Death By Audio Arcade was asked to build a photobooth for the Weird Wedding, taking place on April 13 (Friday the 13th) 2018. The bride and groom were interested in having somewhat of a "spooky" vibe, so we commissioned custom green screen animations to insert behind the guests of the wedding.
To ensure that the photobooth would be fully tested by the wedding date, we decided to launch the first version at PlayNYC at Terminal 5 in August 2017. Chris Hernandez drew up five custom animations with prompts like "Run For Your Life!" and "Cower in Fear!" which would be inserted into the background of the gif. The photobooth had a computer, screen, and webcam built into a custom acrylic box. A foot switch triggered the experience and selected one of the custom prompts and animations at random. LED strips let the users know if the camera was recording, compiling, or uploading the gif.
Dustin Long built the experience in Javascript and Neil Sveri developed code to upload the gifs to a Giphy Channel.
Photo by Ester Segretto
In the time between PlayNYC and the wedding, we decided to make a few changes. First, we wanted to improve the image quality by switching from a webcam to a DSLR. We switched to a Canon Rebel T3i, but because it must be controlled via custom software, we could no longer run the experience in Javascript. Dustin wrote an openFrameWorks application to interface the camera with the background images and compile them into gifs. His blog outlines the technical details behind this process.
Additionally, since the image resolution had been scaled up, we needed a whole new set of animations. We leveraged some guests at the wedding with some animation skills, as well as some members of our own collective to produce ten new animations with matching prompts.
Check out more gifs from the wedding!
Thanks to Giphy for providing us a custom API key for uploading gifs!
