A year of my life in 10,000 photos

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"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. ~~Not 30 second clips~~ (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.

Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."

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May 19th, 2008 4 comments link to (permalink) posted by david

There are a few of these time lapse pieces on YouTube and nearly all are worth watching multiple times, to see which unexpected patterns emerge.

tags: animation

4 responses so far »

tomé : May 19, 2008 at 6:34 pm

i’m surprised to find such review from you. what’s the perfect way to make a meaningless, boring photo more interesting? put it next to a gazillion other meaningless boring photos. other from an “attractive” effect, the result tends to be rather innocuous.
admin : May 20, 2008 at 9:04 am

Actually – you are absolutely right, it isn’t that great. I like the idea in principal, however.
Ivana : Jun 27, 2008 at 2:54 pm

Come on folks, some of us LIKE innocuous. It can be very subjective – and only as boring as the person viewing it.
Paul Baclace : Aug 1, 2008 at 3:43 am

I think “God is Dog Spelled Backwards” is the original experimental film that first used this Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP, a scientific term used since the 1970s for no-eye-movement reading). A clip of that 1963 work is at http://animation.filmtv.ucla.edu/students/dan/god.html and the student that created it, Dan McLaughlin, eventually became a professor of the film school there. At some point, it was shown on shown on the TV show Laugh-In with some banjo music (and without the irreverent title).

I worked on mobile phone software at the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University that will stream text to your cell phone (www.buddybuzz.net if you have J2ME) in the RSVP style. It is a cool way to read fast without any effort, and while doing that work some years ago I was able to identify that original film I had seen 20 years ago at a psychedelic film fest as the earliest use of this non-motion, rapid image technique. Seeing that film is what got me interested in RSVP for cell phones, actually.

Koyaanisqatsi also uses this technique for a few minutes in the “television sequence”.

The possibilities in this RSVP style have not been fully explored yet. For example, in Dan McLaughlin’s film, which consists entirely of famous paintings, he has 12 shots per second, which is too fast to move your eyes to explore an image, and by doing occasional zooms and pans between two alternating paintings, he essentially grabs your eyeballs and makes you look and compare details between paintings.

I think it is time for this radical RSVP image techinique to be rediscovered.

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A year of my life in 10,000 photos

May 19th, 2008 4 comments link to (permalink) posted by david