art-time-collective

A crash heard in the night
a camera placed for sight
the crash again
heard from the den
a ghost; the cause of fright!

It turns out that my drum practice room is haunted and I have captured the phantom drummer in the act!

Or… perhaps all this indicates is how easy it is to produce authentic looking fake ghost footage and that you should not believe everything you see, hear, or read… especially on the internet.

P.S. This type of artwork is a fairly new (began in 2011) construct called a cinemagraph. It involves taking a video clip and isolating a small part while the majority of the frame is a frozen image, and this is usually packaged in the form of an animated gif. This particular example is simple looking (although not easy to create) and maybe even natural looking because it’s not difficult to imagine that the rest of the image would be perfectly stationary, as depicted. (Aside for the absence of the drum stick and my body/arm that I sneakily removed) However, the cinemagraph becomes much more intriguing when there are other aspects of the image that you expect to move along with the moving part. For example a person could be walking  through a scene where everything and everyone else is frozen.
One limitation in the technique is that it is an infinite loop, so the transition from beginning to end has to appear smooth and often has to be completely fabricated by duplicating and manipulating many extra frames.

Now that I have discovered this new art form you can expect much more of it to appear from me here on art-time-collective in the near future. I’ll make a few based on the very limited videos that I already have, and eventually I might film stuff specifically for this purpose.

Filed under: cinemagraph, digital manipulation, video | Tagged: cinemagraph, cymbals, drums, fake, ghost | 4 Comments »