Here is a little time lapse film I shot from the back of my bike as Liz and I rode through the streets of Portland tonight.
It is mostly a visual abstraction.
We rode over to the Clinton Street Theater to see “The Breakfast Club”.
On the way there … I set the camera to shoot at a two second shutter speed at ISO 800. On the way back home after the movie, I set it at a one second shutter speed and kept the same ISO.
We weren’t riding too fast and the camera fired about every 5-7 seconds.
I’m working out some animations for the “No Escape!” video. Some of the animations are simple two frame flips and others are more elaborate.
The character in the clip above is one of the two leads in the video. He is a frog. Well … a humanoid frog. It was hard to find the right balance of “eye bulge” vs. “alien head” while being limited to 20×20 pixels.
Yes … I know that legs don’t really do that … but let’s remember that this is a work of old school vid’ fiction!
This particular walk cycle swings around fives frames.
My blog went offline for a while today as I switched hosts. My last host … Netfirms … was insanely slow and starting to drive me crazy. They denied that there was a problem with their service, even though my site took 20-50 seconds to load on a T1 connection.
Oh well … that’s history now.
I’m still working the kinks out of the new hosting situation, but it appears to be much faster. I had to do a little database management to get all the posts to come up okay. If you come across anything strange, please shoot me an email!
I have been working on the “No Escape!” video. Here is the precursor to a driving sequence in the middle of the movie. I know there is no one driving the car (yet). It’s just a mock up right now. I’m going for that Pole Position feel, with a POV from inside the car.
Car Fun!
Double Click the image below to play:
I also pushed the song “Brain Games” to the 95% mark today. I only have two small vocal lines left and then I’m calling that one good.
Today, Liz and I hiked up to the top of Multnomah Falls. It is the 2nd tallest year-round waterfall in the U.S., coming in at a height of around 700 feet. It made us both a little dizzy.
It was a mild day (about 75 degrees) and the hike took us a while. I needed to stop and check on the memory card in my Canon A640. It seemed to fill up pretty fast. We saw a huge banana slug, a gardener snake and some other rubbery looking snake sleeping in the rocks.
I shot these short time lapse shots using a slow shutter speed to blur the flow of the water. I still need to figure out how to set a non-standard ISO using CHDK. This would have helped in a few situations where I really needed a low ISO.
The last shot of the movie was taken from the top of the falls!
I’ve pretty much finished up the intro to the “Combat” music video. I am only missing two elements:
The Bomb
The Bomb Bay Doors
I have a good solution for the doors, but the bomb still eludes me. The only thing I have come across is a water rocket at Fred Meyer. I’d have to paint it black and even then it would still look like a water rocket from Fred Meyer. I guess they just don’t make toy bombs anymore. What a shame.
I’ll try and finish the doors tonight.
I spent quite a bit of time working out the title word “Combat” in the intro. It’s kind of funny but I like it.
I also tuned the sound of a B-29 (I couldn’t find a good B-24 drone) to the key of the song … so the video will start with the ominous sound of an aerial bomber that fades into the song … and hits the root note.
Double click the image above to play the 2 second clip.
In the opening sequence of the “Combat” music video for my upcoming record “Bits”, a bomb is dropped from a model of a B-24, falls through the clouds and hits a bunker.
I spent some time today working out how to pull this shot off. I’m using multiple layers of fractal noise to generate the cloud effects and key-framing the opacity of the layers as the camera falls through them.
It’s not perfect … but it’s getting close to what I want. I still need to composite the bomb into the shot as well. I’m thinking of throwing in some bomb bay doors as well. I’ve got some ideas on those…
Liz and I tried to go out to Multnomah Falls today, but it was too crowded. There was a long line of cars just waiting to turn around because there was nowhere to park.
We drove back on the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway, and crossed over an old bridge built in 1915. We decided to jump out and check out the scene. There was a nice waterfall below the bridge in an area called Shepperd’s Dell.
Here is a short time lapse film I made using some CHDK camera scripts.
