Light and Time - Developed Slit Scan animation

Here is the developed slit scan animation that I had originally made as a final piece.  I spent weeks planning this thinking about the order in which the scans were going to be placed and the speed of the animation.  It includes over 1251 scans, with some darker random scans at the very beggining, at about 10% speed/duration.  As the clear scans fade into each other I changed the speed to around 0.2 and duration to 1.20 for each clip, as I purposely wanted the clear scans to fade into each other slowly, to see shape and colour.  I then changed the speed to around 60% to run faster and then gradually to 100%.  I chose to change the speed of the animation and place certain scans in different places because I still want the viewer to see a beginning, middle and end, so that the animation has a point.  The middle of the animation being during the day capturing peoples movement, colour etc.  Then working through the darker scans as people disappear towards the end of the day.  I did not just want to put over a thousand random scans together, as it would have no meaning. 

I also tried to get the music in sync with the video which was quite a task as it was such a long song.  I edited parts out where appropriate, but there is a part at the beginning that is slightly out but I tried my best with it.

One big problem I had was having to rename all the scans.  Each time the computer made a scan, that image automatically went into a folder, but when the folder was full, I had to stop the scan, move all the scans out and delete all the ones inside it.  This was in order to make a new set.  The problem was that in each folder the scans were named the same (output 1, 2, 3 etc).  I therefore had an extremely tedious task of renaming over a thousand scans, so that After effects would import them correctly.

To make this video I rendered it in After effects and edited it in Premiere Pro.

How is it related to light and time?  If there was no light there would be no scan.  It is related to time through time of exposure i.e. how often the computer makes a scan.

Overall, I am very happy with this piece and I enjoyed making it.  It was going to be my final piece, but through experimenting I created something I am much more pleased with.

Music by Drums of Death

Untitled from Rachel J Milner on Vimeo.