The Rose

2018-19

For the 2019 production of Beauty and the Beast at St. Anne's-Belfield school, I worked together with Mariah Payne to create a digital piece that would enhance the performance.

We decided to build a digital rose animation that would change over the course of the show and augment key scenes with timed visual effects.

For a visual demonstration of the rose, check out this video.

The rose was created using Processing. The actual shapes of the rose petals/stem were transferred into Processing by tracing actual images with the mouse to get coordinates that could be turned into primitive polygons.

There is an unfortunate amount of hard-coded polygon coordinates in the source, but this prompted later work on automatic generation of low poly images.

The following features were implemented:

• Fading of colors / shrinking of parts of the rose smoothly over the duration of the show.
• Falling petals, with particle system glitter.
• A dramatic shattering effect for when the Beast dies and the last petal falls.
• A reconstruction effect from the shattered state, for when the Beast transforms into a human. Complete with a fountain of glitter.
• Emergency reset, in case an effect is triggered accidentally at the wrong moment in the performance.

For the actual production, the rose sketch was projected onto a side wall of the theater, and operated by a crew member up in the catwalk. We simply put Processing on a school laptop and implemented key commands that allowed the operator to control the effects.

Photo courtesy of St. Anne's-Belfield.

Unfortunately, the camera had trouble picking up a clear shot of the the rose, but it was quite crisp in person.

The source is here.