We've Only Just Begun

Michael Woods 'We've Only Just Begun' from Vid Price on Vimeo.

In this music video they use light trails from LEDs attached to rhythmic gymnast's clothing to create a sense of motion trails from their movement. The trails in this video were done in a post production program but give the same effect as I was looking at in my previous post. By doing them post production they can keep the gymnasts bodies in clear focus but still apply the motion trails over the top allowing both representations of their motion to be seen.

Slow Shutter Speed Test

I looked a lot last year and over the summer at super slow mo photography from Marey's original experiments and photographic sequences through to using Twixtor to create intermediate frames in video to fake a super slow mo effect. These methods looked at creating high numbers of still images of moments of the motion that can be brought together as video frames to create the impression of motion when played at a high enough frame rate the eye stops recognising them as individual images but as a continuous representation of motion. The image above is a still from a video I made of an instant during the act of hitting a punchbag.

I wanted to look at the idea of motion capture from the opposite perspective, by using a slow shutter speed to capture and entire sequence of motion in one image. The images below are of the same act of hitting the punchbag but using a 2 second shutter speed. Shooting like this in normal light blurs the motion so much that the motion becomes almost invisible, with only stationary or slow moving elements becoming visible.

To invert this so that the motion becomes clearly visible rather than stationary objects I shot in the darker using different coloured lights to identify the motion of the two objects; red for the punchbag and white for the hand. The outcome is an image showing the motion trails for the two elements. The thickness/intensity of the motion trails represents the speed that the object is moving at that stage of the motion.

The image below was taken with a 10 second shutter allowing a series of punches to be captured. The punches of the fist are clearly distinguished from the withdrawing of the punch by the width of the line showing that the punch is quicker than the withdrawal.

Prism at the V&A

'Prism presents an alternative view of London, exposing unseen data flows in the capital through a sculptural, immersive interface suspended in the V&A’s uppermost cupola. The installation is an investigation into the virtual life of the city, and our own often ambiguous relationship with the data that controls our lives... digital artist and film-maker Keiichi Matsuda's Prism presents an ingenious window on that complexity, using data to depict the ever changing nature of the capital. His formidable digital installation at the V&A - a giant, sculptural lantern - is made up from a series of screens through which fast moving data streams are visualised, coaxed into unfolding shapes and patterns of light and colour.'                                                                 LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL

The V&A has opened up areas in the roof space of the museum that have perviously never been accessed by the public for the Prism installation by Keiichi Matsuda. The prism sits in the pitch black room below the cupola above the main entrance hall. It is lit up by live information streams which are represented by moving and changing projections onto the facetted fabric faces. Information such as the energy being used by 10 Downing Street, the depth of the Thames, the number of Boris Bikes being used and the amount of pollen in the air are represented on the prism.

Slow Motion BMX Edit

First full slow motion test edit using Twixtor. Its been a learing curve. After playing around a lot with the settings for Twixtor in After Effects it seems the most important factor in whether fottage will work with it is the way it has been shot in the first place. I hadn't realised this before filming the footage so the outcome wasn't very good with Twixtor. At least in the future I'll know to film at super fast shutter speeds on a high contrast background at 60fps.

Slow Mo Test

Running some tests in Twixtor for after effects to see how super slow mo looks. Since filming this clip I have realised that to get twixtor to work smoothly its best to shoot at 60 fps with a fast shutter speed and small aperture. Unfortunately my bog standard hitchi HD video camera does none of these things resulting in a blurry outcome from twixtor....