Swimming Eye Video

I've just completed a video project titled Swimming Eye. This was yet another accidental project on my part as I was not planning on creating a video. Rather I was experimenting with using Processing to create an algorithmic painting program.

In experimenting with applying Perlin noise to a gridded particle field to create a large algorithmic paintbrush, I was struck my the nature of the ensuing motion. It was similar to that of a liquid surface in motion. The impression it made on me was that of a living painting: it wasn't a static image but an image that had a life of its own.

My original idea of creating some rather unusual digital paintings using this methodology was replaced with the idea of creating a video. The image used as illustration above is representative of my original idea. It was created by stacking several individual movie frames together in Photoshop and using different layer blend modes to merge the individual images together.

Previously I wrote about using Windows Live Movie Maker to create a YouTube video (see Portrait Art Video Project). However I found that Movie Maker was not capable of turning jpeg images into a real movie. With Movie Maker, an image must remain on display for at least one second. This is fine if you want to use images to create a video slide show. However, it does not work when it comes to creating an animation. To translate my 1400 images into a movie, I wanted each image (frame) to display for 1/30th of a second (think 30 frames per second).

I tried using Avidemux but it crashed repeatedly. In searching I came across FFMPEG – a DOS command line utility. It worked. With the basic video created my next step was to come up with a soundtrack because I really didn't want to create a silent movie.

Searching opsound.org, I located a public domain song that met my needs (thanks to Free Sound Collective for making their music available for use). I used Audacity to create a sound clip of the necessary time length. I used Movie Maker to add the mp3 to the video created by FFMPEG.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Don't forget – art is in the eye of the beholder.

See the Swimming Eye Video on YouTube

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Monday, December 16th, 2013 at 11:12 am and is filed under Algorithmic Art, computer art, Digital Art, New Media Art, Processing, Videos.