Cinema Redux

[…] Distilling a whole film in to a single image is I guess what cinema posters are meant to be all about, but Brendan Dawes has come up with another way of representing an entire film in one print. Interesting. […]

[…] Textural “movie posters” from Brendan Dawes that take an entire movie and put all the stills on one page, check out the difference between several classic movies. These are gorgeous. [via serif] […]

These are so beautiful. I can’t believe how much these are able to express the tone and rhthym of the films in question. Vertigo and Taxi Driver are both about men becoming obsessed and unhinged, but you can see that TD’s unhinging is a fractured yet evenly distributed chaotic descent while Vertigo has sudden ruptures of madness.

How can I get these on my wall? Also: Ran, The Godfather and Traffic. I’d love to see those.

Hi Mark,

thanks for your kind words. A special limited edition of 2001 is available from http://www.coudal.com/swapmeat/swapped.php

awesome, these would make great large format prints!

What a smart and wonderful thing you have created.

Interesting to see the textures involved. For me, Scorcese’s in particular… maestro of light and dark….

It would be a lovely thing to do if you released the software into the wild, especially as it’s Java and presumably platform independent.

That said, it’s marvellous though, I love it.

[…] brendandawes.com - readable is so last year » Cinema ReduxGanze Filme in einem Bild. Frame für frame. […]

you should consider doing the movie HERO. The color that is captured in that film is unbelivable and would probably look pretty interesting in this form.

Actually I’ve done Hero and is actually featured in my book Analog In, Digital Out, But great suggestion - and it looks cool!

[…] I’ve been researching into stratas, layers and deposits recently for a pitch (I’ll let you know how it goes) when I came across Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project. Written in processing, it essentially converts every second of a film into a still frame, then puts them in sequence to form a printed/static version of the film which is more than the sum of its parts. […]

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! jagzmuatdchl

The next step is making a movie where when this process is applied, an image appears.

[…] […]

Very cool idea! One thing, the example.jpg image at the top of the page appears to be Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, not Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” as it’s labelled.

[…] Cinema Redux, my project that attempts to distill whole movies into a single image, will by featured as part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February 2008. […]

[…] Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project is refreshingly real — he has created a small piece of software that samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The resulting image is random and unified at once. I of course am draw to it because I’m drawn to multiples in any form. However, there is a bit of voyeurism here, almost as if each of these is a window we can’t quite look into. It seems that I’m not the only person impressed, MOMA is including this project in a 2008 exhibition. I look forward to seeing these in person. Not to mention — Dawes’ website is worth a trip alone. His use of videoclips is unique and changes the experience of using his website. […]

You should check the work of Jason Salavon:

http://salavon.com/work.php

[…] Link: Movie DNA […]

[…] Want to discuss a movie with your colleagues or friends but have no time to see it? The DNA of an Movie helps which distilling a whole film down to one single image. ami, Ariel Shamir, Content Aware Image Resizing, Digital Photography, distilling a whole film, distilling film, dna, egg, Gallery, image resizing, landscapes, lostamerica, Photo, Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, polar bears, Shai Avidan, weekend delight Share This […]

very nice. a bit similar to a video installation i did a while back. great work!
peace.
bv.

[…] Brendan Dawes created awe-inspiring images of entire films distilled into single posters. As Dawes explains, his 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 film is sampled every minute.Each row represents one minute of film time. […]

this was the idea and look of the very first onedotzero poster and identity in 1997- breaking down the langauge of film and lineararity of the time. it took frames from the whole festival films and was designed by state. i dont have an image to link to.
we also revistied it using processing for our dvd lable poster designed by philip o’dywer. see details here: www.philipodwyer.com/page.php?id=17&section=2

Hi Shane,

It’s not quite the same idea though - Cinema Redux takes every second of an entire film. It’s that scale that gives it its appeal. Taking some frames from part of a film is not quite the same thing. I’d love to see it though if you can dig it out.

[…] Splitting up a news report into frames which depict the emotion of the news reporter, and captioned with the story they are conveying at particular moments in time. […]

This is very cool. It gives me an idea of what the movie will be like. It could even be used for reviews.

[…] More here. Posted on 24th October 2007 under IDAT307, tagged with cinema redux, film, linearity, processing, time « Eadweard Muybridge Marcel Duchamp » […]

verwolf130678

Interesting, but the software should be released so it can be utilized by every fanatic to discover interesting correlations and perhaps even synthesize new methods of film-making using the minute long strips as rough guidelines or as forced limitations to spark creativity.

genius…

anyway we could do this, but for an hour from a miniDV tape? and have the still captures be at full res?

mike

Knew it had to exist already. Spinning off creative whatnots over a Guinness with a friend tonight and proposed just such a project as this. Actually it was a follow-up from a year or so ago from a related concept which I will explore as I haven’t found it out there yet. Convinced myself before the last sip that I was merely sampling from the collective consciousness again. A few keywords brought me to your doorstep.

Bravo Brendan. Birds of a feather. I propose a Cinema Redux Soundtrack of sorts to score each visual piece, made of overlayed clips of the sound in each frame in the source movie, played all at once, continuously. Might sound like white noise, or not. The interesting part might be the comparison of the tonal qualities of ‘reduced’ soundtracks when each piece is viewed/heard as part of a show at a gallery. (I wonder what The Godfather sounds like in comparison to, say, The Sound of Music?) The blind might also appreciate access to your work in this manner.

