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Don Whitaker's videos
Check out WaveSlice 2 in HD:
vimeo.com/13831859

I'm intrigued by slitscan photography and other visual/temporal shenanigans. I'm especially interested in some of the 'video slicing' techniques I have seen and wanted to try it out for myself. Never could find any suitable software - so I gave up looking and wrote my own tool using Processing. :)

This video is a compilation of my initial experiments, using my own nature videos as source files. Love the abstract, moving shapes and colors - especially the way the ocean waves are transformed, yet still recognizable.

Each frame of the video is a horizontal stack of a 1 pixel, vertical slices of a video image. The left of the frame is the beginning of the video clip, the right side is the end. The animation effect is created by moving the location of the vertical slice from the left of the original video frame to the right. In effect, swapping time and space. :)

The music is by a group called Rare Silk who created some amazing jazz-fusion vocals in the 80s.

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  • Lara 3 years ago
    This stuff is amazing, and yes,... the sea is the best O_o
    At first it looks like a bunch of regular shore waves,... then you notice how... they roll in the weirdest ways possible!
    Some other things were harder to make out, but nice too see!
    I've added this great piece to the Psychedelic Soda channel
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    It would be fun to make a collection of clips and have people guess what was on the original video. :) Thanks for adding to Psychedelic Soda.
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  • Erick C. 3 years ago
    runs a little long but very pretty images. :)
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  • Mark O'Connell plus 3 years ago
    Love it! Some great stuff.
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  • lukasz plus 3 years ago
    wow, you've created some really beautiful forms... especially like the one you chose for the video thumbnail. the great thing about slit-scanning is that you get a such a variety of results depending on the source material.
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    Yes, it's hard to tell what will come out the other side when choosing videos to process. Some that I thought would be boring, like grass blowing in the wind, produce surprisingly beautiful shapes.
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  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    Thanks for the positive feedback everyone. :)
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  • Julian Oliver plus 3 years ago
    this is very good work. you ought to submit it to video art festivals and the like.

    cheers,
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  • The Fibro Twins 3 years ago
    i dig it
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  • Ammonite plus 3 years ago
    Wow, truly amazing the waves are eerie. The clouds at 3:50 looks as though you are flying around them. Don't really understand the process but wondered would it be possible to drive the effect using the rhythm of the music. Nice job, love to see more (in Hd if possible.)
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    Def. more possibilities for exploring this technique. at this point I dont think I could figure out how to make it react in real time, tho. As it stands now each frame at this low resolution takes about 30 seconds to render.
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  • Gabriel Naranjo 3 years ago
    I love the results and have always wanted to learn how to program in processing. I would love to see this in high definition, or at least less compressed
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    This was my first try at a processing script. The learning curve is not so bad if you have even a smattering of previous coding experience. I'm certainly no code-wizard. I'm a bit shy in showing my code since it is prolly so bad ;) But I will add a few comments and make it available for others who would like to experiment.

    Unfortunately this is at the full rendered resolution. The script is slow and really bogs down with higher rez scripts. Now that I have the hang of it I will def try some higher quality renders, tho.
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  • Videopia pro 3 years ago
    Wow! I was just trying this two nights ago - and gave up! Incredibly tedious work masking and shifting lines of video manually by hand. Nicely done!
  • baldakino 1 year ago
    I guess he had good music in the background while doing it.
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  • Joey Carr plus 3 years ago
    The poster frame reminds me of the Hiroshige print of the crashing wave. Very cool.
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  • GammaBlog 3 years ago
    That must be what the hydrogen seas of Jupiter look like. Beautiful work.
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  • freakyfana 3 years ago
    Freaking COOL! =DD
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  • Gabriel Naranjo 3 years ago
    Hey Joey: I'm also fond of that particular japanese print, I've got to reproduceit by chance in one of my pictures ;)

    flickr.com/photos/ganar/2462469731/in/set-72157600955553269/
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    whoa, that is so neat! Love finding similar, natural shapes like that. Great shot. :)
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  • Gabriel Naranjo 3 years ago
    Thanks Don! That's one of my best series. I used to work in post production and am looking at vimeo as a way to publish some of my experiments on motion.
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  • nicolas horne 3 years ago
    your concept is a real mindswapper! i hope you'll post the code soon. no need to be shy!
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  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    Thanks for the reminder, nicolas.

