the negotiated brief

For this brief I had to meet with my tutors several times and discuss an idea that I wanted to make into a brief. The idea could be anything essentially, so I decided to investigate a special type of effect known as 'slit-scan'.

Here's an example



and this is from 2001: a space odyssey the first major commercial use of the effect.



I decided to use a P2 camera to get my own footage. I decided to focus on fire spinning and circus skills. Partly because it's a hobby of mine that I have yet to incorporate somehow, but mostly because of the exaggerated movements within the body to create fluid manipulations of objects.
I shot the footage at 50fps for slow motion, knowing i can always speed it up again in post.

Also some videos tend to go out of focus and zoom erratically, this is because I wanted avriety in my footage so I could see how different film styles would work.

One of the key differences when working with this effect digitally is that the computer uses an alpha ramp as a means of working out how to distort the frames in either direction. With this in mind I also set about doing some experiments with various types of alpha channels including fractal noise to various degrees of distortion and trying to incorporate movement into the alpha as well.



















There's a lot more to come but I have to get away from the computer for a few days. Generally out of these first filming sessions i learned that there is a lot to be found in distorting the light sources such as the LED or the fire. My next shoot, I used a pitch black photography studio and the LED staff to produce some really cool movies for slit-scanning.