Midday Traffic Time Collapsed and Reorganized by Color: San Diego Study #3 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.
This video interests me for a few reasons. For one, I think it’s a great example of when a simple concept is compelling enough to replace and/or become plot–I watched it the whole way through and thought it was mesmerizing (granted, a minute and a half was about all I could handle. I think it was smart to keep it short). I wonder if it helped to keep the rarer colorful cars at the end? I’m pretty sure I would have lost interest about five seconds into the white cars, had they come last.
As I was watching this video, also, I couldn’t help but think about our discussions around direct cinema and how “truthful” filmmakers are when we re-arrange the sequence of events to craft a plot. This is exactly what the producer has done here, and the re-arranging is the only thing that makes the film interesting. It’s not a lie, because the patterns were there to begin with, but there is very clearly a manipulation of the original film.
With that in mind: does it matter to you that “there are no CG elements, these are all real cars that have been removed from one sample and reorganized”? I think it does in my mind, not because CG couldn’t create the exact same images, but because the decision communicates a sort of pact between filmmaker and audience–something like “this sequence is clearly modified, but it’s not made up.”
Finally, I was interested in the technical aspect of how the cars were reorganized. Does anybody know how you would go about doing this, and whether we have the software to pull it off?
-Allyson
Looks like he used AE. Here is a little bit about his process:
There are no CG elements in the video and none of the cars have been moved from their original lanes or had their speeds altered. The gaps in traffic are due to the different volumes in the lanes. For the tech curious the way I did this is conceptually simple but labor intensive. With After Effects I cut out each car frame by frame and saved it as it’s own new video. Then I grabbed a still shot of each lane when it was empty, laid those over the source video, which produces an empty freeway and then put all the cars back in on top of that. Each car took an average of fifteen minutes to cut out and save x 492 cars, which is around 120 hours. I’m not entirely sure how long it took to put it all back together.
Wow, I kind of love this video. Not to sound corny, but in many ways it seems like one giant metaphor for the art of film-making. Editing and rearranging is what genuinely defines the plot or story – generating it from a seeming collection of chaos. The original footage of the cars seems to have no pattern, but if you look at it deeply and long enough, there’s a hidden pattern that can be created through editing. It’s the same as amassing a collection of different shots and then being able to stand back from them in order to see the underlying story that unifies them all.
The one difference is the fact that the manipulated time sequence is obvious and actually the plot of the whole story. Thus, the manipulation of time can be a totally justified act if it is laid out in plain sight.
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