Aurora Light Painters on America's Got Talent (video)

The Aurora Light Painters. I think what these guys do is cool: live, performative light painting. It starts getting really interesting around 1:50. Rusty at Laughing Squid has more. (via @sfslim)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

Did they edit that to make it irritating to watch on youtube or is that a real TV show?
http://twitter.com/WpgCameraMan Rock Hardwood

Next time edit out the parts with the annoying side-stage guy , but wow… that was very cool.
http://vinnietesla.com/ Vinnie Tesla

Man, Julian’s pretty much the king of Boing-Boing this month.
miasm

had to
- ocker3
  
  All art comes from somewhere, everything has a pre-cursor.
  
  What they’re doing, especially the live performance part with the video screen, takes what’s been done in the past with time-lapse photography and itereates it. I reckon they’re going to start a new wave of performance art in their genre, which I have to say is a good thing.
  - miasm
    
    I had to because I also like that picture, not because I was evidencing prior art in an attempt to undermine the show.
    You must meet that a lot.
    - ocker3
      
      I wasn’t attacking your post, I quite like what he’s doing, obviously you do to, which is why you posted it. I was perhaps reacting more to what some of the show’s presenters were saying about “nobody else is doing this” (or perhaps they said “has done this”?), which a number of people in the comments have disproved, at least to some extent. If we talked to the artists in the videos themselves, they’d probably happily list all of their influences, but for that kind of TV show it helps the ‘wow’ factor if noone mentions that.
      - miasm
        
        now my internet preconceptions are showing. oops.
        :3
sata blank

I like light painting, used to do that sort of thing all the time. Here’s a photo I painted several years ago in a completely dark room with a nearly 2 minute exposure. http://satat.deviantart.com/art/Nish-and-his-Bike-1-93746819 I think it’s a medium more people should experiment with.
Steve Taylor

The light painting stuff is nice, but there’s something strange about that TV show. Everyone seems to be talking down a level, as if they weren’t sure if their audience were native English speakers. And the audience explodes into applause at semi-random intervals. What universe is this set in?
- euansmith
  
  They say that the past is a strange country… does this mean that America exists only in the past?
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

How is this done?
- sata blank
  
  Generally you set up a stationary camera to let in the most light possible and create a long exposure image. I would move lights with colored gels over them around a subject, and if I wanted to “draw” a line I would turn the light source directly towards the camera.
  - penguinchris
    
    Yeah but clearly @NoctilucentStudios:disqus was asking how they do this live. They’re not taking still photos here.
    
    Looks like they have a video screen and have some software that holds anything bright on the screen. You can see them below the screen and it looks like they’re just waving lights around (though the cinematography on this show is apparently terrible – always looking at things from weird angles and you can’t really see what’s going on). There must be a camera trained on them at the front of the stage and it gets processed and presented live on the video screen above them.
    
    Probably pretty simple though I don’t know if you can do it with off-the-shelf software.
Mister44

I give a 10 on concept and a 6 or 7 on execution. But I’d like to see them work on something even more complex and polished. Nice work.
BenStroup

This man is a David Cross character.
- babyfeet
  
  Tofutti Break!
http://twitter.com/SamuraiWhite Samurai White

reminds me of the stuff Linda Costa does out of Atlanta. http://www.lindacosta.com/hispanic.htm
http://twitter.com/marvintucker Marvin Tucker

Bababooey bababooey bababooey! Howard Stern Rules!
TimmoWarner

Watching this I get the feeling that the show is superimposing the live movement of the lights with the result on the screen above for the audience at home. Meaning the people watching live could only see the light as the picture came into view on the screen and not the performers themselves unless they looked down at the stage.

I wish we had been able to view it that way because I think it would have been more “magical” to just see the light painting come into view rather than see the people making it.

I’m basing this on the way the performers and the light picture never quite match up properly in what we see.