Closing the loop

The other day I posted about gathering the tools to convert a frame-by-frame sequence of my computer graphic images to a Quicktime movie. This gives me a kind of doorway into making animated films, but it’s a door that goes only one way.

What if I want to make computer graphic films that incorporate the real world itself? What if I want to mix live-action film-making with computer graphics and stop-motion? In order to do all that, I need the door to open both ways.

Today I figured out what I need to do to close the loop — to start with a video that was shot with a camcorder, and pull it, frame by frame, into my own computer programs.

You might ask why I would bother to do this when there are perfectly good movie editing programs out there. The problem is that those movie editing programs will only let me do what they were written to let me do. If I want to try out one of my own crazy techniques for film making, whether that technique is a different way of blending live action with computer animation, or a way of skipping through time in an odd sort of way, I can’t program somebody’s movie editing program to let me do that.

But once I’ve got everything sitting in my own computer program, frame by frame, then I can pretty much do whatever I want.

It’s like having a shiny new toy. And pretty soon I hope to combine this shiny new toy with my other one — the 3D printer sitting next to my couch. Hopefully I’ll have a few fun things to show in the days to come!

One thought on “Closing the loop”

  1. Same in music technology… very much. Packaged softwares produce somewhat conformed result, or “heard that before” music 🙂 It is difficult for untrained (non-computer programmer) artists to go “frame by frame”, but if you can, your result is much better off, I think.

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