waves in water is simulated in a computer-generated three-dimensional space. The water is expressed as a continuous body after calculating the interactions of hundreds of thousands of particles. To visualize the waves, the behavior of the particles of the water was then extracted and lines were drawn in relation to the movement of the particles. The wave created in a 3-D space is then turned into an artwork in accordance with what teamLab refers to as ultrasubjective space. In premodern Japanese painting, oceans, rivers, and other bodies of water were expressed as a series of lines. These lines give the impression of life, as though water was a living entity. This form of expression leads us to question why premodern people sensed life in rivers and oceans. Also, why did they behave as if they themselves were a part of nature? Perhaps something can be discovered by fusing the fixed objective world of today’s common knowledge with the subjective world of premodern people."

https://www.teamlab.art/w/black_waves

I took many pictures and videos of the room and really enjoyed the experience. The calming wave sounds and the beautiful visuals made for a very relaxing experince. They had placed bean bags in the centre of the room, which we sat on and took in the show.

I really like the starkness of the moving waves to the completely black background, this is visual I have used a lot so far in the designing of my film. I think this may be mostly because I think the image in the mid-ground and fore-grounds are so important, that a complex background is not even needed.

I have included a video below of the room to get the idea of the room.