There's a movie I've wanted to make for a while. Nothing like anything anyone's ever dared to do. And for good reason. Working title: 70,000.
*** I'm listening to this album at the moment: http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix ***
I've noticed that if I take a stream of digital images and show them at a rate of about eight per second, that's more than enough time to "see" individual images. What's interesting is that I can go through the same images, at this speed, and see different images every time. It's fast enough that not every image is being seen.
What I'd like to do is collect 70,000 images and turn them into a movie-length slideshow, non-stop slideshow (about 2:26 long). The idea is that everyone would see the movie differently.
It would be a mental marathon. It would totally exhaust a large percentage of people. I believe some people would be able to be inspired by it, get ideas from it, and that they could watch it countless times without seeing the same thing twice.
As a DVD, or Blu-Ray it would have a number of different soundtracks. It could also be sped up or slowed down.
From time to time you'd slow the relentless rate and pause on a single image. Or, you might have several frames from a video. Enough to capture a tiny moment of motion.
What kind of images would it contain? Overall, it would be an homage to existence. It would
consist of simple images primarily- things you can grasp quickly. It would have art work as well as photography. It would have
a lot of portraits in it. It would take you in many directions at once, allowing your mind to pick up on any number of themes at will. For instance, it would have an almost equal number of male and female portraits, but different people would see more men, or more women, depending on a number of factors- expectation, for instance.
The first challenge is a legal one. Creative Commons licences would make things easier. The best way to proceed would be to include attribution and license information on the image itself. That way, you could arrange them in any order.
The next challenge is one of raw manhours. To find 100 good images a day would be a monumental task- a full time job. Even then, it would take two years just to collect the images- much less get them ready for presentation. A team of twenty, each preparing twenty images a day (volunteer, part-time labor- get paid later) would take could bring the gathering time to
about seven months (including weekends and down days).
If I get twenty volunteers- or even half that- I'll start. Your portion of the profits from the DVD sales will reflect the number of hours you spent on the project divided by the total number of hours to complete.
By the way, eight/second means that, at 24 frames per second, each image would be on screen for three frames. That allows for a two-frame crossfade with the image that preceeds and follows.
It would go something like this for images A, B, and C:
Frame # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Image A A B B B C C
% 100 80 80 100 80 80 100
Or, from the perspective of a single image (B):
Frame # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Image B B B B B B B
% 0 20 80 100 80 20 0
In other words, an image would start as 20% visible while the previous image was 80%. In the next frame, the proportions would be reversed. 80% while the previous image was now 20% visible. In the next frame, the image would be 100% visible. Then the fade into the next image would start in the next frame.
2 comments:
Four minutes of eight-per-second imagery has an interesting effect. If I take a nap immediately, afterwards, my mind enters a hyper-speed hypnagogic state in which hundreds of distinct images appear in my mind's eye. And they're not the same images either. I just can't imagine what the mind is doing to achieve this. They're not simple images either- they often have have emotional content and impact, and are utterly unique. It would take a thousand painters a year to accomplish what the brain can do in a couple minutes.
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