Speaker Project
GAMMA
THETA
DELTA
S C U L P T U R E S E R I E S
For this class project, I was tasked to "collaborate" with a brand and create a promotional video for this collaboration product. I researched many companies and picked JBL because I produce music and I have memories of using a JBL iPod dock in middle school, which I still have today.
After many concepts, I settled on three home speaker designs that look elegant as home decor. Each one is created from a basic 3D form and named after a greek letter that resembles it. Surrounding the fabric wrapped center is a golden metal frame.
I also had to understand myself as an artist to contribute my half of the collaboration. All of my art features a creative and elegant use of light. Each speaker has lights on the inside which pulse with the music, and a light strip on the inside of the metal frame.
A speaker ad should have suitable music to make the speaker not only look good, but also sound good. I produced the music myself in Logic Pro to create the exact mood I was imagining.
I did everything 3D inside Blender from scratch, from the modeling, texturing, animation, and especially lighting. Each shot has its own set of carefully placed lamps to ensure light was reflecting exactly where I wanted.
When starting this project I was learning about color science by making my own tonemapper. A tonemapper is the function which forms the image from the linear light values by compressing the dynamic range. Now I've learned much more, allowing for a much more natural result.
Old Tonemapper - October 2022
I was naively using OKLab to preserve chromaticity angle, but that doesn't equate to perceptual hue in a tonemapper, so as the orange increases in intensity it appears to get pinker.
New Tonemapper - February 2023
My new tonemapper is simply a filmic curve between two opposing matrix multiplications, which emulates the wider gamut of the eye while preserving saturation in a linear rec.709 working space.
I assembled the shots and added text with After Effects. Each speaker is part of the "sculpture series" and named after a Greek letter.