Of all the ways to describe creative work, few are more universally positive than saying that the art, music, or film “comes alive.” Filmmaker Jeff Desom seems to have recently taken that idea as literally as possible and created “Holorama,” an art installation of iconic movie scenes enhanced with a beautifully simple holographic technique.
Holorama is basically a set of five dioramas with models of movie scenes as backdrops. Enclosing these models in an ingenious rig that includes a monitor and a two-way mirror that projects holographic images onto the dioramas thus breathing life into the scenes. The movie and TV moments chosen were Cooper’s dream sequence from Twin Peaks, Martin Sheen rising out of the water from Apocalypse Now, Elliot’s bike ride from E.T., the skeleton battle from Jason and the Argonauts, and our favorite, John Turturro’s scene from The Big Lebowski.
These holograms are accomplished with the use of a two-way mirror. A monitor below the model projects the moving parts of the scene onto it and from the viewer’s perspective it’s overlaid onto the incredibly accurate models behind it. This is the same technique you can utilize with some household items and a smartphone.
The work involved in these models alone is impressive but let’s just take a moment to think about the hours upon hours it took to rotoscope each scene into something that could be projected. Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which, for simplicity’s sake, an artist traces over an original piece of film frame-by-frame. Even with the short scenes and done digitally, it’s still a daunting task.
Other than the E.T. scene, the ones chosen are all a bit off the beaten path as far as what you’d consider “iconic,” which kind of makes Holorama just a bit more awesome. The Twin Peaks scene is an especially fantastic choice as it has always been a bit off-putting. Seeing it in hologram form just kind of adds to the… oh what’s the phrase… “David Lynch-ness?”
Take a look at the gallery below and let us know what you think of Holorama in the comments!
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Images: Jeff Desom
