Background
At the beginning of 2020, while staying at my sister’s home after a death in the family I spent a lot of time with her in her garden, drinking coffee and taking photos of the plants, flowers, and wildlife that visited. When I returned to Melbourne I turned these photos into a textile design with the mind to print a scarf for her for her birthday.
This got me to thinking, what if the design was moving? (As a motion artist this is invariably where my brain goes). The motion of the still images of plants and leaves could simply be animated but the actions of the animals I would want to be short visual loops of their natural movements, thus captured using video.
The problem is that conventional video isn’t high enough resolution to print at scale – even 4K video only translates to 8MP images, where ideally you’d need 2-3 times that size for a detailed print. But if I used high burst rate photography I could create a high frame rate image sequence for the animation, while still getting high definition photos to use for the print design.
The design could then be viewed as both a still image and in motion via augmented reality, projection or screen-based presentations of the work in a range of environments and applications.
Preliminary results
My initial research and development has yielded excellent results, capturing high resolution image sequences of wildlife around my home suitable for both print and video use.
