New Media Initiatives

WACTAC has an event next week called Don’t Sleep on It, taking place during Art-a-Whirl. The gist of the event: over the course of 24 hours different groups of artists will transform a gallery space, destroying and re-building the art many times over the period. At the end of the event, they want to show a time-lapse video of the transformation.

Making a time-lapse movie is not hard. While it can be done using a video camera, it’s easier to use a digital still camera. You take a series of images at predefined intervals and stitch them together using software like After Effects, or, even simpler, Quicktime Pro. We’re using a Canon G10 and the Canon Remote Capture software to take photos every 10 seconds. I set up a test in our office just to make sure it would run correctly and without incident. Here’s the result:

Taking one photo every 10 seconds over 24 hours generates 8640 frames, creating a video just under 10 minutes long. We may end up dropping every other frame to create a shorter movie. The nice thing about using a digital still camera for this is that it produces a video well beyond even 1080P HD resolution.

In the above video, you can enjoy watching me look up documentation on Django, read a book about symfony, and my be mesmerized by a screensaver.

One of the myriad of things New Media Initiatives is responsible for around the Center is motion graphics. There are already great posts on here about some of the more interesting technical projects involving multiple projectors and fancy software. In addition to these more complicated solutions, we also do some old-fashioned linear motion graphics work in After Effects. I’ll dig into the recesses of my hard drive in the future and post some of that work.

In the meantime, here’s the latest piece for the Insights Lecture Series, which began yesterday. This video is entirely based on the poster designed by Vance Wellenstein and Ryan Nelson, I just added some slightly sophisticated transitions and timing.

2008 Insights Lecture Series Teaser from Justin Heideman on Vimeo.

This video runs for the period before each lecture start, while visitors are finding seats. It’s used as branding for the series and to remind those who haven’t bought tickets to the next lecture they might just want to. I’ve put the video on Vimeo rather than YouTube because Vimeo’s video quality is much better.