ITMFL Mosaic

ITMFL Mosaic

These collages are a part of ITMFL, my sketches exploring the imagery and colors of In the Mood for Love.

The inspiration for the layout method - recursively dividing the frame into 2x2 grids - came from Phillip Tiongson's 2D parametric drawing applet. Using Processing, I captured video data from the Criterion DVD at 30 frames per second, and produced a series of collages in real time. The program laid out each incoming video frame at the correct position and size, given the randomly selected level of recursion at any given point in time, starting from top-left and moving towards bottom-right.

Among the resulting collages, my favorites are the ones that seem to repackage a scene as a graphic narrative, as in a comic book. When Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are in conversation as the camera cuts back and forth, it results in a dense collage of partial faces looking in opposite directions. The layout scheme distorts the flow of time, however, since different moments occupy varying amounts of screen space. Certain moments feel more important or memorable within the collage because of their relatively larger sizes.

As I wrote on my blog earlier, one interesting mod would be to change how the code manages the recursion level, so that it relies less on randomness and more on color- and shot-change detection. The sketch would then become more about how a program might better edit a film into a graphic document.

Comments

[jeanpoole]

the way you've done that gives nice strong imagery... well done :-)

I haven't touched processing yet - how do u find it?

And have you tried max.msp, jitter and auvi? they have many screen-splitting capacities which allow complex real-time manipulations...

[James]

Thanks jeanpoole.

I enjoy using Processing. It's great for doing small sketches. I think it has been used to do much more + is being extended by a good community of people. Disclaimer: Ben + Casey who built Processing are former labmates of mine.

I haven't tried looking at those other tools in depth - it'd be fun to check them out during future projects. I played with Max/MSP a while ago for a class project:

http://plw.media.mit.edu/people/jseo/research/elapse/