Movie Stickers

Alternative titles: I'm not sure, but something way better than "Movie Stickers" - it will probably be easier when I pick a movie...

The Idea
- A temporary (one night or weekend) event experience for a large space with the floor, ceiling and walls all in white.
- Attendees are given sheets of stickers with unique images on them to place wherever they wish around the space.
- The sticker images are individual frames of a well known movie (exact movie TBD)
- As the event goes on, attendees will likely group stickers in various ways - colors, scenes, around particular objects in the space, and by other associations
- Eventually the entire space will be covered in over 100,000 stickers.

Why do I like this idea? Is this a tech demo to explore a novel application, or something more significant?
- I love the physical aspect of seeing how people group the images and scenes together. The potential for emergent behaviors in the space would create a lot of unpredictable outcomes in terms of how the images and scenes are used.
- I like the idea of creating a temporary community around a film like this, where people can come in and discuss their favorite parts.

What do I have so far?
- In the past, I have made forms of an app that outputs large images from a movie file, so making the app to output the images would be mostly trivial if I'm just doing images and not something more detailed
- I have calculated how many sheets of sticker paper I would need for a movie that is roughly 90minutes long.
  - A 90minute movie at 24fps would be about 129600 individual frames or stickers
  - Assume the frame images would be 1" wide (height would depend on the movie's aspect ratio) but we can assume a 16x9 aspect ratio which would be an image that is roughly 1"W by 0.56"H.
  - Assume a sticker sheet handed to visitors is 8.5"x11", so that would fit 8*(11/.056) = approximately 152 stickers per sheet (I simplified 11/0.56 to 19, so 8*19=152)
  - Assuming all of the above (125600 frames/152 frames per sheet), I would need approximately 826 individual sheets of paper covered in movie frame images. All the frames would need to be die cut so that people can easily peel them off

Next Steps/Where I'm stuck
- The idea and final execution might only be compared to Yayoi Kusama's The Obliteration Room. What am I expressing that would make this different to Kusama's piece? I could just be overthinking it - this would be a fun low stakes thing for a weekend or evening thing to do with the right movie and fanbase.
- It's currently still the pandemic and people can't be in close proximity to eachother, nor do they want to touch things.
- Should I keep all the printed frames in order? Or randomize them? Or maybe have 2 physical spaces - one where people are given random frames, and one with sequential frames and see how different the results are.
- It might also be good to add the frame number to the front of the sticker to keep things orderly?
- Maybe a poster around the space highlighting frame numbers and critical moments of the film?
- I have no idea how to print and die cut that many stickers in a reasonable fashion. I have not located a sticker vendor who would be open to helping me process such an order. Most sticker places are not set up to process lots of individual files. I would need a printing partner who could work with some weird requests.
- If you are a printer or someone who knows their stuff about stickers, please get in touch!
- What movie do I choose? Something super well known and linear would help keep people organized (like Star Wars, Back to The Future, Fight Club, The Matrix), but it could also be fun to play with a movie that has a lot of nonlinear timelines (like Momento, Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run, etc).

Technologies Involved
- No real equipment involved for the installation. Mostly just software development to spit out the images that will eventually be printed.

Logistical thoughts
- Would I need rights to a feature film before doing this? What would I be violating, exactly?
- How do you encourage people to fill the entire space rather than stick to specific spots in the room?
- I would need to rent or partner with a location, get walls fabricated and painted, and then deal with the cleanup and disposal afterwards (or even preserve and store some of the surfaces). The wall creation and prep could easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars. This would definitely need a sponsor or some additional funding outside of my personal funds.
- Sticker printing:
  - I did get one quote from a sticker company that looked like this - so the price of this activation pricetag could get quite high: "We have a minimum order quantity of 10 sheets per each unique design. In this case, if you have 900 unique 8.5" x 11" sheets; your minimum order requirement would be 9,000 sheets total. An order of this size would run $28,483."
  - One other option could be to work with a company that can just print several very very large sheets and then hand cut them later.

Are there other elements that could make this better?
- Place objects or things that relate to the movie and see how it changes the behavior of what frames are put where. Maybe put well known quotes around the space, or express the character arc in set design.
- Make another layer that allows people to locate, scan or play back the movie later on? Or just recognize the scene.