Material Video Processing

I’m building a piece of software around a simple idea: take a video, pull it into the physical world, disturb it, then bring it back.

It breaks a video into frames, lets you export them as printable sheets, with a variety of effects, then reconstructs the video after the frames have been altered.

Here’s a clip of my friends Hannah and Sirus in a bathtub. I’ve reduced the image to a binary threshold.

From there the software generates sprite sheets, which are grids containing every frame of the video.

These sheets can be printed, and this is where the process opens up.

You can draw on them, cut parts out, color them in, add stickers. You could burn them, spit on them, spill something on them, or shoot them with a gun. You could dig a hole and bury them for a week, leave them out in the sun, or run them through the washing machine. You could use them as a coaster, let a child draw on them, or stick them in the oven on low heat for a few hours.

At that point, it’s out of your hands. That’s kind of the point.

Here, I printed them onto pages from an old magazine, letting the original text and images bleed into the frames.