In April/May of this year I was in Japan on holiday with my family.
I made many pictures, but what most struck me being there was how different the colors seemed to me. To give a feeling of that I decided to make a holiday snap into a movie by making every pixel of the picture a monochrome.
The resulting video, above, runs for close to 113 hours.
This is because I used the complete captured photo as input, at 3024 x 4032 pixels. I did want to project every single pixel captured. This is the photo (but downscaled so I could upload it to WordPress):
What I particularly like is the rather smooth transitions of the color because the resolution is so high. If I just would scale down the picture to fit a 90 minute movie, the result would be too flashy. But I did want to make a movie at a more standard 90 minutes running time, so I can send it to competitions or festivals.
So in the end I decided to scale down only in vertical direction, using the nearest neighbor algorithm, so the individual pixels would keep their color as much as possible. This resulted in a very vertically squashed picture as the input.
Which produces a video that runs for 90 minutes:
Which to me captures the colors and feeling of Japan uncannily.
And, feeling that a runtime of a standard cinema movie would be too long for some, in a monochrome format, I decided to make a 5 minute version:
I like the original full version best, and would like to exhibit it somewhere some time, on a monitor as large as possible and hung flat to the wall like a regular monochrome painting. Preferably an Apple Studio Display. This just running for the whole duration of the event or exhibition, never repeating itself, a slow and very detailed journey through a certain image, although the traverse seems to happen very fast. Which may be a very apt metaphor for Japanese culture, come to think of it.
It’s true that you could apply this procedure to any digital image you can make or find. But for now I think I’ll just render a few more movies based on snapshots from Japan. For the memories.