David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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  • http://profile.yahoo.com/DS4OME72OGLQ6QH7LKM74LCWS4 .

    So someone finally found a way to make a particularly egregious camera bug (the rolling shutter) into a feature by calling it “art”.  It still makes me ill to watch it.

    • http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

      You are basically right, except they’ve been doing it since the 1960s. The trippy sequence created by Trumbull for the film 2001 was a slit-scan effect.

  • gerg

    it’s a pretty simple effect, Muse used it in a music video once:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9LOFXwPwC4

  • http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

    Seeing that in the real world would almost inevitably be followed by the immortal line: “Well, we weren’t burned!”

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Dee/725892454 Robert Dee

    Well, if these future archivists are any good at their job they should know that Zbigniew Rybcznksi did this 24 years ago with his “Fourth Dimension” short film.

  • nowimnothing

    I like the woman walking in the background at 2:42, oblivious to the reality-shifting aliens nearby.

    • http://newnumber6.livejournal.com Peter

      I call shenanigans!  She wasn’t altered by the effect at all.

      I don’t think this was digital manipulation, I THINK THEY WERE ACTUALLY STRETCHING LIKE THAT!

    • BillStewart2012

       There were also a few falling leaves that didn’t seem to be altering when the people were.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Ritzmann/1532420118 Jeff Ritzmann

    “…this is the sort of piece they’ll reference as the moment the computers started making art for us.”

    Yeah. I’m not feeling that. If you’re a tech school “artist” then I can see feeling that way. If you’re classically trained first – you realize that everything from an brush, to an airbrush to a computer – are just tools to help you get your vision into reality. They shouldn’t dictate what your art is, The tool doesn’t make art.

  • http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

    An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research

    http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/

    • teufelsdrochk

      came to post this…also  see this album cover:

    • gd23

      I liked this http://youtu.be/G_bHuJAZg68 by Daniel Crook, mentioned in catalogue above

  • taras

    Well, *I* still think it’s magic, and no amount of ‘evidence’ can dissuade me.

  • Marco Antonio Morales

    Yup. I’ve seen this sort of thing before… but i call it ‘reality remapping’ and involves chemicals rather than pixels…

    (And as it’s presented, I don’t believe it’s ‘art’ as much as any other Photoshop/Premiere/whatever filter is ‘art’)

  • Chentzilla

    Reminds me of some parts of Uzumaki (manga/movie).

  • http://www.facebook.com/gregoire.tricoire Grégoire Tricoire

    That effect was used extensively in the 1990′s french movie “The 1001 nights” (Les mille et une nuits) for the all sequences where the genie comes out of his lamp. That movie is also famous for featuring a very young and naked Catherine Zeta Jones.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_KJSzgDmok

    • Donald Petersen

      Wow.  That looks like a rollicking good time.  Wonder if it’s on the Netflix?

  • http://monolithcreative.com thekinginyellow

    i would approach this with after effects using a precomp for every row of pixels to fill the veertical space of the footage then offset them from top to bottom by one or two frames. i’m sure there could be an expression written that would apply a hue to a time delay so you could just use a precomp of a ramp. seems pretty simple to me. just make sure you lock down your camera. it really wouldn’t be that bad seeing as how hd is only 1080 pixels high. a little bit of tedious preproduction and you’re done.

  • http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

    I’d like to see Ok go’s take on this effect.

  • Forrest Cahoon

    I applied an effect like this to a random video of skaters I found on youtube — two years ago now.  From the other comments here I guess I don’t get any prizes for originality, but hey, I thought it up independently.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83JwHS5IUCE

  • Geoffrey Wirth

    the rolling shutter is not at it’s core a digital effect: there have been analog cameras doing this since decades. It can not be reproduced with aftereffects (or any other digital tool) without using several cameras or 3D objects: or how do you get imagery of the objects backside instantaniously?

  • http://www.peterbagge.com/ Buddy Bradley

    Shame they didn’t credit the lovely music in this video. Sounds like Beirut to me, anybody know for sure?

    • ether78

      Yes. La Llorona.

  • Model Citizen

    Ketamine’s a hell of a drug.

  • Mitch Calvert

    My band did this… old hat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjrYKvwSnB8

  • http://redesigned.com redesigned

    i actually tried to play this video…after 2min. of frustration i realized it was on vimeo….you got me again boing boing.   i keep falling for that trick, thinking that maybe someday a vimeo video will actually play on my new mac w/ broadband connection.  fool me once shame on you, fool me 100 times…shame on vimeo.

  • Steve Taylor

    Slit scan photography is not that new.

  • http://forresto.com/ Forrest O.

    I made a more-complex version of the effect for these dance videos: http://vimeo.com/21029662

    (instead of a single “slit” for the scan, a slitscan is made for each column of pixels, and a video is made of all of those, effectively trading x for time)

    More experiments with the effect: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2540182DE868E85&feature=plcp

    • Zachery Sanford

      So I can’t shake the feeling that I’m tripping balls while staring at a Dali painting with the first video. I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not… it probably is.

  • http://twitter.com/jamesholden James Holden

    There’s an interactive exhibit in the National Media Museum, in Bradford, UK that does this in real time for visitors.

    From memory, you stand in front of a big screen with a camera in the centre and watch yourself bend and warp as you move. It’s pretty cool.

  • duncancreamer

    “this is the sort of piece they’ll reference as the moment the computers started making art for us.” 

    Yeah, back in 1968′s A Space Odyssey.