Photo Cloud Animation

A real-time animation for a national conference: portraits of its 500 visitors, taken at registration, imploding into a structure on screen just 15 minutes later.

For a national conference, together with the photo-event bureau and strategic agency Limelights, we developed an animation in Quartz Composer on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) which used portrait photos of the 500 visitors of that conference. Because the animation had to play just 15 minutes after the visitors had their picture taken near the registration desk, there was no time to pre-render the movie. So instead we developed a real-time sequence which would render on the graphics card and which could be started the moment the picture files appeared on the computer.

The animation was composed and prepared in Quartz Composer, a specialized Apple application, which is used to test and demo the capabilities of the graphics card. We used Quartz Composer because it helps to quickly render visual results. Also the use of Quartz Composer allowed us to simultaneously work on the development and the design without having to wait on one another. Because Quartz Composer itself was not adequate enough to render the core part of the animation —a reverse explosion of the 500 portraits into a given structure—, we developed a custom plugin for it. This plugin rendered the imploding cloud of 500 photos in OpenGL and used accelerated graphics techniques to make sure loading of the image textures onto the tiles was optimized and fast enough to render the animation in Full HD at 25fps.

Because we managed to get this animation running so soon after the photos were taken, we ended up showing the implosion animation not just at the moment the client requested, but also as an idle sequence leading up to it.