Two wrongs don’t make a right, but sometimes two clichés can make something cool.
That’s the case with Michael Shainblum’s new Mirror City project. Shainblum took two overused visual tricks—urban time-lapses and the kaleidoscope effect—and combined them to make a video that’s full of eye candy.
“I’d had this idea of mirroring images but I knew it would be gimmicky unless it was conceptualized in the right way,” says Shainblum, 23, who’s based in Southern California.
To make the video he shot time-lapses all over the country—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Francisco and Chicago—then imported them into Adobe Premier and started playing with mirror effect in that program. Each clip is mirrored at least twice and some of the clips are mirrored up to 30 times.
“Anyone can double an image but doubling wasn’t abstract enough because it just looks like you shot something reflected onto water,” Shainblum says. “I really wanted to push it in a different direction.”
Instead of mirroring the entire image in each clip, Shainblum says he actually ended up mirroring just a quarter of each image. By taking a quarter he was able to piece them together so they looked like one continuous image instead of four copies.
“With big cityscapes, it just didn’t look right if I mirrored the whole thing,” he says.
Because the clips are repeated so many times, Shainblum had to choose his filming locations carefully. He needed to set up in spots where there was obvious symmetry. If the buildings or roads he was shooting were neatly organized it made the image that much easier to mirror.
He also liked shooting in places where there was movement—cars whizzing by or the sun setting—because that added to the kaleidoscope effect.
“I put a lot of effort into figuring out unique places and some of the spots people can’t guess because they haven’t seen anything shot from there before,” he says.
Doubling a clip is fairly easy, but Shainblum says that as the video progresses it gets more and more abstract and kaleidoscopic, which challenged him technically. He’d spend hours trying to get the effects right on one clip. All told, it took him four months to shoot and piece it together.
“What I really wanted to do was show people these cities in a new way,” he says. “Maybe they’ve lived in Los Angeles or Las Vegas their entire lives but they’ve never seen those cities like this.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment