Videos made from artists' paintings usually take the form of a slideshow.
More elaborate ways of making videos from still images are possible, however. Here is an example of a video collage.
This short video is in the form of a fairly fast slideshow, with a soundtrack.
Both the images and the audio track were created using systematic processes. These processes are described here.
Each of the frames in the video is made by collaging photographs.
There are only three original photographs involved. This gives the video some coherence. Two of the photographs are of flowers. The third is a of an abstract painting.
These three original photographs were each cut into nine pieces. Consequently a set of twenty-seven still images was created, with which to build the video.
Each frame of the video is a collage of three images chosen from the set of twenty-seven. They are chosen so that consecutive frames are different.
The means of collaging three images is to use one of them as a mask. The other two images are printed through the mask. So what you see is components of two images, through the outline of the third.
This method of collaging is done so as to retain the colours of the original photographs, rather than the more obvious method of blending the photographs which leads to blended colours, less in control of the artist.
In fact the ultimate collage is a little more complex.
The twenty-seven individual cut-up images were indeed constructed as described above. But these were not the final frames used in the video.
Each of the twenty seven new images were in turn used to make more detailed collages, again by overlaying selections of three of them. Thus a new, larger collection was constructed. An interim video was made from those.
To create the final video. The collaging process was carried out for a third time. The consequence of this is that each frame of the final video is created from nine of the twenty seven cut-ups, three of them being used as masks and six contributing colours and shapes to the final appearance.
The video is paced at a rate which suits the beats in the audio. The audio rate is 64bpm, and the duration of the video is 60sec. So each frame of the video is displayed for 60/64 secs.
The audio is a percussion track that has a percussion pattern that is 1-1-2-4. This pattern is repeated on three toms, each with a different pitch, at different rates. These rates are in the proportion 1:2:4.
Emphasising the tom that is moving most quickly leads to the illusion of an attack for every frame.
As a demonstration of the versatility of this process it has been repeated on other selections of photographs, with some interesting variations.
This video shows the effect of using just a single photograph. This time it is the photograph of a painting which has been cut up to provide nine images.
The original idea in this second collage was to use a photograph of a Mondrian painting, to see the extent to which the collage still looked like Mondrian. That experiment has yet to be completed.
Updated July 2018