This is a sketch video I made a year ago, but didn’t get round to posting. There isn’t much to say about it – the footage is of the walking section of my commute – besides that it wouldn’t look the same if it was someone else who’d filmed it. This is what it feels like to walk around in my body, looking for patterns.
Category: Quick video
2022.10.12 Quick video: Walking to Delftse Poort, revisited
This is a quick video, re-using some footage of walking through Rotterdam (previously seen here). It’s fairly simple, didn’t take long to make, but it’s always satisfying to spend a bit of the day sketching in this way.
2022.10.11 Quick video: IMG_2596
Not so happy with this, but only had a little time to make it today. Making an old video of running in the snow into something abstract – and playing with the idea of Shepherd Tones, but somehow falling short of the mark. These things are all just experiments, and sometimes they don’t go so well – but no matter, the joy is in the doing.
2022.09.29 Quick video: wide journeys
I made three quick experimental videos the other day with footage from train journeys in three different countries. Note, they are all extremely wide, so it might be hard to make them play on a phone. On a computer, you can make them fullscreen by double-clicking somewhere in the video.
France
The first video I made was from France, taken sometime in 2016. I think it’s just outside Paris:
Stills from the video:
England
The second video is from an old video of a train journey across England, about 2013:
Stills from the video:
USA
And finally – and perhaps most successfully, a longer form train journey across Chicago, from 2015. Note this is the only version with sound:
Stills from the video:
Why?
I make short experimental videos quite regularly (see here, here, here, here, here, etc), as a way to sketch an idea, and keep developing my video editing skills. For years, I’ve been taking videos of places I’ve been, looking out of various vehicular windows. I’ve got scores of them (and other footage) stored away on various hard drives. And whilst I enjoy the process of taking films, quite often I find the videos themselves are a reduction of the experience of being somewhere, as if you have to perceive the environment you’re in through a very thin rectangular cardboard tube. There is so much in a journey that doesn’t come across in a film; a wider field of vision than a smartphone camera can capture, the sounds all around you, the lingering smell of a stranger’s fried dinner further up the carriage.
I’ve been reading Ed Yong’s book An Immense World lately, and thinking about the myriad ways in which animals perceive the world, and how our umwelt is so specific to our physiology. I’m on the part about vision at the moment, and it is so much stranger than you might think. Jumping spiders have multiple types of eyes with different functions; scallops distribute their vision throughout their body; there are so many ways to see. Yong argues that the mode of vision we take as ‘normal’, i.e. two eyes in the front of the head, is anything but. Take, for example, birds of prey:
Many birds of prey, like, eagles, falcons, and vultures, actually have two acute zones in each eye – one that looks forward, and another that looks out at a 45-degree angle.
– Ed Yong, An Immense World
All of which caused me to think about vision, and memory, and how the films that I take regularly always fail to capture the entirety of an experience; that cameras are made not to capture reality, but to frame an aspect of it for a screen. I wanted to make films which capture the texture of experience, so that you experience the texture of a place on a journey; rather than focusing on individual things in the journey, my intention is to show textures and patterns in movement. I think they’re getting towards what I’m trying to do – there is too much to focus on any one thing, and so instead of watching a video, you can see similarities between them, how parallax movements shift into and out of logical sync, and so on.
This is not an articulate definition of this stuff – it’s hurriedly written, and these are sketches, rather than exhibition-ready things, posted here in the spirit of sharing my experiments in progress.
2022.09.09 Quick video: moving through an image
Very quick video made in Blender, moving a virtual camera through a field of semi-transparent video planes at high speed. This is an incomplete sketch of a project from years ago, which I’ve just started to play around with again. The video itself is not anything special; it’s just the output of a fun process.
2022.09.08 Quick video: Chicago State St
Another quick video, this time playing with displacement on an archival image of Chicago, plucked from the Flickr Creative Commons. The setup for animating the displacement is a bit finickity, but I like the overall ability to dive into a spatialised version of an image.
I recorded the audio pretty quickly too, a five minute recording session and about fifteen minutes to edit. The rendering of these things still takes quite a while, though – this one took 16 hours to render at 4k resolution. I’m sure there are some variables I can edit to make this better, but for now, I set these things up quickly and wait to see what they look like slowly.
2022.09.06 Quick videos: Chicago skyline, projected videos
This is a set of quick sketches in Blender. I’m intrigued by the ability to project images and film onto surfaces, which is especially interesting if the original movie contains movement.
I started with a video that I took from an L train in Chicago a few years ago. A simple shot, not much happens, but there’s some parallax movement, and a tiny bit of camera shake:
I then projected this onto a surface, so that the video moves at the same speed it was moving in real life. The camera effectively mimics what my real-world camera did. Then I projected the textures of this video onto a load of randomly placed cubes and circles. The camera moves, and the projected video moves, but the objects remain in place; the effect is that there is weird video displacement in unexpected places.
Here are various results:
Note that videos are mostly square for Instagram.
Here’s what the setup looked like behind-the-scenes:
2022.09.01 Quick video: driving in Iceland, again
It’s been a while since I posted any of my quick video experiments. This month I’ve been learning a load of new techniques in Blender, which is just incredible software.
First up, here’s a video of the shot I seemingly always use to test new video editing techniques. Over the 15 seconds, the video transforms from a 2d screen to a weird 3d shape, thanks to displacement based on the colours in the video. The virtual camera looking at the screen moves too.
Note that the looping isn’t perfect, this was just a quick experiment to play around with this technique.
2022.04.30 Quick video: balloon pop
2022.03.29 Quick video: coral
This is a quick video of some coral, overlaid with some more coral, and more coral, and even more coral.
