Movie 1


About the Movie

  • Dimensions : 250 pixels x 250 pixels
  • Duration : 35 seconds
  • Frame Rate : 6 frames/sec.
  • Date of completion : 1 January 1999

    Idea behind the movie

    The inspiration came from an artwork by Scott Kim in which he had played with the unit origami theme. In unit origami, small elements are used repeatedly to make more complex patterns. Here I have used the two right triangles in a square as the basic unit of repetition.

    The movie is a journey through 8 patterns made of this unit. In each pattern, the basic unit is the same but the relative orientations give the different patterns. In the movie, I have transformed a pattern into the next using either a physical movement (rotations or moving rows/columns) or color change in some squares. Furthermore, everytime a new pattern is realized, the whole coloring scheme transforms into another to signify that this is a new pattern.

    How the movie was made

    I wrote a Java applet to generate most of the 212 frames. I had to modify a few frames in Adobe Photoshop. I used MooVer (made by esp Software) to make the individual frames into a movie and then used QuickTime MoviePlayer to add the sound track and later to compress and flatten the movie. The low quality version was compressed with the Sorenson algorithm and the higher quality was done with the Animation algorithm. The sound was done with QualComm PureVoice in both versions.

    Special Thanks : Alina Khasanova provided some help in the frame capture and color combination stage.

    What the movie is missing

    Title : The movie as of now lacks a title. All suggestions are welcome and if I choose to use a suggestion from you, you stand to get $5.00 or 1% of all box-office profits (whichever is higher).

    Sound Track : The current sound track is the first 35 seconds of Crockett's Theme composed by Jan Hammer (shhh...don't tell him, as I have not asked his permission). However, I am on the lookout for a better sound track. Again any suggestions are welcome. Better yet, if you do any digital music compositions and would like to compose a 35 second piece, let me know and I will supply you with details of my ideas of what I am looking for in sound track.




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