This exhibit was fascinating! On close examination of the frames, it certainly looked like there was a lot of information in each 8 x 6 pixel frame…. In fact, I thought it impossible to compress so much data in a mere 8 x 6 pixel image. In the MOMA exhibit, was each frame indeed 8 x 6 pixels??

Thanks!

Hi Charles,

The 8×6 pixels is in reference to the original project - guess I need to change that introduction now! To create a version that can be printed 18 feet high, as in the case of the MoMA piece, each frame is much larger than 8×6. The Redux code actually works out the individual frame size given the required output size so it can be rendered at high quality.

[…] (Image: fragment of a ‘Cinema Redux’ composition by Brendan Dawes, who explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. This image is made by processing Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ 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.) […]

I recently set out to do this very same thing then discovered you’d beaten me to it by several years! See my first tries at my flickr page as well as my description of my alternate process: Bullitt Movie Mosaic

Cool stuff!

[…] brendandawes.com » Cinema Redux [[* Each frame of a Hitchcock film. Similar to what’s in MOMA exhibit. *]] (tags: funimages graphic media gallery design visualization) […]

[…] brendandawes.com » Cinema Redux [[* Each frame of a Hitchcock film. Similar to what’s in MOMA exhibit. *]] (tags: funimages graphic media gallery design visualization) […]

I know i might be a bit late on this, but question; can you combine this process with a mosaic maker? Say, to take one image from a movie, and make it into a mosaic using these stills taken by the program shown here? Does such a program exist, or how difficult would it be to fuse the two processes together?

[…] Just saw these film mosaics on information aesthetics and thought I’d share my own version. I give you: Tank Girl: In 2033, justice rides a tank and wears lip gloss. There is no particular reason to this choice, just found it on my disk. […]

[…] Thumber is a Mac OS X app that creates Cinema Redux photos. […]

[…] cinema redux film mosaics Filed under: aesthetic — information aesthetics @ 10:16 pm rnseveral free software applications that create so-called Cinema Redux photos that distill a whole film down to 1 single image. in practice, snapshots are taken from a movie at 1-second intervals & stitched together as 8×6 pixel frames into 1 single image.rnrn[link: brendandawes.com (Processing) & threewordtitle.com (for Mac OS X)]rnrnsee also:rn. film frame motion analysisrn. long video games exposuresrn. film dialog particlesrn. fight club narrative in Legornrn […]

Cinema redux - movie thumbnailer: How to make a redux snapshot from a movie in 2 lines. Test case: Kieslowski’s Décalogue…

After writing this earlier post about vertigo and cinema redux, I wondered how to make this kind of pictures easily. let’s say the movie you want to process is called movie.avi > ffmpeg -i movie.avi -r 1 -s 8×6 -f image2 frame.%05d.png > montage…

[…] A 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. read more | digg story I Love Social BookmarkingSubscribeDiggdel.icio.usStumbleUpon […]

[…] Also it was my birthday this week. I got one of the best gifts ever…A one of 50 limited-edition Continous-Tone, High-Gloss, Lambda Photographic Emulsion “Cinema Redux” print of 2001: A Space Odyssey by artist Brendan Dawes. In the artist’s words “A specially written piece of software takes a tiny snapshot of the film every second. Each row contains sixty of these frames, representing one minute of film time. This process continues for the whole movie resulting in an image that becomes greater than the sum of its parts, in effect creating a unique visual fingerprint of the film.” […]

[…] As I was perusing the Processing.org exhibition entries, I found this one that really struck me as just plain cool.  The application is called Cinema Redux and it was developed by Brendan Dawes, you can find the sketch on his site here. The code basically take a frame every second of a movie and outputs it onto a file in sequential order with the other frames. Examples are below. Howeve, It has been awhile since Brendan has developed this application, and there have been extensive changes to processing that will output several errors.  Further digging, I found another site called Plastic Bugs which explains an updated version of Brendan’s original software.  Even though this site was using an updated version of processing, it still wasn’t updated enough to get the film DNA code to work.  After a few changes, here is the code that works. It is roughly the same as the one found on Plastic Bugs.  Now, the other end of this process is the input video that processing using to get the frames.  I am running a Macbook Pro with 4Gb of RAM and had processing using 2Gb of RAM, I was STILL getting out of memory errors.  The larger the file, the better chance that something could go wrong.  So, using Quicktime Pro, I exported the videos at 176×99, sound off, H.264, and with preserving aspect ratio turn on.  Even using these settings, there was still a change of memory errors, but these settings also yielded the best results. Take a look for yourself! […]

[…] This was inspired by Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project. I think I’ve linked to him before. […]

[…] First off I’ll start with the course I attended down in london, more details here. For a beautiful web, hosted by Andy Clark and Guest speaker Brendan Dawes. What an inspiring day, these guys have so much energy and passion for what they do and have great knowledge to pass on. They have stuff all over the net worth checking, so get scanning.  I was lucky enough to have Brendan come into my uni to talk about his work years and years ago, and a project that stuck with me with his cinema redux, you can check it out here and here. […]

[…] I felt that I needed a visual in my exhibition space to allow people to view the visualisation and get a sense of what it is like when it isn’t running. I decided for this I would take inspiration from Brendan Dawes who created the Cinema Redux posters. A 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. […]

[…] To see how closely color is tied to the events of the film, take a look at the chart below. Brendan Dawes has come up with a great new way to examine the pacing and overall color of films, and here are a few more color charts to look through. […]

[…] To see how closely color is tied to the events of the film, take a look at the chart below. Brendan Dawes has come up with a great new way to examine the pacing and overall color of films, and here are a few more color charts to look through. […]