Artist Statement
Light was shot and turned into moving images in cinema. Whenever the camera is on, it is always first the interaction of light and the object in the scene that makes the camera capture. To read a film as a map of light is to realize and acknowledge the work of light in it, to see how it help perform the scenes, express the emotions and develop the rhythms. In this video, I design three ways to see the light in the films of F.W. Murnau, an early cinema filmmaker who had a strong sense and interesting use of light in his film, by using different image processing algorithms, therefore to experience cinema in a more “low-level” way. The first section is a variation of height map and histogram indicating how many pixels are there containing the same brightness value ranging from 0 to 255 at each X (graph on the right) and Y (graph on the left) position. Although the graphs are purely statistical, we can still somehow recognize it from the original images. In the second section, I try to make every frame of the film like a weather/heat map where there are gradient orientation indicating the direction of the change of pixels brightness and stepping colours indicating the level of brightness. For the final section, the transition of the images from frame to frame is decided by the probability of a computer generated random number is higher than the pixel’s brightness value or not. Therefore, the brighter the pixels, the higher the possibility that it will jump to other frames.

Process
The image processing parts are done by Processing and then I composite it together using Premiere Pro. The footages are downloaded from internet and then converted from .mkv to .mp4.

In last semester, I had took JC2002 Artist in the Lab as the preparation course for my GT. During that semester, I learnt about the principle and the practice of some image processing algorithms I have used in this project. For detail documentation can be found here.


Footages
Sunrise (1927)
The Last Man (1924)
Nosferatu (1922)
Faust (1926)


Code
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dOy7_Q1Xy9rtePa4ANkqy7KMhgn_xOlW?usp=sharing


Theoretical Reference
Vilém Flusser, 1985, Into the universe of technical images, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Gene Youngblood, 1970, Expanded cinema, New York : Dutton.
(Will write about it later…)