ZZZ Visualizing Time-Based Media

Z/Z/Z/

Visualizing Time-Based Media

ZZZ describes the dimensions of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language. We use visualization techniques with trial-and-error methodologies to explore individual cultural artifacts (a scene of animation) as well as larger cultural data sets (a director's filmography).

Our primary goals are:

  • aesthetic production—to create new work from existing works
  • providing better descriptions of cultural artifacts than language alone
  • to analytically and heuristically reveal previously unseen cultural patterns
  • better representing the complexity, diversity, variability, and uniqueness found in animation, cinema, and video games

— Kyra Ocean / Sarah Caluag / Jeremy Douglass

Processes 101

Animated Seek

Animated seeks are a hyper-fast 30-frame overviews of the entire video. They provide a quick, firm grasp of the complete composition.

Extended Montage

Extended montages are large (typically 300-500 frame) “contact sheets” of the entire video. They are useful for understanding color palette, shot-length, and overall compositional structure.

Orthoganal Animations

Orthoganal animations are constructed by cutting “time slices” (1-pixel col/rows) from a frame, positioning them side-to-side chronologically, and repeating this process on every frame.

Therefore, each orthoganal frame represents a single X/Y position throughout the video.

Keyframe

Keyframes are similar to orthoganal animations except instead of slicing every pixel, only the midpoint (center) column/row is sliced [resulting in a static image].

Average

Averages display the average (mean) value of each pixel across the entire video. Often, the front averages result in images similar to “long-exposure” photographs.

Maximum

Maximums display the maximum value of each pixel across the entire video. (These can be all-white if every pixel is whitened during the duration of the video.)

Minimum

Minimums display the minimum value of each pixel across the entire video. (Likewise, these can be all-black if every pixel is blackened during the duration of the video.)