Geek Squad

March 8, 2009

Heat Movie DNA

When I first discovered Brendan Dawes’s Cinema Redux years ago, I longed to make my own movie DNA. Dawes creates a mosaic of still frames from a film, captured at 1/sec., and lets us see something about a film all at once. This project was recently exhibited at MOMA as part of the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, and his updated website on the project led me to what I have been waiting for: the code. Back in 2004, I hadn’t heard of Processing, and I’m not sure I would have understood what to do with it. Recently, however, my Advanced Media students and I have been working with Processing as we consider programming as a media art form. Dawes has links to some applications people have developed to replicate the process and one to a site with updated Processing code. A little more tinkering and, at last, I’m finally getting to make my own! I have been waiting to create one for Michael Mann’s Heat for a long time. Expect to see more.