January 28th, 2011

I took the day off this friday and recuperated a little.  June spent the day with grandma so Jenny and I both had some free time to relax a little.  I worked most of the morning posting the last three days to the blog since I’d had a bit of catching up to do.  I felt much better today.  The food poisoning from Wednesday night had pretty much subsided.

Today, I thought of all sorts of things I could do but I couldn’t escape the thought that I have a music video to finish.  My friend Steve, of the band Cue The Moon, so graciously offered me the chance to choose any one of their newer tracks to make a music video for.  I’ve been planning on doing it with the slitscan effect.

I have been relishing in the discovery process of experimenting with this effect.  It’s quite hard to predict what you might get from the from a particular piece of footage.  I’m extremely lucky to have been given an optimized bit of code which can render the effect at lighting fast speeds.

I have been lagging on shooting stuff with the purpose of slitscanning in mind.  This has been a prominent frustration.  Anyways, today I thought, hey, I’ve already got a bunch of material that I’ve shot in the past, including stuff over the past year.  Why don’t I try sending some of those shots through the mill?

So, that’s exactly what I did.  I drove over to my buddy Dean’s house with my computer and hard drive.  I set up the stuff and selected a group of shots to try.  I transferred them over to Dean’s PC and started by making a single image representing all the frames at once.  This is a great way to sort of preview what the shot might look like when I finally render multiple frames.  You can see some examples of those images above.

I decided to give a full render to two of the shots.  One of them is a shot of the sun setting in Laguna Beach.  I kept the camera steady for a minute or two and then began panning it around, capturing the surf flowing over the rocks.

The slitscan came out pretty cool.  It’s actually quite inspiring to me.  I like the way that the water flowing over the rocks in the end of the video create this cool abstract imagery.

The music under this test shot is from the most recent Monome Community Remix Project, the track is called “Hints of Logic” and it was created by an artist and monome afficionado Bongo.