When the magic unfolds

Robert J Lang is one of the world’s foremost masters of origami. A former laser physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lang ditched his day job at a fiber-optics company 13 years ago to devote his life to folding paper.

Dozens of his featherweight creations — a peregrine falcon and an emperor scorpion, a stag beetle and a bull moose — are all fashioned with such skill and lifelike detail, they appear ready to leap off their pristine white pedestals. The complex pieces require days of work and hundreds to thousands of folds.

For centuries, lovers of the ancient art had to consult books to uncover such secrets. Increasingly, though, experts and novices alike are learning about origami through online films.

There are animated shorts — like Sipho Mabona’s Origami Rhino Unfolding, a 21-second wonder of stop motion animation — and commercials, like one Lang did for Mitsubishi, in which an SUV rolls through a forest and then a city constructed purely of origami figures.

There are documentaries, like Vanessa Gould’s seminal 2008 film Between the Folds, and shorts, like Origami Scaled Koi, by Sara Adams. “The advantage is that you can show the continuous action from one step to the next,” Lang said.

At his shows, images of Lang’s crease patterns scroll by on a screen above the completed works. While wonderful to look at, they’re intended to provide a glimpse into the creative process.

The tutorials have opened the art form to a new generation of fans weaned on the Internet, including would-be folders stymied by book instructions and those in parts of the world where a wireless connection is easier to come by than an origami manual.

While films have been instrumental in showing just how complex the art has become over the past couple of decades, misconceptions about origami remain.

“If I say I’m a professional origami artist, people think, ‘Oh, you get paid to make flapping birds,’” Lang said. “But then when they see what I do, that usually corrects that misunderstanding.”