Staying Pictures by The Planet Of Leather Moomins [web]
staying pictures is a short film (3 minutes) which I created in my spare time during august 2003
the film is inspired by, and named after a track by the danish musician karsten pflum, and uses music taken from his amazing album, tracks.
the music is courtesy of worm interface recordings, and I am much obliged to the nice people there for giving me permission to use the track in this film.
staying pictures is a semi-sequel to tom thumb, in that it explores similar ideas and shares a similar aesthetic. tom thumb was my first foray into film making, and also into experimentation with "generative" algorithms. staying pictures continues the line, and is similar in its style of "weak" generativeness: the script and structure of the film are pre-programmed, and never change. only the details, such as the shapes of the vines and other 3d objects in the second half, change on each viewing. (the first half of the film is a completely "traditional" pre-rendered animation).
obviously, as before, the recordings posted on this website as quicktime movies don't change - it represents just one possible variation. however, since only the details change, they are more than representative of the film as a whole. I hope in the future that some progression can be made towards, for example, structural generativeness - but for now, I prefer to liken the degree of randomisation to the variations of a human actor on a stage, performing the same play each night.
the synchronisation of the glowing cubes at the end of the film to the notes of the melody, is also computed in real-time. thus, if the music were performed "live" by a human trumpeter (or keyboard player), or if a different tune were substituted, then the images would automatically change to reflect the new musical performance. this real-time element, although un-explored in the medium of internet films, is very important to the way I work, and comes out of my background in games, club visuals and the demo scene.
I hope to release a realtime version of staying pictures shortly; I have a small amount of packaging to do first, which I plan to complete during september 2003; the 3d part of the film can be rendered in real-time using any normal pc, so long as it is equipped with a dx9 capable graphics card such as the ATI Radeon 9700/9800. At the time of writing, GeForce FX's don't work - sorry - see my blog entry of 29-08-2003 for more technical information. for the majority of people without such modern graphics cards, I hope the provided pre-rendered avi's and quicktime files will do.
as before, thanks to tpolm.org and scene.org for support and hosting of the movie files.
I hope you enjoy the film, and please feel free to email me your reactions, I'd appreciate the feedback.
- alex, september 2003
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