When the creative team behind Radiohead’s new video for House of Cards released 3D imaging data of Tom Yorke’s head, I’m sure they looked forward to finding out what people would do with it. I’m guessing one thing they didn’t expect was for someone to go manually through the data and painstakingly reproduce it in actual, physical Legos, one … brick … at … a … time, then make it into motion again with time lapse photography (okay, with a fair bit of fakery and digital legos added, though quite nicely).
Be sure to go watch the high-quality version on YouTube for the full effect. (Check the direct YouTube link and look for the option directly below the player.)
I think I’m going to go just watch TV for the rest of the day or something.
Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, and that he runs New York’s T-Minus, a festival devoted to timelapse. You’ve got some time to get in your submissions for this year’s T-Minus – the call for works follows – but I wanted to press Chris a bit on why manipulations of time are important to him, and what works he finds inspiring.
Among his picks, above from just over the river at the wonderful Brooklyn Botanic Garden (and yes, there are idyllic places like this within the five boroughs):
This time-lapse shows three days in the life of the Cranford Rose Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden as thousands of roses bloom in early June. To create the unique perspective, each still frame of the video was treated with a tilt-shift lens effect in Photoshop. For more information on the Cranford Rose Garden, visit bbg.org/roses The music is by Jon Solo. His website is myspace.com/jonsolomusic.
Chris explains how he became a video Time Lord – and how even raindrops can take on new meaning when time is compressed. I got him thinking out loud in email:
It’s a jumble of things that draw me to time manipulated work, some personal, some societal, all technological.
One theme that inspires T-Minus is how boring the majority of documentation video is, yet the market sells more and more video cameras, and the entire industry around video is thriving. For what? Think how many times you’ve sat and watched a documented event. I think of the massive amount of energy and resources that go into consumer video. Wedding videos are a great example. Sure there may be something compelling to you if you’re the one at the alter. But we’re recording too much, saving it, calling it precious, and never actually seeing it again. Instead, if people captured timelapse, they would have the best of both worlds, and save petabytes of data.
The primary creative theme in time-based artwork that inspires me is the idea of the unexplored relationships surrounding us, just waiting to be unearthed. Video editors and VJ’s know some of the excitement around these relationships. But there’s generally in those contexts the studio mindset that comes into play, instilling classic ideas of composition, color, line, movement. I use the analogy of baking a cake to the capturing of time. You put the ingredients together, put it in the oven, and see what you get. The result always brings out a pattern you wouldn’t have seen or thought existed. I put a camera six feet out off my fire escape on East Broadway once, pointing up the street. When I compiled the footage, I was perplexed to see the frame shift significantly, yet very slowly, over the course of 12 hours. What I realized was when it rained during the recording, the water accumulation and then drying caused the board to warp and twist, shifting the camera’s view. Or how city lights appear through drying raindrops in front of the lens. Or how the shadow of a church slides across the buildings during certain times of the year out my studio window. All these things are incredibly intriguing to me.
As visualists we tend to spend most of our time working with digital processes. So it’s good to step back occasionally and remember that computers don’t need to do all of the work:
1154 stills taken over 2-3 weeks. The lighting and setting is kept remarkably consistent, although I’m guessing someone with a little more production knowledge (or spare time) would have removed the tripod-bump in post.
While we’re on the subject of animated pieces of paper: Switchfoot’s “Awakening” has been treated to a similar workflow (frames printed and photographed) with a very different result.
Ways of adding a second layer of animation to a video:
1. Composite them digitally. Use lots of tricks, like match moves, to line everything up.
2. Print each individual frame onto paper (4,133 in this case), tack them up to stuff, and video the results into a time-lapse video.
Max Tyrie chose the latter for the Modest Mouse video contest. This is probably beyond the wildest dreams of what Modest Mouse’s promoters hoped for. Viva viral. It’s funny that, as digital technology progresses, people are discovering new, more “analog” means of producing visuals.
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