I've been playing with anamorphic images recently, for the uninitiated it's a technique that 'distorts' a 2D image to make it look more realistic in 3D when viewed from a certain angle of perspective. Street artists have been doing it for years and the overall principle has been experimented with amongst artists for centuries.
Probably the most obvious examples are the sponsor logos that are seen on sports grass pitches on TV, they're distorted in such a way that when the camera points at them they look like they're 'standing-up'.
So now it's arrived at my little corner of the web... for this test I decided to use the Wasps Rugby logo and, basing it on the popular Rubic's Cube image example, I distorted it using grid templates I drew in Adobe Illustrator, printed it from a laser printer, and then cut part of it out on our Zund plotter, the result is this video:
It's not great, the problem is the Wasp graphic's antenna created a shadow that almost ruins the effect and the paper I used is too thin and light to stay down against the Zund's bed vacuum suction but, despite that, the effect does work! Placing a shadow effect below the logo helps enhance it...
The OCD graphic designer in me wants to improve this video because the angle at which I filmed it makes the Wasps logo look too fat on the height, the original logo is much thinner.
