During the recent Malta Street Art Festival in Valletta, digital artist Toni Gialanze got together with street artist Bond Truluv to create what is probably the first project involving graffiti video projection mapping in Malta. Toni walks us through the process that led to the final projections, which kept hundreds of festival-goers enchanted.

What was the process like? As in, did you work together to come up with all the elements or did you each do your own thing separately?

Since Bond and I have totally different skills, we had to work separately but on every step of the way we were giving each other opinions and inputs. It all started from a magical sketch artwork from Bond, which was the base of the whole project. We slightly arranged the artwork to fit as a projection mapping. I later recreated the artwork in a 3D modelling software to get realistic lighting and shadow effects. Then came a lot of mapping of all the different surfaces of the artwork to project patterns and such on it. After that, it was just playing with different patterns and achieving practically endless variations on Bond’s artwork.

For those who are not familiar with the technique of projection mapping can you describe what it consists of?

Imagine you have a cube in front of you, which is slightly tilted from the top, so you can see its upper surface. From the frontal perspective one can see three surfaces of this cube, so if you map all the three surfaces and project different visuals on each you can create illusions that will trick the mind into seeing what is not really there.

In a nutshell, that’s what projection mapping is. Usually it is done on 3D objects or surfaces like architecture, but in our case we used a flat wall.

How did logistics work?

With a lot of e-mails and planning ahead and the total support of the Malta Street Art Festival crew, which ensured top notch equipment and the building of a temporary wall, so that the existing ones would not be affected.

Did you know what the finished artwork would look like?

I could visualise it the moment I saw Bond’s artwork on the screen. Bond grasped the idea immediately, so the piece he sent was perfect for the project. As for colours, patterns and so forth, I tried to stay as loyal as possible to Bond’s style in general so the main inspiration was Bond’s own patterns – animated instead of static.

What was the biggest challenge in completing it?

Definitely, mapping the projection to the actual sprayed graffiti perfectly. A slight movement of the projector could have resulted into a catastrophic, non-repairable fault that maybe would have meant delaying or even aborting the project.

What was the reaction of the audience like?

This is a good one. The best reactions came from those who had to go and literally touch the screen to actually understand what was going on. Some people thought that it was a 3D-surface.

For me that was like a mission accomplished because, as I said before, projection mapping creates the illusion of something that is not really there and that’s how it felt right there and then.

Do you have plans for other, similar works?

There aren’t any confirmed projects yet. But there are some discussions going on about working on similar works.

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