It is an optical illusion that has been used to bring Tupac back to life on stage at Coachella, recreate the British seasons for Dunhill's Shanghai fashion show and allowed Dita von Teese to morph from a Christian Louboutin shoe before performing a burlesque before an audience at London's Design Museum. But using Musion's Eyeliner technology to create a 3D projection shot underwater was a first.
The Siren is a life-sized 3D projection created by Laura Jean Healey, a Fine Arts graduate from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design.
She had previously used the Musion system -- a reinvention of the 19th Century theatrical trick, Pepper's Ghost -- to create work for the Burberry Body perfume campaign and also at the premiere of Mikhailovsky's "Swan Lake" in London in 2010.
However, shooting in a pool posed several problems not least the fact that this was the first time, says Healey, that the Phantom Flex camera has been used underwater.
Working alongside underwater photographer Mark Silk, whose film credits include The Boat That Rocked and
Stardust, the team created a custom housing for the camera and opted to shoot at the Underwater Studio in Basildon.
Healey had originally planned to shoot her siren, a synchronised swimmer who is also training to be a stuntwoman, through a window but Silk argued she needed to be filmed underwater "to get the right angle and control". Despite the fact that he dove into the water with her, you don't see the camera move during the five-minute sequence.
The next issue to tackle was lighting. "Lighting was difficult as we had to build from black as we had to film on a black background. This means that anything black will just disappear," says Healey. "We wanted to use tungsten-based lights, but we couldn't use these underwater so we had to light everything from above." The team next discovered that the ethernet connection between the camera and editing equipment wouldn't work underwater, which made reviewing the footage more difficult.
Despite this, Healey is keen to shoot underwater again, but in the meanwhile is hoping to take The Siren to Yota Space in St Petersburg, which seems, at the moment, to have been indefinitely postponed from the Spring. "The Siren may be just a light projected image but she holds your gaze as if she's actually there."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
