Category: TemporalCaptureIdea

I was inspired by some of the moving camera projects, especially the one with the camera on the shovel. It’s such a simple concept that still provided an interesting (and enjoyable) perspective on a common tool. This got me thinking of other tools/devices I’d like to mount a camera to:

• A hammer – I think it would be really delightful to repeatedly slam the viewer down towards a surface. As long as one could effectively stabilize the camera.
• A pottery wheel – I thought it would be fun to watch a lump of clay sitting still in front of your be transformed by a rapidly spinning hand. And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, because this one has been done by Eric Landon. It’s a pretty neat video!
• A paintbrush – This idea kind of reminds me of the interactive art project from last spring where you could draw with a stylus and “ride” it in real time with a VR headset. That really let you imagine yourself as one with your own writing instrument. But I think it could be differently informative to look down the handle of a paintbrush with a regular camera. You could watch the bristles as they are dunked into paint and rubbed across the paper in different directions. I think that moving camera would be interesting to apply to this subject because we are so used to thinking of painting/drawing as a person moving their tool across a surface. If the surface is the thing moving, would people watching be able to identify what is being painted? It could also help some people appreciate the differences in brushes and painting techniques more, by highlighting how some bristles are more flexible or more absorbent. Maybe I just still have typologies on the brain, but a set of recordings with different brushes and different paints or papers could be very interesting.

I am very interested in how Dirk Doy’s Fixed series are able to relocate the subject of a video narrative by centering the location of a moving object in a scene. Following his method, I thought it will be interesting to track the position of moving elements along the facade of a building such as construction cranes, window washing climbers, or furniture lifts. This new perspective could create the impression of the whole city being pushed upwards. Here, I made a short clip based on a YouTube video:

I was captivated by the music video from Oren Lavin who used pixilation to create a beautiful animation. I think it would be interesting to apply Piero Glina & Martin Borst cmyb layered photography with pixilation to create an animation that overdramatizes movement but still has a stop motion feel to the video. The process would be to create almost like a time-lapse of the subject but to make four frames turn into a single frame that is in the cmyb layered style. I think this would be interesting to apply this to dogs taken in the situation of having to do tricks before getting treats. Their movement will be over exaggerated, and it might enhance some of their mood and emotions.

So as I watched the lecture and scanned through the lecture pages, I kept thinking about how these methods can be used right now. My brain, as probably most people’s, is preoccupied by the emotions going on right now. With the capture methods of timelapse, slowmotion, and photogrammetry I kept thinking about how they can be used to capture the emotions/thoughts/actions of people right now going through this point in history. I do not know what it would reveal, but I think the layers of emotions many people seem to be wearing right now is interesting and could possibly reveal how individuals are processing and coping.

My main idea is to make a music video which follows either one or multiple people as they do their normal day to day activities but then something is done to reveal other layers of emotion that exist. Either slowing down on elements of their face that hint at other emotions or using photogrammetry to copy their head then explore what is happening inside using Unity.

I’ve known types of videos like this Tetris video, but never knew that these forms of videos were known as pixillations. Another cool video I stubbed upon recently was this Gatorade ad where they were able to trigger water droplets falling to create the shape of a human in a running pose, and stitch these poses together to make a human walk cycle.

I think it would be cool to have a capture system that would stitch together frames of people moving left to right in a walk cycle, but each frame switches to a taller person. The person could be walking in a 3Q motion that is away from the camera, so that they appear to get smaller, yet since the capture system would switch to frames of taller people, their height would stay relatively constant during the duration.

Above is a sketch of the mechanism, where each person would have a walk cycle video of them stepping on the same footholds (for alignment purposes), and in post-processing a frame frame each person can be taken to create the walk cycle.

With a lot of these examples, we’re able to understand somewhat, what we’re looking at. I found it interesting with the drill cam, one won’t really have any idea what they’re looking at unless the see the video footage right before the camera started spinning. Since they’re limited to using color alone to identify the scene, I was was curious about what would happen if I asked people to identify a scene based on what they thought the color “looked” like.

My next thought, was wondering if I took a series of videos of different living communities, would anyone be able to pin-point which was which? For example, a gated community in an affluent neighborhood versus a run-down apartment block in the ghetto. My guess is the former would be lusher and greener while the latter would be more muted tones. I realize this isn’t a very realistic project, but I think it could yield some surprising results about what we think communities look like.