Floating Points – Silhouettes

The very unique timelapse that you see above is an experimental video created by the guys from Trunk in the U.K. in a very sophisticated and laborious manner which results in a beautiful light painting animation.

According to Trunk’s blog: “Trunk’s director Junior Martínez and Pablo Barquín have created a the video for Floating Points, aka Sam Shepherd. The music in the video is taken from ‘Silhouettes (I, II & III)’, an eleven-minute overture that is also the second track on Floating Point’s debut album – Elaenia.

The video came about when Sam Shepherd saw the amazing light rig Pablo had built at Hamill Industries in Barcelona. The motion rig converts digital 3D data into analog movement to control the path of an LED resulting in ethereal 3D light images. Mixing in camera effects with digital precision has always fascinated Pablo. He states that “the hardware wasn’t complicated and took around 3 weeks to develop and build, but the software took a bit longer, almost a month. The hardest part was developing the right combination of hardware, software, electronics, cameras, lighting etc and getting them all to communicate perfectly.”

You can see the amount of work needed to create this project in the behind the scenes video below:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/142120095[/vimeo]

According to the team: “the video was shot in a purpose built landscape within Barquín’s studio as well as on location in Rio Tinto. This corner of the Spanish and Portuguese border is deemed the closest thing to Mars on Earth and perfectly portrays the sense of space suggested by the music.

The location also led to a lot of challenges Pablo notes “Shooting in Río Tinto was really hard, as we had only 5 nights and a lot of material to shoot. It was the first time we used this machine for a shoot so it was kind of hard to make a shooting plan with the right timings. Sometimes an animation of 70 frames could take a whole night to get done. We learnt on the fly how to be more efficient. It was a huge effort: we crossed the entire Country! Sometimes we even had to choose a location in total darkness in the middle of a mine!”

We have covered many light painting projects here on LensVid and you can find all of them on our Light-Painting page.