Glittering Lights Of Hollywood

I wanted to test out this new and exciting slit-scan Processing script that designer Amnon Owed created.  I went searching for whatever video I already had on my computer.  Since the creativity project ended I have backed-up and deleted quite a few days and material is a little sparse on the hard drive at the moment.

 

I really didn’t care too much which shot to choose.  I just wanted something convenient so I could test out the script and see how fast it rendered.  I chose my time lapse of the sun rising over Hollywood that I captured on Day 318.

 

Always a discovery, I was happily surprised with how the shot turned out.  It’s really quite beautiful!  It rendered really quick as well.  I mentioned it in my previous post– It took just over an hour to render about a minute and a half of full HD video!  Awesome!

 

I think I should also mention that this script does only one type of slit-scan.

There are two major techniques that are popular in slit-scan and this script only performs one of them.  Unlike my Day 330, where you see a sort of cadence flow of scan-lines traveling up the frame, where anything that doesn’t move in the shot appears unaffected by the slit-scan, this script rather presents the life of a single particular scan-line over time.  A good example of this kind of slit-scan can be found on Day 297 and Day 301.

 

Now a more detailed description:  Imagine a virtual slit hovering over a single scan-line from the source material.  What you will see is the life of that single scan-line suddenly spread across the entire frame at once.  Now, as it renders, that “virtual slit”, that hovers above, travels down the source material and samples each scan-line as it goes.  When it transitions from one scan-line to the next, the life of whatever scan-line it hovers over, is spread out across the screen.

Make sense?  Yep, hard to describe.  Nothing to do about it.

 

Anyways, check out the video below and compare it to the source material on Day 318.  In the video below you will see two shots.  In the first one, the “hovering slit” travels horizontally and in the second, vertically.

It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at exactly, but what you may recognize is the white headlights from the cars going north on the freeway and the red tail-lights of the cars going south.  They end up looking kind of like this glittery strip of sparkling lights but if you look very closely you can tell that they are actually a ton of tiny cars.  About an hours worth of cars, actually, because that’s how long the original time lapse lasted.

 

All of the other very thin strips of light that you see flicker on and off come from all the city lights as the “hovering slit” travels over them.

 

I hope this description helps to illustrate what’s going on.  You can understand why it’s tough to predict the outcome of any particular slit-scan.

 

Anyways, enjoy the shots.  I think they are beautiful.  The music in the video is from an artist called Automatic Thoughts from a track called “Keep Right”.  You can download it here.