OpenFrameworks Project – UI For Painting with Time

Neil McLaren made this interface that allows you to create interesting visuals from movie clips. By playing with a brush, you can move selected pixels from a frame to their equivalent pixels in past or future frames.

The idea of putting together a tool like this, and especially working at the pixel level is admirable. The video shows how one character can move back or forward in time, while the rest of the frame is still. Using the brush over characters can create interesting arcs for that character. This project could be pretty powerful, if used for interactive storytelling. For example, if at the point that the gun is fired, you move the victim back in time to before they were there, and then resume the clip, you could generate an alternate ending. Allowing the user to interact with characters in novel ways to could be a great addition to this tool.

The creator is inspired by scanner photography and time travel in movies and has cited art from this exhibition as an inspiration for his work – http://hotartwetcity.com/time-travel/. Neil’s inspiration for modifying frames in an interesting editor come from this superb talk by Bret Victor. The interface used at 4:30 in this video is so beautiful! https://vimeo.com/36579366

I found this tool to create loops in movie clips to be related https://vimeo.com/2636324. It uses horizontal and vertical positions within the frame to generate different lengths and starting points for loops.

Add-on – ofxBackground

While I haven’t been able to get this add-on up and running yet, it is the first one I would like to try. The aforementioned example moves a character back in time. This add-on could help me move a character to a different space.

https://github.com/JGL/ofxBackground