SILHOUETTES OF JAZZ / JAZZ HISTORY IN 3D ANIMATION

Magnifico! Bravissimi! © 2009 — dominik käser  martin-sebastian senn — mario deuss — niloy j. mitra — mark pauly
Watch it in high resolution -click here!



This animated short movie outlines the history of traditional jazz music in a virtual walkthrough of a shadow art museum.

Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The movie highlights five different milestones in the evolution of jazz: the early songs of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop. Each era is represented with a room containing 3D sculptures which cast multiple shadow images at the same time. This unique property is achieved using a novel computational method for the interactive creation and manipulation of shadow art. Given a set of desired silhouette images, a global geometric optimization builds a 3D shadow volume that can subsequently be edited by the artist using a set of 3D modeling tools.

The reinterpretation of jazz and non-jazz music is crucial in jazz pieces - in the same way, a shadow object can be seen as a 3D interpretation of the desired 2D shadows.

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