Entropy – Short version

Entropy is the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system, and a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message. It is heat death, it is inevitable social decline and degeneration- in a closed system, it is accountable chaos.

2000 pictures compose this piece- that is, 2000 perfect different water drops into which we mapped an animation. Droplets that behave and look strangely similar at the stage of less entropy, and become more disordely as they splash.

When we got the offer from IdN to create an exclusive logo formation, as happens most times, we thought at first ‘wow, we would like to create something new and test it’. Then we started thinking about the formal shape of such a piece: short, including some animation for the logo. We wanted to find a vehicle for this format that would respect it and at the same time treat it in a different way. We had had in mind for a long time strobe light and water, a mix that renders water in real time in different ways unseen to the eye in normal conditions. We had also seen image projections in photography inside waterdrops, and then we thought “what if we could have both things, the logo formation inside a water drop falling? Could we have replacement animation inside a water drop-and still be able to see it?”. Once the thought enterred our heads, we just had to create a way!

The final result of the piece you have seen has absolutely no CGI, and was shot in stopmotion so as to be able to project inside the waterdrop the logo formation, previously animated in 3D and then printed in paper and placed behind the water drop falling. There were 320 frames printed and replaced frame by frame in the animation, and over 2000 frames compose the final shot- this meaning that the drop you see is never the same, there are 2000 different drops in the piece. In order to be able to photograph each one in exactly the right place as to be able to see a fluid fall, we created an Arduino-based system in which, after having the drop cross a laser pointer, we would have the absolute precision of when to trigger the flashes and camera to see the drop in the right position. We worked very hard to synch this mechanism to our Motion Control system, and the final piece is the result of a 3-week testing process in which we shot about 45 splashing tests with over 20000 pictures taken, before we produced the final shot.

Tests:

3D fluid animation projected in the drop: