Stop motion animations or rapid sequences of images are some of my favorite things to make. I use them in my edits and I also just enjoy watching them silently or with music. Depending on the order or duration of the frames and how they are repeated, cropped, and displayed always changes how you think of the loop.
This list of instructions aims to allow quick generations of moving image visual edits that are trimmed, cropped, aligned in a ways that make for fun and quick loop creation.
I have also provided a small program that will generate marks(brushes) as if to be painting; as a way to help generate content or add originality to artwork. There is a readme.txt inside of the zipped folder that will provide you with instructions on how it works.
Otherwise the following directions will create work as well.
- Take a series of screengrabs, size does not matter. (later this can be modified to preference)
- Find a way to scroll, preview, view your selections one by one(later this can be modified to preference)
- Screen Record yourself playing back or looking through these images(crop now or crop later)
- Trim the screen record, play it back with loop setting on, screen record the loop.(Crop the image)
- Playback both this new variation of the screen record on loop side by side the previous loop(crop the image)
- Trim this version of the screen record, repeat any step to your preference.
- Save and Label.
This process reminds me that I alignment and order makeup a lot of how I create the work and just having something that can brief, having to determine how many frames there are and what each frames is doing slows me down and just allows me to think about a singular moment rather than just what is happening over a period of time.
I was struck by how personal the result of these rules is! I interpret the first rule to either be “take some screengrabs you already have” or “go take some new screengrabs right now.” In both cases, the result could be extremely different depending on the user.
When you created these rules, did you think about how the result might vary from one user to another?
I actually wanted them to be more specific when I was making it, but then I realized that if someone was using a different operating system or had different tools they might not be able to follow because of my bias to certain apps or processes. So I decided to leave it more open which then would still create results but hopefully not make people feel they are doing it wrong.
Yeah, I like the rule about cropping or trimming, which I feel can be a hard step to just say trim or crop, but even if your crop very little which I actually did, there is still the ability to crop more in the next step so you really just have to commit which is my favorite part of art making.
This just popped up – so relevant!
“The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) invites all designers, artists, writers and web-surfers (if there are any left) to submit their visual and written works created via or inspired by screenshots!
In the upcoming hybrid publication PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot, INC wants to collaboratively explore the omni-present, yet somehow often overlooked screenshot as a contemporary digital image and practice that fuses the human and machinic boundaries of authorship and vision.
As screenshots multiply in our digital depositories, whether to serve as a reminder, memory, pretty artefact or future blackmail material, they seem to be neglected due to mundanity of our encounters with screens and technological easiness with which a screenshot is captured. As we move through our digital surroundings with very low-effort action of scrolling, we occasionally stop by and freeze the moment with even more low effort of screenshotting. We share them, we read our poetic worldview into them, we gasp in disbelief just before we take them, we forget them. The project PrtScn aims to capture (pun intended) the ways in which we contemplate and get creative with them.
With this publication, we invite perspectives on screenshots as layered, sublime, uncanny, poetic, touching, stylized, authored (right in the middle), untouched, retouched, touchable, untouchable, ready for sharing, secret, beautiful, ugly, glitched, messy, clean, clear, confusing, accidental, just perfect.
PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot will be edited by Dunja Nešović and Geert Lovink.
Contributions can take a visual or written form (1500 words max.). The deadline for submissions is 4 February 2022. Send your contributions to info@networkcultures.org. For questions contact dunja@networkcultures.org.”
OMG yes! thank you so much, that is really cool and just about everything I have ever thought about screen captures, but yeas, they cannot just be pushed to the side, I use them for all those reasons to archive, remind, and to be the creation of new work, its definitely one of my favorite ways to work because of how crude and direct it is, it is like having audio visual sampler at your disposal.
I appreciate the way you incorporated putting multiple pieces of art together for a single artwork!
Do you think that this is a good way to find the average place that an object could be on a screen?
Thanks Tim! yeah, the destructive of working outside of a “real” editing software to make images has the tendency to make you center or grasp on to what is in the middle because as you edit away the fringe becomes lost similar to real materials. So in the end all you have left is the middle sometimes because there are only so many ways to manipulate the image without using better tools or more complex tools than just cropping and screen capture.
I noticed that the last video is stitching two videos of different sizes. Did you do this on purpose? Because the asymmetry makes it different than other videos above.
Do you think it would be interesting to stitch together the same video with different sizes and different playback rates?
Qianlin, thanks for the kind words and that is definitely what I am going after, the two inputs playing back at their own time and with their own size or scale create the final loop. I want to provide another perspective or version that is similar maybe in some ways very different depending on how the edit turns out. I like the ability to compare images. Also the way the image is constructed is really fun with screen capture you can align things so freely choose to have a border or not, it all works and all can be change with a simple trim or crop adjustment and its almost as if the work has changed. Lastly, I re-record the same loop because the timing of the loops becomes smoother, at the beginning I am manually controlling the playback of the images, but after I re-record the loop the time and pacing is changing with each version, this is the part I love the most about looping.
The timing for me is the most significant trip. I either feel hypnotized or completely off-put by the slamming of contrast shifts. very interesting to see these things without transitions
As I read through the instructions, I was reminded of clothing shopping as a child. Our local department store had tri fold floor to ceiling mirrors that shoppers could move. A child could stand inside and close the folded doors around themselves….did that. At that point, the world became an infinity of space and time. Your rule set of screen shots folded into screen shots, cropped and rerecorded reminded me of that experience. I wonder what your inspiration was? Have you ever seen other artwork like this?