Painting Media / Media Painting
Keywords: Portrait, animation, mosaic, meta-image, Hollywood.
In a series of four vignettes, this screen-based painterly portrait presents Harrison Ford performing the heroic role that we've come to associate him with. A series of clips showing Harrison as a hero, on the run, fighting villains and dealing with pressure were collected from a handful of his action films (BladeRunner, Star Wars, Frantic, Indiana Jones, Patriot Games, The Net, Clear and Present Danger and The Fugitive).
Using a specially designed framework for composing multiple movies in a mosaic or meta-image style, all the clips from each thematic section were stitched together to dynamically create another movie from the same section. For example, a series of clips from depicting Harrison as a hero were assembled and constructed to create another heroic scene. The selection of the smaller video clips was based on the luminosity of the main movie clip ... and each of the smaller clips adapted to the color of the main clip.
This process treats each sub-clip as an animated paintbrush, going frame by frame, pixel by pixel, to create a larger composition. Each video sample was treated in Jitter to turn the clip into a black and white (duo-tone image). The white section was then used as a brush to apply "the paint" - the color from the main clip.
The software for this project was programmed in Java using OpenGL and QuickTime libraries. The final video was exported in non-realtime to create a high-resolution (800 x 600) QuickTime movie.
Thanks: Mark Napier, Chris Kairalla.
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