Time-lapse Pollock Paintings



I worked on a fun project with the Lower School art teacher. The fifth grade students studied Jackson Pollock and his drip technique of painting. Afterward, they were to collaborate to create their own Pollock-inspired pieces.

Nicole wanted to capture the students painting using time-lapse photography. I knew of an application from a previous project at my old job and downloaded it onto my work Mac: Gawker would take time-lapse photographs using an iSight camera. Gawker is particularly nice because you can schedule when you want the Mac to start taking photos and when you want it to stop shooting. This way I did not need to be connected to the laptop to get it to start filming.



I happened to have an old iBook with no display or keyboard that worked perfectly for this project. I climbed a ladder and zip-tied the laptop and an iSight camera to the fire extinguisher pipe.



In order to "control" the computer I connected to it from my MacBook using Screen Sharing, which comes with OS X. Here you can see what the cameras is seeing from the ceiling, in this case the blank canvas waiting for the students' paint.



Nicole decided we should shoot the footage at 4 frames per second. The results, shown above, are pretty interesting and cool: you can watch the painting come to life before your very eyes!

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