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The music is Buralta by Fedaden, off of his new LP Broader (Beatport.com is the only place that has it in lossless, and it costs a ridiculous $25).

I shot my first timelapse a little more than a year ago. Above is a compilation of the best ones that I’ve created. I have learned a few things about timelapse:

1). Shutter angle in timelapses is very important. In stop motion animation, the strobing look of objects moving without motion blur is part of its visual aesthetic (except when counteracted by techniques such as Go Motion). In timelapse, since the subjects move by themselves, very filmic results can be achieved. The trick is to think about shutter angle, and to adjust your camera’s settings accordingly. Tyler Ginter wrote a more in-depth post about the technical and aesthetic considerations of Shutter Angle, but my description of it in application to timelapse follows.
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Since I graduated from college, I have been working steadily on learning theory and gaining practice in implementing a variety of visual effects techniques. I read books containing theory, namely Matchmoving: The Invisible Art of Camera Tracking by Tim Dobbert, and The Art and Science of Digital Compositing: 2nd Edition by Ron Brinkmann, I read manuals of software, I watched tutorials from the internet, I shot plates with my Canon HV20, and used shots from previous projects such as The Trouble with Unicorns. 8 Months later I now have a reel of content that is entirely new from when I graduated college, and have advanced my skill level significantly compared to what I was capable of then. However, I am still a fledgling and am excited to learn more, hopefully while being paid some small amount of money, so I can continue to pay rent and buy nutrients to survive.

Most of these little projects are primarily technical experiments, which serve to demonstrate a skill, and which provided me with some much needed experience. Therefore they are significantly lacking in any sort of conceptual and creative capacities, which are so essential to good work. However, competency applies much more than creativity in a junior level rotoscoping job. Don’t worry, I feel a boiling of creative output gearing up to burst forth sometime in the next 1-5 years.

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To the detriment of my poor elderly car, and the benefit of my endorphin levels, I took a trip back to Olympia. This visit was a respite from my previous months of working hard at living alone in California and having no friends and working all of the time on my reel and my procrastination. Then I came back, and continued doing the very same thing.

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Unfortunately I didn’t have a tripod on my return journey, so the previous consists of snapshots taken every 5 miles or so. The music is Traces by Cheju.

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Over the summer since I graduated, it seems like I have been in somewhat of a creative mire, not really working on anything satisfying. Instead I have been taking a lot of pictures, and learning some new techniques, perhaps resulting in another project at some point in the future.

One technique that I’ve been working on quite a bit is Timelapse photography. A little more than a year ago in New Media Studies, I built an intervalometer out of a 555 timer IC and a transistor to do the switching, and a few other resistors and capacitors to control time interval of how fast it triggers the shutter of whatever digital SLR you are using it with (I have a Canon 350d / Rebel XT). I got caught up in other things and never really used it, … until this summer. Following are a couple of the better results. (more after the break)

With this one I decided I would shoot an epic wide-angle timelapse of the light-patterns reflected through the trees on a windy night onto this billboard. Unfortunately, some guy got in my shot.

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This sprinkler timelapse was shot a while previous. I used a flash to illuminated the sprinklers and the grass, but of course the sprinklers stopped sprinkling before I wanted them to, so I had to do something to give it an exciting ending… the only thing I had handy was my face.

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Lethe was originally intended to be the first section of a larger project about the growth and perceptual evolution of an artificial intelligence. Unfortunately my time in SOS: Media ran out, due to The  Trouble With Unicorns and my insanity of time overcommitment. Having spent a great deal of time on conceptualization and preproduction for this project, I intend to finish it when time allows. This short and incomplete segment is all that currently exists.

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Download Lethe (33.5MiB).

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Download Dream Sublimation (72.5MiB)

Dream Sublimation is an attempt to extract and refine a sense of the pure feeling of remembering an expressive and significant dream. 3 dreams here are diverted aesthetically from a memory into animation. The result is at once intensely personal, yet surreal and illusory. A consistency of underlying internal logic perhaps exists in quantity great enough for meaning to be distilled.

I don’t consider this animation completed, but here it is in its current form, until a time at which it is finished.

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An old structuralist work mutilated by the digital age.

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Cyclic Punctilious Recompense is a video project completed in response to the (first) July assignment of the Safe Harbor video production group. All videos produced by members each month are broadcast on the Thurston County Community Television public access cable network two times per week, at 11:59pm on Monday, and 11:59pm on Thursday. The assignmental constraints on the style of the video were as follows: predominance of the color red; preponderance of repetition of objects and imagery; frenetic cutting style; no cut lengths greater than 4 seconds.

The constraint of “no cuts longer than 4 seconds” led me to explore a style of jump-cutting 1 subject with so little change in the jump as to produce the illusion of movement between frames. This in itself is a type of animation, if less manual of a process than creating each frame independently, as is traditional to animation techniques.

The red substance oozing from the mouth of the subject is Oobleck, a non-Newtonian solid.

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