Another Thing with Stuff, this Time about Time-Lapses

When confronted with Time-Art I was made to watch the film Samsara to which I realised something, Time-Lapses are absolutely incredible, and so pretty much instantly I needed a reason to do one. A few days later I was reminded by my optician that I needed to have another check up for my eyes, to which I became rather curious about how my eyes have, and will develop over the years.

 I decided that I personally wanted to represent birth, life, and death, through 3 simple metaphors being sunrise (in a place for children to play), midday (showing monotonous work), and sunset (being in a calming field/farm. The time-lapses themselves were somewhat simple however the devil is in the detail and I will say that exposure and focus are nightmares to control as I especially learned during the sunset scene, and while I could make the excuse that the slight lack of focus is for the eyesight problems of old age, it really was a dumb mistake in filming

in terms of eyesight problems presented the retina was represented by a reverse keyed lens flare to create a small iris effect, loss of focus was made of Gaussian blurs with some masking for distance, cataracts was a reversed  light ray made to be black and blink effects were small animations. The piece was mostly about using keyframes to set up slow blur increases and so on, and while I do hope to use more complex systems in the future, finding methods to reverse light rays and key them out became easily the most complex part of the project as they weren't conventional techniques and therefore not covered by lynda.com (for reference the technique is to make a green screen with light rays and then key and reverse the effects separately).

 While I am reasonably happy with the end project for each I worry that it lacks any effective use of the 3 screens and instead adopts a more simplistic approach, the blinking arguably also looks unnatural due to it being limited to a 25fps limit for the animation that is a full 7 frames long. In the end what is achieved is some interesting time lapses and ideas, but I'd argue that it lacks the complexity of idea to make it stand-out in any way.