Gautam Rangan - Copy of Visual Art at WET Design

This page is an in-progress catalogue of my work over the past eight years at WET Design in Los Angeles. It comprises a wide range of projects, including interactive prototypes, fountain concepts, and show design. My former role was the director of media design, which included coding, animation, and occasionally building mock-ups with electronics.

Digital Media Experiments

Below you can see some tests over the years incorporating projection, dancers, water, fog, and drips :)

This is a prototype of an idea I had years ago that features a dancer inside of a ring of rain. There's a projector opposite the camera, and as the dancer moves, a Kinect picks up the movement and translates the movement into visual patterns. I wrote the code in Processing, spending a lot of time tweaking the motion detection to ignore the water drops, and getting the feel of the projection right. I would eventually like to realize this as a fully choreographed narrative with two dancers. The rain would ideally be more of a character as well.

Projection and fog in an acrylic box:

This is a box of containing a special fog designed by my co-worker Jim Doyle. We had the idea to project through it, and here I'm playing with some interactive code I wrote in Processing. The projection slices through the volume of fog, and lines appear to become planes. The projector sits on the same side as the camera here.

Here the projector sits opposite the camera, and you can see how my hand movement affects the projection.

Here's an edited clip of a 2 minute show I created with a group of my coworkers for the Bellagio fountains to announce the new season of Game Of Thrones in 2018! My role was to edit the show, map the feature, and generally assemble the final product as the deadline approached, but it was certainly a big team effort. The multi-talented Joel Bewley and Dan Walker helped create the content for the final show.

This is a project that evolved as a pitch for an installation for one of WET's clients - it's a tank of water sitting on top a screen/high density LED grid. I coded the visuals in Processing using the pixelflow library. Photo by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan.

LED tank with actuated valves.

This video shows a pitch for a sculptural piece. This is coded and executed in Arduino and Processing using the PixelFlow library.

Jewel Visual Development

This short clip summarizes some of my process in developing projection content over the years. More detailed documentation to come! This was of course a massive team project, but this clip highlights my process and projection content. I haven't showcased their work here, but media artists and colleagues Ting Zhang, Howard Tsai, and Lachlan Turczan were critical to this project.

Drone footage of the 1/5 scale mock-up (10 foot diameter outer rain circle) taken by David Sanders and Howard Tsai. Edited by Howard Tsai. Here you can see some of Howard's projection work as well as my own.

Awesome documentation of the mock-up at Hansen Dam by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan, edited by Lachlan Turczan. Again a mix of Howard and my projection work.

On the left you can see a 2-dimensional animation I made, and on the right is a recording of the projection slicing through the circle of falling water. As you can see a line becomes a circle as it projects through the cylinder of water. The song is Family Portrait by the band Rachel's. This is only one hypothetical orientation of projector and water - I'm interested to play around with more complex arrangements and multiple projectors.

This is a song called Systems and Layers also by the band Rachel's. The patterns I made here are an abstract reference to the structural lattice work of the building (an airport) and kite strings.

This video shows the projection on a single sheet of water with fog. The way falling water interacts with projection is interesting - it changes 2-dimensional imagery into volumetric forms, and the shifting fog abstracts the shapes. Furthermore, while you can't see it in this video, each water droplet functions like a tiny prism, so the color shifts slightly as you move your head.

A short montage of some of my choreography work including moments from three different shows.

AR Presentation Tool (2013)

This shows one of several app concepts that I have developed at WET to facilitate communication between designers and clients. This app (made in Unity) helps clients understand better the scale and behavior of the water feature as a dynamic, animated sculpture. Because clients are increasingly interested in interactive sculpture, I have been experimenting with the touch-screen interface as an input device. WET design spends a lot of time choreographing its features with international talent including Kenny Ortega (Dirty Dancing, High School Musical), so the interface needs to be able to express that level of sophistication from relatively simple gestures from the user. These examples are still in progress, but they show how the process of designing something as simple as a fountain can involve some complex ideas. This video was shot and edited by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan.

Animation

The design team at WET creates animations to demonstrate fountain concepts to clients. The animations are used to explain how the fountains move and how they relate to the surrounding environment. I have created many custom tools over the years to help choreograph these water features, exploring a range of ideas from large-scale morphing architectural landscapes made of water to intimate, human-scale dancing fountains.

The images show some of my process while creating these animations - I use Illustrator and After Effects to create animated patterns that map directly to nozzle locations in Maya. In Maya I trigger various pre-simulated water elements based on color information. This workflow allows me to create intricate choreographed water movement.

Sketches, etc.

Below are some of the illustrations and sketches I've drawn for WET for various projects. My goal is to emphasize the drama and beauty of the concept while representing the concept accurately. Sometimes the clients are receptive to a more abstract or stylized aesthetic, so I can use visible pencil marks and painterly color. Sometimes the clients want to see something much more literal, so I have to rely more on computer-generated geometry and photographic textures.

The University of Utah approached WET to design a fountain to commemorate a natural phenomenon on campus called "The Fountain of Ute." There is a mythology surrounding the fountain going back 85 years.

Made with ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and Photoshop.

Above and below are some sketches I made for an exercise in science fiction protoyping we did as a company. We were asked to think about the future of urban planning and to speculate about some of the sometimes grim realities facing people today. What will people need out of fountains in 30-50 years? I sketched some of the ideas we thought were particularly compelling, such as using water fountains for heating, ventilation, and cooling on top of buildings.

This image represents a sketch style called "interim," which applies to rough concepts. The image is not fully rendered or colored but instead only defines the basic outline of the water shape.

This is a more finished illustration using Maya & Photoshop.