DNA of a film

Cinema Redux by Brendan Dawes is an attempt to get a visual analysis of a film by reducing it to a single image. The artist himself describes his work the following:

This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed 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. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.

‘fingerprint’ of Vertigo, A. Hitchcock, 1958

Compare Serpico to The Conversation. You can see there’s far more edits in Lumet’s classic compared to the more gentle slower pace of Coppola’s Conversation. This is also down to the editing style of Walter Murch who prefers to only make cuts when absolutely necessary. Have a look through the eight movies and make your own mind up.
(via rhizome)

Reading about this work brought also the 0xdb project back into my mind, which is an einteresting database website about which I have written in an earlier post. Aside from the below quoted self-definition 0xdb provides also analyzing features like to trace shooting locations, single scene fragmentation, timeline and some other features ….

The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.

The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them. Even though most movies in the 0xdb are copyrighted, and many of them are practically inaccessible for legal reasons, the monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic allows the 0xdb to identify and index these materials.

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