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Designer/programmer Eva Schindling has posted Cinematic Particles, an online applet that creates art based on the dialogue in popular movies.
Cinematic Particles creates smoky, abstract images based on a mathematical analysis of the movie’s dialogue. The user can run the process in realtime (launch the applet) and adjust the speed at which the movie dialogue is replayed, which influences the creation of the image. The dialogue (and its pacing) is taken from the subtitle files included with commercial DVDs. By looking at the images, you can start to see differences in the output, stemming from differences in movie dialogue and pacing. Schindling explains:
“Movies that are defined by rapid successions of spoken dialog produce drawings that consist mostly of black ink blobs that grow together, as the particles are constantly reset with new parameters. Movies that show long silent pauses between scenes gives particles more time to produce long lines and curves.”
Here are a couple of samples from Schindling’s site:
Blade Runner:
See what His Girl Friday looks like after the jump!
His Girl Friday:
Many more examples are available at Schindling’s Cinematic Particles site.
If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d recommend checking out the work of Ben Fry, who is partly responsible for Processing, the open source programming language used to create Fry’s and Schindling’s visualizations.
An opportunity for improvement:
When pictures are added to a blog entry, there is just enough room for 2 or 3 characters to print to the left or right of the box and it often does. It makes the entry a bit difficult to read. This is what I see:
Ma
ny
mo
re
ex
am
ple
s
are
av
ail
abl
e
at
Sc
hin
dli
ng’
s
Ci
nematic Particles site.
posted by KJ on 9-20-2007 at 11:44 am
I see the same thing KJ. And sometime the highlighted yeloow text is behind the photo altogether.
posted by khm on 9-20-2007 at 1:48 pm
Yellow. Yes I CAN spell.
posted by khm on 9-20-2007 at 1:49 pm
Looks fine to me, though I’ve seen it in other posts before. Cool stuff.
posted by TMo on 9-20-2007 at 2:00 pm
I’m going to fix this layout issue later today — thanks for catching this! (I’m assuming you’re viewing the site using Internet Explorer?)
posted by Higgins on 9-20-2007 at 2:01 pm
Yeah, it’s IE. It’s on a ton of different posts, but I’ve never seen anyone say anything about it before.
posted by bobwalrus5 on 9-20-2007 at 2:34 pm
Same here. This happens to me frequently, as does not being able to see/click on links because they’re behind pictures.
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 9-20-2007 at 6:40 pm
Okay, I think I’ve fixed this post — please let me know, if anyone’s still seeing improper layout. I’ll take this message back to the rest of the blog staff so we can resolve it across the board.
posted by Higgins on 9-20-2007 at 8:04 pm
In a whole bunch of posts, I can’t see all of the comments. The end of each line disappears, cutting off a few words on each line. It’s not every post, and I can’t figure out why it happens on some, but not all. This one doesn’t do it, but the post before this one (”What Will You Do For A T-shirt”) does it.
posted by greenstrawberries on 9-27-2007 at 5:30 am