I would like to to call attention to an interesting project, dealing with the correlation of digital manipulations and candid documentary shots.

www.digitalsnapshot.de contact: info@digitalsnapshot.de

DIGITALSNAPSHOT Minute manipulations of space, place and time.

What does a moment look like? Can snapshots freeze a moment in time?

In DIGITALSNAPSHOT, motion fragments were captured and rearranged in a new visual context via unconventional digital manipulations. A long take camera movement cycle generates a unique "digital painting". In this case DIGITALSNAPSHOT enables the viewer to experience a virtual walk through a beautiful park during summertime.

Tell me- -what do you think?

Cheers,

Lo

         

Wow! This is awesome!

         

Sieht ganz nett aus, aber was hat das hier zu suchen?

         

i know i did quite the same two years ago

         

That's really cool stuff. Unfortunately, I can't seem to download the PDF file explaining the theory behind it... How was it done? Best, Jacob

         

you can try right mouse click to download the pdf, maybe you are behind a firewall... if it does not work, write an email at info@digitalsnapshot.de so that i can sent it to you.

         

OK, I've managed to download the PDF file (not sure why I couldn't download it before.) Now the only problem is... I don't speak German! Would it be possible for you to write a brief English summary? Since the PDF is 26 pages, I assume the process is fairly complicated, but even a very short summary would be interesting.

         

Many people asked me for an english Pdf, but my english is not well enough to translate the whole document... So let me try to give you a brief summary: Apart from the scateboard scene the whole clip is based on candid documentary shots. This was achieved by walking through the parcs of my city for about 6 weeks, waiting for the right moment... snapshots!

I worked with 4 different cameramen, because you have to spend a lot of time doing nothing...We worked as a team more or less in a guerilla - method. My cameraman with a canon xl1 dv-cam without tripot,to be more flexible (e.g. police razzia )and me documenting the shots from the same perspective with a digital camera (4mio pixel). The digital hi-res fotos build the base for the compositing. You can stitch them together in combustion, builing huge backgrounds for your scene.

After I had collected enough material for my project, I organized it into different groups, (old people, children, animals,...) to build up a large database to have an easy and fast access to the right material...

I only used Combustion and realviz retimer for compositing. To capture more then a snapshot or a freeze I used several frames of each person and streched it about 15times with retimer... So I was able to catch some motion fragments of each person.I think thats more interesting and meaningful than a still.

I did build several "animation islands" in combustion to avoid a creative blockade. The compositing was build up by inserting the persons via soft garbage mattes in combustion, because I wasnt able to key anything. At the end I had several "animation islands" which were consistent. So I have build cross-links to generate a seamless camera movement.

I hope I put my idea across

Lo

         

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize it was such a time-consuming and elaborate process--as Fred Astaire always used to say, it takes a lot of work to make it look that easy.

Best wishes, Jacob