Proposal 1 -

Ave Maria, This poem is about the formative experience going to movie theaters is for a coming of age kid.

• character-wise this poem is fairly ambiguous, which poses an interesting design challenge. There are a lot of movie goers, all having their own experience in a dark room.
• the film itself is a character, which I think could be an interesting creative puzzle.

My idea for the automaton would be a miniature set of a movie theater. The viewer is looking in through an invisible back wall. Everything in the foreground is black, as if cast in shadows, only visible as silhouettes. The film screen has an image on it and is the only thing that has color, except for maybe some curtains framing the screen.

• movement-wise some of the audience would be walking thru the rows of seats to find their spot or down the aisle of seats
  • this could be achieved with belt mechanisms attached to little silhouettes of people
• an already seated audience member or two could shift their head around or lean in their seat
  • this could be some sort of cam mechanism
• the movie screen - this could be a lenticular print with a left and right shifting movement in order to shift the perspective enough to shift the image, giving an illusion of a moving image. I’d like the movie stills to be from A Trip to the Moon by George Melies or the opening shots from David Lynch’s Eraserhead, both movies that really fostered a love of film for me at a younger age.
  • I think this could be driven by some sort of linkage

Materials

In my mind this would be a mix of 3D printed elements, fabric and laser cut plywood. For the mechanisms, I would want to buy as much as I could from sites like McMaster in order to achieve smooth operation and good tolerances.

Fabrication Schedule

The rough schedule would be first creating each individual mechanism in a vacuum to make sure I can get them working smoothly. After this I would work on connecting them all to the same drive system. From there I start 3D modeling the miniature theater and how I would integrate the mechanisms into the aesthetic design. From there it is mostly trouble shooting and creating aesthetic qualities of the theater.

Proposal 2 -

Continuing Jersey Devil

Not a poem but I really liked the feedback I got from my midterm automaton.

• Keep the tree peaking actions of the jersey devil heads, but play with the scale of the trees and maybe employ elements of black puppetry to camouflage parts of the devil heads with darkness behind it
  • this would be controlled by a cam system
• add foreground that would be a single lane highway with a car driving by and a devil chasing it
  • this would be a belt driven mechanism
• add a moon with moon beams coming in and out of view
  • this would be a gear system with a large gear that has the moon beams on it rotating behind a a piece of wood with slits cut in it.

The materials for this piece would still be laser cut, but would be fully UV printed with designs in order to elevate the look of the cut plywood.