MAGICAL WINTERY AR OWL SET
During a cosy and dark winter 2021 and into spring 2022, I created this set of “Magic Owls” experimenting with AR capabilities in Instagram and Facebook.
There’s something just inherently magical about owls, and here on Vancouver Island I am lucky to get to see them a few times a year, once in downtown Victoria Chinatown!!
If you’re also a night owl like me and you live near any kind of tall trees on VA, you will be rewarded with hearing an owl even more often, usually a Barred owl at 11pm, midnight or 1am.
Once I was standing by the fireplace during early evening and a pygmy owl flew right into my living room window glass, as if it was trying to land on my shoulder. (Don’t worry, after a few minutes, it shook off it’s confusion and flew away.)
This art project started with the intention to make an autumn/winter themed multi-owl surface pattern, loosely inspired by Hedwig and the owlery at Hogwarts seen in a few scenes across the Harry Potter films. Hedwig was also my friend’s favourite owl, so it would get me bonus friend points.
The project quickly morphed into a series of owls with their own styles rather than as a single collective print. During this time I was just learning about advancements in Augmented Reality (“AR”), and I was curious to explore its uses and limits, and decided that these owls could be a fun application. They could literally come to life on the page. Some of the florals take design cues from retro flowers, something new for me.
Each owl has slightly unique types of animation, with the snowy owl I got excited and had to quickly learn the limits of AR currently on Instagram/FB, ie. that you are very limited by the amount of frames in your animation, because it quickly gets laggy and oversized. The sleeping owl on pink was my last animation in the series, and you can tell I learned some lessons in the process. The pink barn owl is light and limited in its movement, and runs the best.
For this AR to function, you need to have the print or an image of the print and point your phone towards the print with the instagram app and the link to the effect. This link can be found on the “downloads” page here, or in my effects tab on instagram.
The process isn’t super intuitive yet, and I found that it hits a wall for anyone who isn’t addicted to their iPhone and Instagram. I am waiting for AR to develop further to become easier for users, hopefully this will happen soon.
These owls were shared as a limited time card set on my Etsy page. I am currently in the process of finishing a barn owl notebook with a nighttime awake owl and sleeping owl on opposite sides, which is intended to be a more steady item in my Etsy shop.
Can you tell I love owls yet?
PS: If you’re on Vancouver Island and haven’t seen any owls yet, why not check out the Raptor Centre up in Duncan? It took me way too many years to visit here for the first time. I found myself loving the resident vulture there — maybe because I’m a sucker for an underdog.
This was a bonus AR project, a scene in celebration of the winter solstice.