The Library of Congress just uploaded a bunch of portraits of American Civil War peoples to Flickr. Public entities providing content for private companies — sure, whatever.

Asylum, almost completed, is the The Civil War-Ken-Burns-style film that I’ve been wrestling mightily with for about a month now, maybe more. I’ve been looking at photos like these, of period mental patients, for that whole time.

Partly because I’m in the middle of The Name of the Rose and love A Scanner Darkly I’m riffing off the fact that these tend to be digital photos of prints of negatives of people, and in some cases the digital copy of the reversed copy of the reversed copy (which we see upside-down and automatically interpret downside-up) is all that remains of the memory of the person. The photos are on Flickr to sort out the multiple layers of disintegrated signs and get people to use metadata to reconstruct the original sign, the name of the signified.

It occurs to me that the issue of Transmetropolitan where they resurrect all the cryogenics people is actually rad — in that book, technology is at the point where we can reconstruct the signified.

I wrote a pixel-shader-type-deal yesterday (actually, a “component”-shader-type-deal I guess — it works on pixel subunits) and used it to implement Conway’s Life on photographs given as input.

Here’s a series of 120 photos, animated in Conway steps, of the subject of Asylum:

I wrote the utility using the OS X APIs, mostly to learn them for my own creative edification (I want to automate the glitching process, and maybe some other things). I might be able to clean it up a bit, move it off the command line, and cross compile to iOS.

Right now it recompresses the JPEGs every frame, which is bad for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that it screws up the cell-based nature of the game — it’s Life-versus-Compression at the moment.

Sometimes shitty cellcams have a certain aesthetic. Here’s my new splash page background. It helps that Ontario has such awesome skies:

The camera and software on the Nokia 6790 are surprisingly good. It can shoot relatively high-rez, in bursts, and has color correction, as well as some simple image editing capabilities. There’s also a video editor that can strip audio and apply scene transitions. It’s like having a miniature, portable multimedia editing suite.

Click through for a photo essay / HOWTO on The Constructening of The Rootwork Man prototype.

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Here’s a cellphone pic of my little stopmotion puppet prototype, The Rootwork Man.

Step-by-step SLR images to follow, just wanted to get this out there.

I have an assignment coming up that allows a great deal of artistic freedom. I’ve decided to stretch into more serious stop motion animation. Here is my setup:

Pictured: three ceramic masks, a couple of styroballs, some aluminum armature wire, a mess of magnets, some double-sided tape, and a miniature clapboard.

The idea, roughly, is to make a puppet as simply as possible out of armature wire, swaddle it in fabric, and then put a mask on the head for a face. I want something easy and reasonable-looking. All that said, it would be cool to paint different expressions on the masks and make them easily replaceable — this would give the puppet a basic emotional range or maybe some limited lip-syncing for speech. This is, generally, how Hollywood stop motion figures are given facial expressions: replaceable heads.

I decided to go about this by attaching magnets to the head assembly and to the masks. Here is a mask in progress:

As you can see there I’m affixing the magnets to the inside of the mask with the double-sided tape. I reckoned two styroballs would form the head assembly, each holding a magnet, and two magnets on the interior of the mask would form the coupling pairs:

Alas, it was not to be. The magnets couldn’t hold the weight of the mask! I tried to form the armature into clips that would support and grip the ceramic, but it was too fragile to be trusted:

I started to think about building a small electromagnet to clamp the mask, but then Jill reminded me that was probably out-of-scope for the project. Better, I think, to declare the experiment a failure and work on attaching the masks, permanently, either to the styroballs or to the armature.

PS — Welcome to the “Puppets” tag.

Here’re some of Jill’s pics from our recent Autumn leaf safari in Ottawa taken on the bright pink Holga she snagged for me in Tdot:

Here’s one of mine, a triptygraph:

Here’s the poster for the movie I’m pitching tomorrow:

Thanks to phrenzee, the photog, for permission to use those wonderful images. The Flickr stream is awesome.

Here’s how I’ve been making time lapse films, for those interested in the nuts and bolts on OS X:

-2. Win a poker tournament.
-1. Buy an SLR.
0. Build a timer.
1. Take a bunch of photos from a locked-off tripod or other still mount.
2. Turn them into hi-rez JPEGs.
3. Import them into Final Cut Pro.
4. Select all the images and insert them into the timeline.
5. Select everything in the timeline and set the duration to your desired frame rate (eg, one frame per image).
6. Nest all the items. This step is key and took some intense googling to learn.
7. Now you can pan-and-scan to create Ken Burns effect-style motion over your images by keyframing the Motion panel (or wireframe manipulation).

If you’re shooting RAW on, say, the Canon Rebel then you get a rez which is a weird combination of 4k and 2k — something like 4200×2700 pixels, roughly (probably 4×3). This is a great deal larger than 1080p HD, so a cropped 16×9 pan-and-scan won’t lose resolution in any current playback environment, and could actually be made higher than HD rez so that when TVs improve your video will look better.

Oh, yeah, and:

8. Render.
9. Come back in an hour or two.
10. Edit the clip down.

I made this film this morning out my front window using the intervalometer I built this weekend. Watch the clouds above the house — and what are those lights pulling away in the dark?

This is my first video in 1080p (though I guess I only exported 720p from Final Cut — the RAW data is higher-than-1080p-HD-rez).