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.) […]