Tag: quick video

2022.09.08 Quick video: Chicago State St

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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

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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:

2022.03.08 Quick video: Seoul loop

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Today’s quick video – a looping clip of driving along a highway in Seoul. My PhD supervisor Stephen Gage calls this type of thing a ‘finger exercise’, I assume because it’s like practicing scales on a piano – it’s one of many playful, small things that helps you work out ideas for larger projects.

I took this video on the way from the airport to my accommodation in Seoul in 2016. I was messing around with a camera I’d loaned (A Canon C100, if I recall). The footage isn’t remarkable, but you do get to see part of the city looming in the distance and the huge river. I just wanted to make it loop, nothing special – just to play with video a little, and make a quick accompanying sound bed.

The original shot looks like this:


link to original

The longest loop I could make is just short of the original clips’ length, 33 seconds and 9 frames, with the looping part coming from the van that overtakes. The hue of the video shifts throughout, from pinks and reds through to purples and blues and back. It also has a 12-bar sound bed I made quickly:


link to original

The 12-bar bed meant that I could cleanly cut the video in thirds. Here’s a version that’s 22 seconds and 6 frames, in blue, pink and purple:


link to original

And finally a version in 11 seconds and 3 frames, one third of the original length, in a yellow palette reminiscent of the Blade Runner 2049 desert scenes:


link to original

2022.02.17 Quick video: Wires

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This is the quick film I should have made yesterday – very quick and simple, a looping set of wires – but instead spent too long fiddling around with layers and composition, etc. Shot on the same journey, it’s just slowed down, inverted, layered footage of the wires going past.

I set students the task of making short, daily films all the time, but I rarely post my own. Hoping to do more from now on.