Films condensed into a single frame
London-based sculptor Jason Shulman has gotten a bit of press recently for his long-exposure photographs of films — Dangerous Minds points out that his work is very similar to work by Jim Campbell. (Campbell makes digital images of each frame, and then lays them all over each other.) Above is a comparison of their takes from the Wizard of Oz — Shulman on top, Campbell on bottom.)
I was interested in these, not just because they look cool, but because as works of art, they don’t really work without captions. If you saw them in a gallery, you’d just think, “Huh, abstract art,” but once you see the film title underneath, the image takes on a new significance. (Even more fun is to see one image, then play a kind of game, cover up the captions, and see if you can guess the movie. But to play that game, you have to be told with words that they’re composite images of a movie.)
After sharing, it was brought to my attention that since at least 2013, scholar Kevin L. Ferguson has been posting his own film composites. (Check out his tumblr, Film Visualization.) Here’s his post of Purple Rain:
Ferguson’s work is even more interesting to me — since he’s an academic, it’s not just a search for “cool” images, he’s actually digging into the films, and writing about them. (Long captions!) If I understand it correctly, he used Quicktime to get a library of stills, then analyzes them with a program called ImageJ.
Here’s a terrific post on watching 50 westerns:
Ferguson talks more about his work in this Huffington Post interview.
Filed under: captions
The time I saw Wizard of Oz twice in a under one second.
