VoiceOfEmerika

I recently discovered there is film festival for time lapse movies. That their web site is in a sad state is a bit of a concern. Nonetheless, I’ve decided to move beyond the simple clips I put up here and have started on a movie that I’ll enter into the festival.

Because there is not a lot of time, I’m reworking stuff you’ve all seen before into more of a feature length movie. Not only is time short already, but they want the movie as a Quicktime and they would prefer it in hi-def (1920×1080).

I had a lot of cool ideas that would require a lot of programming that will have to wait to next year. It has taken more time than I thought just to get Quicktime at 1920×1080 working. Several times I was ready to give up and roll the whole thing over to next year. Certainly, if it weren’t for the internet and all the great people who have written how-to guides, I would have.

I have a rough sketch of the movie on paper and in my head. My computer is humming away, churning out a bit of this and a bit of that and will be for the next week.

This is my longest and likely the best movie I have made. I’ve made a few changes to my hardware that allow me to create substantially longer movies. This one was 4000 plus frames shot over about six hours. It’s about three minutes long at 25 frames a second.

We were staying at Mountain Shadows Getaway in Portal AZ. This movie was shot in the car port at the guest house. There were amazing thunderstorms the entire time we were there. We were so busy I only set the camera up once, but I couldn’t be happier with the result.

It seems a little silly to write several posts when I’m building several movies from the same source. So… I’ll be adding new ones to this post over the next few days,

This one is a zoom to the lower left-hand corner. Nice but not especially better. I’m working on a painted movie that I think will be lovely.

I confess I’m a little in love with these movies with an oil paint filter applied to each frame.

As I mentioned in my previous post I had an idea for a long blend while in Joshua Tree. The idea was to highlight the wind in the scene. If things had gone as planned, you’d be looking at something with hard, solid rocks and other bits, contrasted with soft and fuzzy plants.

Instead… as you can see for yourself, everything is hard and crisp.

This is a blend of a hundred frames each five seconds apart. I’m left to mull the results and the difference from my expected outcome. Which reminds me of a great talk I just listened to:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
Monday, February 4, 02008

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/ (I hesitate to deep link directly to the audio–you can find it.)

There is really quite a lot to think about in this talk. Hints as to my inability to predict the outcome of this photo abound.

So, why did this photo fail? I believe the fact that the plants tend to a center position is the answer. Well, that and the huge number of images I blended. I am going to try this again blending just a few frames. The fact I used so many images seems to just have reinforced the strength of the norm and washed out the movement.

Karen and I went to Joshua Tree last weekend. We were just looking for a nice hike, but the flowers were blooming like crazy and it was nicer than we had imagined. I didn’t find anything I wanted to use for a time-lapse, but I did find some scenes I wanted to do a long blend on. The first one is still waiting to be processed. The second one was a disaster. It’s documented visually below.

I am sure you guessed that the tripod fell over. And yes, that’s me with the look of horror you just can’t make out. Arrggg! My camera has a telescoping lens and it’s bent and stuck now. (No, I’m not going to show you a picture.) It’s off to the repair shop for this little one.

And what did I learn? Wind is not to be ignored. Until now, I gave very little consideration to placing the tripod. If it stood, I figured close enough. Not anymore. Yes, all very obvious in retrospect. More so, because the wind was the entire point of the picture. I had planned to contrast the solidness of the landscape with the movement of the plants in the wind.

Well, it’s been exciting here lately. With Cory from boingboing.net giving us a plug. All and all, it was very nice. The only negative was the guy who said a monkey could have done what I did and that it wasn’t worthy of boingboing. The next day boingboing featured a movie someone made from a batch of cupcakes that turned out inedible; they danced. I can only assume that was boingboing worthy. -ouch!

Here are the last two movies from Seattle. It’s the same movie, one with the paint effect and one without. What do you prefer?

So I’ve been doing these out of order. Before our trip to Victoria, we were in Seattle for a conference. This was shot out the window of our hotel. It’s pretty heavily cropped because there were reflections in the window. Still, it’s not bad.