Movie as quilt

Cinema Redux. Brendan Dawes explores a vantage point that no filmmaker thinks of when making a film but since we can do these things now, why not? Can you see the color flow of a movie? Cut frequency differences? Where it resembles an L.A. glass building near sunset? Or is this nostagia for the now gone era of what a T.V. screen looks like when your aerial is on the fritz? You decide.

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.