I had to go to work this monday labor day and I worked pretty late into the evening.  I decided just before sundown that I should do another slit-scan post.  One of the music videos that I’m going to be working on will make great use of this effect.  I figured I should not forget to keep collecting footage.

I hopped in the car and drove out to the burbank train station which is just beside the 5 freeway.  I went up the stairs to the overpass and got this angle of traffic rolling by.  I’ve treated each shot with both vertical and horizontal slit-scan, you can see the examples of each side by side above.

For a more detailed description of what exactly slit-scan is check out my earliest post on the subject.  The position and speed of the cars dictate their shape after they’re put through the effect.  You’ll notice how in some of the clips the cars are represented by what looks like thin lines driving down the road.  That is because in the original shot those cars are only on camera for about 5 or 6 frames so in turn they end up only 5 or 6 pixels thick in the final product.

The vertical shots travel from top to bottom and the horizontal shots travel from right to left.

Traffic is a very good slit-scan subject in my opinion.  I’m really happy with the way these all turned out  except for the hardcore aliasing on them.  Now that it has finished rendering and I can see it in motion the aliasing is even worse than I expected.  I realize that I have to make a true 1-pixel thick slit-scan in both horizontal and vertical.  These use 2-pixel thick slits and because of that you get a really nasty stair-steppy aliasing along the edges of fast moving objects.  This will mean rendering times that are twice as long but will also mean an effect that is twice as sharp.

The music in the background of this test is a song called “The Tail Of Mr. Fox” and it was created by an artist by the name of Modulogeek for the Monome Community Remix Project V4

I hope you enjoy!