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Cinema Redux

Cinema Redux is a project by Brendan Dawes from Magnetic North. It cycles through a film and takes a snapshot of a frame at a given interval, then arranges the snapshots into a grid to give a visual overview of the film. It is interesting to look at work from a medium where time is the governing law in the presentation of material, in an arrangement where time is not an issue.

This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.

The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process. Compare Serpico to The Conversation. You can see there’s far more edits in Lumet’s classic compared to the more gentle slower pace of Coppola’s Conversation. This is also down to the editing style of Walter Murch who prefers to only make cuts when absolutely necessary. Have a look through the eight movies and make your own mind up.

More here.