Project 2.3: Body Kinetics and Energy

Using the concept of parkour as a driver for the building project I have started to look at body kinetics and the way that energy can be harvested from the body to be used in powering a building. I have been looking at paving slabs which generate electricity when stepped on, watches that charge themselves by the movement of the wrist, a knee brace that creates electricity from the motion of walking, gym equipment which puts electricity back into the grid and ways of re-using the bodies heat to warm buildings.

Sebastien Foucan at Southbank!

I was wandering around Southbank today and spotted Sebastien Foucan - the founder of modern Parkour. He was with a photographer and a couple of other people. He wasn't doing any parkour really, looked like they were just checking out some angles and shots.
He's been in 'Casino Royale' and 'The Tournament', as well as loads of parkour specific films like 'Jump London' and 'Concrete Circus'.

Parkour Royalty.

Project 2.2 Film

Site Analysis film looking at 64-68 Whitechapel High Street and starting to look at how a traceur might interact with the existing buildings.

Project 2.2 Chronogram

The white lines show the movement of the traceur (parkourist), the black lines show the movement of the camera and the red lines show the light positions. Times have been added to the lights and cameras as a means of orientating the drawing. The portions of building highlighted in blue show the objects that the traceur interacts with on his exploration of the site.

2.2 Blender/Sketchup

Got the sketchup model into blender finally. There were a few things causing the problems getting it in. In the end I imported it as a 3ds file, all the other file types I tried seemed to collapse the model into a pile of all the components stacked onto of one another or just randomly rearrange parts of the model. Also the scale was 1000 times too big when bringing it in and because I hadn't positioned my model over the origin in sketchup it was hundreds of kilometres away from the grid in blender. I had to adjust the clipping plane of the camera in blender to stop it slicing through the model as well.

2.2 Video Techniques

I've been trying to work my way around problems getting my sketchup file into blender. Plan A was to take the sketchup model into blender and move around it and animate foot steps, hand prints and 'marks' left on the building by different people in blender. I haven't been able to get my sketchup file to work with blender yet so plan B is to render and animate the sketchup model in Vray and sketchup then use the voodoo camera tracker to set up a matched camera in blender so I can then animate the footsteps etc in blender and composite them into the vray animation. Hopefully that will work.

The video above looks so simple to do and could be done easily in premiere but I wanted to work out how to animate objects to appear and disappear within blender and I also wanted to be able to fade things in and out. The video uses the alpha channel to set the transparency of the material at different key frames. I am going to try and use this to make footsteps appear and disappear once I have the matched camera set up so I can then overlay the animation onto the vray animation.

Building of 64-68 Whitechapel High Street

I'm going to be looking at the existing buildings on the site as objects of interaction for a traceur. How the contours of the building can acts as hand holds or foot holds so I have spent the last few days working on a detailed model of the buildings. Still a long way to go with it... got the rest of the block to finish off and then all the surroundings.

Project 2.2 Site

64-68 Whitechapel High Street

My initial site walkabout showed that the site has two very distinct sides. The facade that presents itself to Whitechapel High Street - the fake historical facade - and the narrow alley to the south - a grimey, dimly lit space that betrays the real history of the buildings through the build up of 'add-ons' (shutters, flues, satelite dishes, neon signs) over the years.

Parkour Pages

I'm trying to keep up to date with getting all the information in my notebook presented onto pages. Here's a few that I've done over the last few days. Still many more to go...

Traceurs: to trace, to draw, to go fast

An interesting piece by artist Layla Curtis. She was comissioned to do a piece of work by Westminster Council. She used thermal imaging to capture the moments the traceurs come into contact with objects and the marks they leave upon them. These marks and interactions are usually so quick thqt it can be hard to process them using normal imaging or the human eye.
The intensity of the mark shows the intensity of the touch on the surface and different surface produce different types of mark so it represents both the act of the traceur and their effect on the object as well as the effect the texture, surface and shape of the object on the interaction o fthe traceur.

For the final video - http://www.traceurstotracetodrawtogofast.com/

The making of video provides more insight into the artist and her intentions and techniques -

Project 2.1 Film Edit

Project 2.1 High Street 2012 - Whitechapel from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Project 2.1 Whitechapel High Street Diagrams

Draft pages from the individual urban studies report.