The Lost Drama

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The Lost Drama
New Media Playground

"Bo Lang Zai 2012" Exhibition is a Design Method 3 Mini Exhibition organised by The One Academy Penang, Multimedia Design year 3 semester 1 students from MM1005-1P. The exhibition is about retaining Penang's culture using new media with creative solutions. We are from one of the booth in this mini exhibition and our project named as "The Lost Drama".

A Lost Culture

This project is a creative solution that aims to reproduce culture and tradition birth of God and Hungry Ghost Festival in Penang. During the festival, one of the old traditions that people practice is to perform an opera show to worship God. There are various kinds of Opera shows, such as Hokkien Opera,Chinese Opera, Chao Zhou Opera, and etc. The purpose of this project is to retain the lost culture in Penang and to urge people to preserve and spread the culture from generation to generation.

To bring out the awareness to Chinese festivals culture, which is the Chinese Opera performance, we decided to use projection mapping as our media. We DIY an object to project video animation on it,the object is similar to the staging of Chinese Opera. The purpose of the mapping is to transform the traditional Chinese Opera into a smaller size, which is on boxes. This idea is to save human resourceand financial problem also some environment problem faced while they are building the stage onstreet. Projection mapping is also convenient on place to put, all it needs is a dark corner, it can be projected anywhere in public to bring the message to audience. The animation of the video will beshowing how Chinese Opera had been taking over by the modern media such as the karaoke “Ko- Tai”. In another hand, it also benefits on visual experience. It give audience a different types of visual experience, which the animation will be integrate with the projected object, that will definitely attract audience’s attention while they passed by.

Environment Design - Old Penang from Chew Jetty

To show the contrast between the traditional culture and the modern generation's method, there is a big different shown in our animation, which shows the heritage buildings is falling behind the modern city. Also, the traditional stage of Chinese Opera is slowly changed into a disco kind of modern stages.

Environment Design - Traditional Chinese Opera Stage

Kunqu Opera, also known as Kunju, can trace its origins back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) in a small town south of the Yangtze River, called Kunshan, in East China's Jiangsu province. It is regarded as the ancestor of all the operas in China and has exerted a dominant influence onmajor genres, including the Peking and Sichuan operas. In 2001, UNESCO listed Kunqu as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritageof Humanity. In the modern age, this elegant art form remains the most influential traditional opera across thenation.

Character Design - Kunqu Opera

Peking Opera, also called Beijing Opera, Peking Opera is China's national opera and enjoys a higher profilethan all other local operas. In the past, Peking Opera was performed mostly on stage, in the open air, teahouses or temple courtyards. Today, it has developed into a high art that is performed at opera houses and appeals to overseasaudiences.

Character Design - Peking Opera

Other than Chinese Operas, Ko-Tai shows nowadays are also very much in demand during thisfestival celebration month. These Ko-Tai shows are well liked by the young and old generationsas well. Lady singers will dress up in glittering and eye-catching attires and their performances are always accompanied by energetic dancing routines. The background music and songs aresung similar like karaoke style but at times, certain Ko-Tai shows do engage band musicians toplay the music live, instead of from a karaoke machine.

Character Design - Ko Tai

To let our user understand more about our project, we did a poster and placed in front of our exhibition booth. In the poster, there is a summary description on our project objective. Also, we included instruction design in our poster, this is to show user how they might interact with our media.

Poster Design - The Lost Drama

Did you know that, the older generation watching drama is free of charge? Yes, and is watching live shows, all they need to do is bring their own stool to the showing area and enjoy the performance with the villagers. In this modern era, we need to pay and get the tickets to enter cinema for movie screening. This is the difference between old generation and modern generation.

To show that, we provided our user a ticket, those with tickets may enter our booth and enjoy the projection mapping screening. On the ticket itself not only show user our project objective and QR codes to lead them to our mobile web, it also can make it into a bookmark, which is just simple makes two cut on it, and it will be able to "clip" on the pages of their reading books. Reason we make our ticket into multiple function is not wasting every single papers.

Ticket Design - Front Page

The purpose of the QR code display is to link user to our mobile web, which will provide them all the information about Chinese Opera in Penang. This is also one of the solution using new media to retain our lost culture in Penang.

Ticket Design - Back Page

Of course, there is some props design for decoration purpose on our exhibition booth. We made our animation characters into handcraft cubes, to show consistency with our projection object, which is the boxes stage. Besides, we also find some Chinese Opera Props to let user understand more on Chinese Opera.

Exhibition Booth Decoration

Props Design for Exhibition Booth

The area of our exhibition is covered with black color cloth. This not to show mysterious, but to give our user maximum visual experience. Projection animation will looks more clear like HDTV.

Projection Mapping

Yes! That's us, with our exhibition booth photo. Are you one of the user who drop by our booth on the exhibition day? Check out the behind the scene video below, you might find yourself inside of it! However, we had cut the video due to duration limitations, and some of you might not see yourself, sorry for that. Or did you missed out our exhibition? See on below for the projection mapping and mobile web preview.

The Lost Drama - Exhibition Booth

This is the first project we experiment on new media. Projection mapping is not as simple as seen to us, it is time consuming to make the graphics merge with object that we projected on. The best part of it is that it could give audience a new viewing experience on visual effects and animations. So, check out the demo video we took on the exhibition below.

The Lost Drama - Projection Mapping

To fully utilize what we learn, we use After Effect to make some simple folding animation on the buttons on our mobile web interface. Although it is just a few page, but it summarized with all the information we need our user and audience to know about Chinese Opera. This is what we called, simplicity yet informative.

The Lost Drama - Mobile Web

Video documentation is important on doing such exhibition preparation and all those sets up. It helps to record our progress development on the project. Each of our meeting and set up on each week we shoot it into timeslape, so we can view it in fast forward mode. To make a conclusion for our exhibition, we took all the video documentation footages and compile/ edit into a making of video, which shows the overall preparation and also the recording on the exhibition day.