I have been having meetings lately regarding the music video I’m doing for Cue The Moon.  I initially was going to do a slit-scan based video that would appear to be a single shot panning around a room.  The camera would pass by various objects which would be under the effect of slit-scan.  I ultimately nixed that idea because A.) I felt like the special effect of stitching all of these slits-can shots together in the computer might not turn out how I’d planned and B.) I wouldn’t be able to use the ocean as a subject.

There is nothing quite like the ocean when it comes to getting beautiful results from slit-scan.  It all comes down to the movement and texture of it all.  The ocean has variations of color and whitewash and ripples all flowing at a consistent rate.  If you stand on the beach and look out at the water there is a natural slow motion quality to it.  These are the main reasons that the slit-scan results look so amazing and surreal.

I knew that I wanted water and the ocean to be an element in my music video for this very reason but I also posed the question to myself of “What else out there has the same qualities of texture and movement as the ocean does?”  My ideas for experimentation were, the leaves and branches of a tree blowing in the wind.  There is a natural slow motion beauty to the movement of a tree in the wind.  Another idea is a flock of birds flying together.  Birds most definitely don’t move in slow motion but there is a larger movement to the flock as a whole that would be an interesting thing to see.  The last idea was the clouds.  The movement of the clouds, when time-lapsed, can look surprisingly similar to the movement of the ocean.

Last weekend it was my plan to inaugurate the beginning of shooting on this music video with an early morning trip to the beach to film the water as the sun rose.  Unfortunately, Jenny has been sick and that mixed with bit of surprise rain / easter plans kind of spoiled that hope.  Although sunday afternoon as Jenny and I drove home from her parents house, I noticed the rain had let up a bit.  The sun was coming through and the clouds were beautiful and large and fluffy.  I decided it was an opportune time to do a time lapse.

I pointed my camera to the clouds and snapped pictures at an interval of one frame a second.  I let the camera go for about an hour and a half to two hours and the time lapse ended up being about three minutes long.

I sent the shot through Amnon Owed’s awesome slit-scan processing script twice.  Once running on the X-axis and the other on the Y.  Due to the large number of frames being input (4741 frames, to be exact) the images from the X-axis slit-scan were really wide at a resolution of 4741X1080.  The images from the Y slit-scan were extremely tall at 1920X4741.

The clouds looked really cool and interesting but also very squashed.  This was because of the actual speed of the clouds.  They passed by at an unusually fast rate.  I could have gone with an interval of two pictures a second and gotten even better results.

I brought the two shots into After Effects and loaded them into an HD comp.  I didn’t really like the way the clouds looked all squashed up so I decided to scale them up to 3 times their actual size in one dimension.  Basically, I took the X-axis slit-scan and scaled it on the X-axis to 300%.  I did the same thing to the Y-axis of the Y slit-scan.  I would normally never want to scale any image up by 300% but because I was only scaling up one dimension I was still retaining some sharpness from the other dimension.  There is some nasty artifacting here and there due to the enlarging but it also revealed all this amazingly beautiful detail and movement at the edges of the clouds.

It was that surreal effect I was hoping for.  It’s the texture and movement that we know from the clouds in the sky and yet there’s something foreign going on.  Cloud shapes appear to form like falling rocket trails out of thin air.  At times the clouds look like strands of long white hair.  I can see even more interesting variations coming about if I do more of these time lapses at different times of the day.

I decided to cut a little montage together last night.  It was great fun exploring around within these two giant panoramic movie files and finding the pretty moments to focus on.  With the two factors of each shot lasting for about 45 seconds and the other being that the scale in one dimension is so enlarged, there was an incredible amount of variety I could find at any particular time or position within a single shot.

I hope you enjoy it!  The music in the video is from my music box melody from Day 148 / A Lullaby To Life.  I took that audio and slowed it way down in Spear.  Then I took that audio file into Ableton and layered it with a reversed version of itself.