The inspiration for the Sonik video for Gravitation came from a local friend of
ours, a talented and world-renowned photographer, Adrian Brannan. Ade is famous for
his analogue photo
collages (please give him a 'like' on his Facebook page):
We
often wondered how the same effect would look if rendered with video. With video
you've got the extra element of time, each segment of the mosaic can be running
from a different starting point, with a different speed, and even a different
direction. In addition the segments themselves can move over time. Would this
end up with an effect that was just too much of a mess? Or would it give an
effect that helps visualise the consequence of spacetime?
We started by taking several videos at three different locations over the period
of a year with a Kodak Zi8 camera. A motorway bridge over the M74, just outside
the Buchanan shopping center in Glasgow, and a bench in Strathclyde park.
Lining up the images was done roughly by using lines drawn on acetate stuck over the
camera screen.
The software to do the mosaic effect was hand-written. We used a simple
scripting language, Perl, and the image library GD. On a relatively modern
Linux PC running Fedora 16 we can render near real-time 720p HD even when handling 300
segments of mosaic. A simple language controls which parts of the screen come
from which video, and the first half of the music video uses this with simple
effects having just a few boxes overlayed:
Later in the video things get more
complicated, using randomisation to pick the location and movement of each
segment:
We used our scripts to create a number of ~13 second segments, then put them all
together using kdenlive. The intro and outro were taken from a different video
from a hotel room in London Victoria; the intro using a 'miniature' effect, and
outro using the randomised segments applied to a single video.
