Motion Animation

I am trying to consciously avoid my usual default mechanism of going straight into secondary research and then resurfacing a week or two later to find that I've neglected my primary research and then not having enough time to develop my idea....

So on that note I decided to jump straight in and play around with making an abstract animation based on the idea of taking a video of a landscape whilst in a moving vehicle (I hasten to add I was a passenger and not doing some dangerous driving and filming at the same time!). The idea of stop motion animation essentially involves taking numerous frames and making a slight change in each frame to the subject so that when all the frames are played in a sequence,  it creates the illusion of motion.  However, in my movie I basically reverse the process with myself moving instead of the subject. 

This is a clip from the original movie I took on my DSLR camera. The car was travelling at speeds of about 30mph. Some of the scenery becomes blurred and almost painterly.

To create the animation, I basically used imovie to create frames from the original clip at the rate of 10fps. I chose a selection of those frames which I adjusted in photoshop and then reimported into final cut to create the movie. I found creating frames at 10fps resulted in too few frames and the resulting animation was very jumpy i.e. the 'objects' in the frame do not move smoothly from one frame to the next. So I redid the process at 24fps. I think it is a slight improvement but definitely still needs work. Perhaps I will experiment with slowing down the car and possibly saving frames at an even higher fps rate. Annoyingly blogger will not allow me to upload the 24fps movie so the 10fps movie clip is shown below just to give a rough idea.

Nevertheless, I think the result is quite interesting in that it is in some ways a representation or sketch of a landscape but does not resemble a recognisable one. When watching the clip, my focus shifts to the marks and colours that appear and how they move. Obviously because I was travelling forward the objects only appear to move in one direction...but I wonder what would happen if I move in quite random directions, as if to create the gesture of drawing?  Another consideration is sound, the original sound was lost when I converted the clip to frames, certainly I will need to evaluate what sound if any would be most appropriate with the images.