    Here is the source code, along with a sample Quicktime movie so that you can get a feel for how the thing works.

    shiny-life.com/dl/VideoSlice_Release1.zip

    and a copy of just the sketch file for those that don't want the video:

    shiny-life.com/dl/VideoSlice_Release1.pde

    Have fun experimenting. If anyone knows of a way to speed up the rendering, I'd love to hear about it. :)
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  • psonice 3 years ago
    Guess I should mention that this inspired me to write my own version :)

    vimeo.com/user669952/videos

    I'm using demo captures (from demoscene stuff) as the source video there. It's made in quartz composer, hardware accelerated, but still incredibly slow (typically less than 1fps for a 640x480 render).
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  • staffan 3 years ago
    this is very neat and thanks for sharing the source!
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  • camil tulcan plus 3 years ago
    this is fantastic, ...playing with time
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  • Hugh Pryor 3 years ago
    Hey these are great! I've spent ages working out how to do it in AfterEffects which was very slow indeed. Here's what I did to my footage of Jodrell Bank Observatory: vimeo.com/2296533
  • Don Whitaker plus 3 years ago
    I have tried some similar experiments in AfterEffects as well, but gave up and finally gave processing a try. I will go back and continue messing with the Time Displacement in AE, tho. Some neat effects possible with that plugin, especially if the video was taken with the effects in mind.
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  • Hugh Pryor 3 years ago
    I used the time displacement and the time echo effects to generate the slit scan movies. It's slow and laborious because you have to pass the movie through a number of times.

    I've had a look at your Processing code and when I've overcome my fear of curley brackets and semicolons, I'll don my programmer's beanie and black t-shirt, order a stack of pizzas and milk shake, and see what I can do.
    Great stuff! :-D
  • Don Whitaker plus 2 years ago
    Cool, Hugh. Thanks for the feedback. I was glad I took the time to learn about Processing. It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to attempt this effect - and not a steep learning curve, either. I'd love to find a more efficient way to scan and convert the video, but I'm just happy I actually got something that worked, even if it's slow.
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  • Cnes 3 years ago
    this is cool
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  • rickflick 3 years ago
    Incredible. What every you did to make this it's really something. Waves, waves, waves. The perfect subject for this technique. Fab music.
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  • Don Whitaker plus 2 years ago
    Thanks :) yeah, the waves were quite a surprise when I ran these first few tests. I also didn't expect that some of the motions would look so similar to the original videos, like the first shot in of the processed waves.

    Glad you liked the music, too. This song worked well or this - sort of a mysterious, slow mo feel. Plus, the musical timing matched the duration of the clips I was rendered.
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  • tritochke 2 years ago
    amazing...:)
    clouds are equally brilliant :)..but sea...oh..sea..:)
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  • edvard brun 2 years ago
    I think pushing video / photography into new frontiers like this is great - it's a tool to enable us to really see the world in new way... with re-mapped time and space. Kudos, Don...
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  • James Sims 2 years ago
    Thanks for pushing the boundaries, yet retaining such simple and natural beauty.
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  • baldakino 2 years ago
    Wow, I was looking for done effects like this for the past 2 years! push/pulling time is definately the thing for moving imagery; see eg. alvaro cassinelli's kronos projector ('06). ( youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8QDf7QPjE )

    Great you shared the code, Don! perhaps the OpenFrameWorks C++ heroes could shed some light on speeding this super cool idea up...
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  • angels of mercy 2 years ago
    really beautiful
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  • GBoGBo 2 years ago
    Beautiful and inspiring !
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  • Jordan Fish plus 1 year ago
    brilliant. using slit-scan on time-lapse and also the fact that horizontal slit-scan (vertically slices) works SO WELL with the waves. i'm into the jazz fusion too :)
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  • Evgeny Mlyukov 1 year ago
    Great art!
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  • Don Whitaker plus 1 year ago
    Thanks for all the great comments, folks! :)

    I've uploaded a new version of my Slitscan Processing script. It has a few more comments and is set up to render individual frames rather than compiling the movie on the fly.


    Here's a link with a sample vid. (280MB)
    shiny-life.com/dl/VideoSliceRelease2.zip

    or just the script
    shiny-life.com/dl/VideoSliceRelease2-pde.zip
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