Nothing particularly special; it’s weird and pulsing because it’s 240fps footage which must have been out of sync with the LED lighting. I just came across this bit of footage in my photo library and wanted to play around with its textures.
2022.10.12 Quick video: Walking to Delftse Poort, revisited
This is a quick video, re-using some footage of walking through Rotterdam (previously seen here). It’s fairly simple, didn’t take long to make, but it’s always satisfying to spend a bit of the day sketching in this way.
2022.10.11 Quick video: IMG_2596
Not so happy with this, but only had a little time to make it today. Making an old video of running in the snow into something abstract – and playing with the idea of Shepherd Tones, but somehow falling short of the mark. These things are all just experiments, and sometimes they don’t go so well – but no matter, the joy is in the doing.
2022.09.29 Quick video: wide journeys
I made three quick experimental videos the other day with footage from train journeys in three different countries. Note, they are all extremely wide, so it might be hard to make them play on a phone. On a computer, you can make them fullscreen by double-clicking somewhere in the video.
France
The first video I made was from France, taken sometime in 2016. I think it’s just outside Paris:
Stills from the video:
England
The second video is from an old video of a train journey across England, about 2013:
Stills from the video:
USA
And finally – and perhaps most successfully, a longer form train journey across Chicago, from 2015. Note this is the only version with sound:
Stills from the video:
Why?
I make short experimental videos quite regularly (see here, here, here, here, here, etc), as a way to sketch an idea, and keep developing my video editing skills. For years, I’ve been taking videos of places I’ve been, looking out of various vehicular windows. I’ve got scores of them (and other footage) stored away on various hard drives. And whilst I enjoy the process of taking films, quite often I find the videos themselves are a reduction of the experience of being somewhere, as if you have to perceive the environment you’re in through a very thin rectangular cardboard tube. There is so much in a journey that doesn’t come across in a film; a wider field of vision than a smartphone camera can capture, the sounds all around you, the lingering smell of a stranger’s fried dinner further up the carriage.
I’ve been reading Ed Yong’s book An Immense World lately, and thinking about the myriad ways in which animals perceive the world, and how our umwelt is so specific to our physiology. I’m on the part about vision at the moment, and it is so much stranger than you might think. Jumping spiders have multiple types of eyes with different functions; scallops distribute their vision throughout their body; there are so many ways to see. Yong argues that the mode of vision we take as ‘normal’, i.e. two eyes in the front of the head, is anything but. Take, for example, birds of prey:
Many birds of prey, like, eagles, falcons, and vultures, actually have two acute zones in each eye – one that looks forward, and another that looks out at a 45-degree angle.
– Ed Yong, An Immense World
All of which caused me to think about vision, and memory, and how the films that I take regularly always fail to capture the entirety of an experience; that cameras are made not to capture reality, but to frame an aspect of it for a screen. I wanted to make films which capture the texture of experience, so that you experience the texture of a place on a journey; rather than focusing on individual things in the journey, my intention is to show textures and patterns in movement. I think they’re getting towards what I’m trying to do – there is too much to focus on any one thing, and so instead of watching a video, you can see similarities between them, how parallax movements shift into and out of logical sync, and so on.
This is not an articulate definition of this stuff – it’s hurriedly written, and these are sketches, rather than exhibition-ready things, posted here in the spirit of sharing my experiments in progress.
2022.09.09 Quick video: moving through an image
Very quick video made in Blender, moving a virtual camera through a field of semi-transparent video planes at high speed. This is an incomplete sketch of a project from years ago, which I’ve just started to play around with again. The video itself is not anything special; it’s just the output of a fun process.
2022.09.08 Quick video: Chicago State St
Another quick video, this time playing with displacement on an archival image of Chicago, plucked from the Flickr Creative Commons. The setup for animating the displacement is a bit finickity, but I like the overall ability to dive into a spatialised version of an image.
I recorded the audio pretty quickly too, a five minute recording session and about fifteen minutes to edit. The rendering of these things still takes quite a while, though – this one took 16 hours to render at 4k resolution. I’m sure there are some variables I can edit to make this better, but for now, I set these things up quickly and wait to see what they look like slowly.
2022.09.06 Quick videos: Chicago skyline, projected videos
This is a set of quick sketches in Blender. I’m intrigued by the ability to project images and film onto surfaces, which is especially interesting if the original movie contains movement.
I started with a video that I took from an L train in Chicago a few years ago. A simple shot, not much happens, but there’s some parallax movement, and a tiny bit of camera shake:
I then projected this onto a surface, so that the video moves at the same speed it was moving in real life. The camera effectively mimics what my real-world camera did. Then I projected the textures of this video onto a load of randomly placed cubes and circles. The camera moves, and the projected video moves, but the objects remain in place; the effect is that there is weird video displacement in unexpected places.
Here are various results:
Note that videos are mostly square for Instagram.
Here’s what the setup looked like behind-the-scenes:
2022.09.01 Quick video: driving in Iceland, again
It’s been a while since I posted any of my quick video experiments. This month I’ve been learning a load of new techniques in Blender, which is just incredible software.
First up, here’s a video of the shot I seemingly always use to test new video editing techniques. Over the 15 seconds, the video transforms from a 2d screen to a weird 3d shape, thanks to displacement based on the colours in the video. The virtual camera looking at the screen moves too.
Note that the looping isn’t perfect, this was just a quick experiment to play around with this technique.
2022.04.30 Quick video: balloon pop
2022.03.29 Quick video: coral
This is a quick video of some coral, overlaid with some more coral, and more coral, and even more coral.
Nothing particularly special; it’s weird and pulsing because it’s 240fps footage which must have been out of sync with the LED lighting. I just came across this bit of footage in my photo library and wanted to play around with its textures.