For my capstone at IUPUI, I wanted to explore projection mapping in a way that blended narrative, sculpture, and interactivity — while also featuring some of the people I’d shared the program with.

The result was Time and Space: The Adventures of Mike, a kind of mixed-media, dimension-hopping short story starring my friend Mike (who was very game about all of this). I worked with another student to create stylized portraits of our classmates, and we built a story where they traveled through time — helping Alexander the Great while simultaneously trying to fix a spaceship. Naturally.

We staged it in the Barco Cave, a 3-panel rotating projection system at IUPUI that could fold into a cube. But I wanted to break out of that format a bit. I reconfigured the space into an open projection area with a portal environment on the back walls, and built my own foreground sculpture — a physical centerpiece that the projections mapped onto.

The sculpture was made from foam, wood, and PVC, with two contrasting sides:

• The left mimicked classical Greek/Roman elements — crumbling columns and hints of the Parthenon.
• The right leaned into modernist geometry — clean cubes and intersecting circles.

These architectural juxtapositions represented different “eras” or zones in the timestream, depending on where the characters were in the story.

Technically:

• I used After Effects, Maya, and Mapamok for content and alignment
• Playback was handled through Millumin
• The sculpture included a motorized sled at the base, which moved a circular projection screen in front of the piece — built using microcontrollers, a few motors, some salvaged pulleys and cables from a workout bench, and skateboard bearings

All of this was mapped and timed to work with the background projections and narrative beats.

And yes — Mike does make it through the timestream.
Though he still ends the show yelling:
“Wait… where do I go?”