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Silhouettes of Jazz is an animated short movie that outlines the history of traditional jazz music in a virtual walkthrough of a shadow art museum. Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The movie highlights five different milestones in the evolution of jazz: the early songs of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop. Each era is represented with a room containing 3D sculptures which cast multiple shadow images at the same time. This unique property is achieved using a novel computational method for the interactive creation and manipulation of shadow art. Given a set of desired silhouette images, a global geometric optimization builds a 3D shadow volume that can subsequently be edited by the artist using a set of 3D modeling tools.

Silhouettes of Jazz was one of the three nominees for the Best in Show Award of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival. Authors: Dominik Kaeser, Martin-Sebasian Senn, Mario Deuss, Niloy J. Mitra and mark Pauly.

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