BTS
I found myself diving down a rabbit hole in early 2022, when I found a website dedicated to showing different types of LCD pixel structures. Some looked like rectangles, some looked like circuits, some looked like arrowheads, and all of them looked like they could've been great for some kind of motion graphics thing. I’d figure it out later.
I got a macro lens with the biggest magnification I could find and re-scanned one of my music videos on a couple of monitors at home. It didn't have a focus wheel, but I couldn’t get mad at the results.
I wanted to see if I could shoot individual pixels, but 5x magnification was enough to catch distinct patterns of light moving across the screen, rather than massive groups of pixels lighting up all over the display.
I tried again with some unused footage for another music video; this time shrinking the size of the window and changing the video’s orientation to catch pixels moving in different directions.
I collected the good shots, looped a couple of sections, and finally hit them with the Dreamweapon. At first, I thought that movement patterns were important, but my video synth only cared about catching and distorting black spaces, red shapes, green shapes, and blue shapes.
The looks I used on it made a lot of my magnification R&D pointless in a “Look, this was gonna look good no matter what” type of way, but turning the camera vertically made for some nice shots. After some colour grading in Premiere, I was good to go.
Thanks for reading.
