Scintillaris

A pearly necklace of stars is plucked out of the glowing Milky Way band in the sky.

4K video. To properly expose the Milky Way, this film was shot with long exposures, holding each single pose for 15 seconds at a time, over the course of three hours, with no breaks.

Animating with my actual body, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much like an animator, I had to think about the position of every limb and focus on each pose. I held every pose for 15 seconds, sometimes with a strong wind blowing, for 3 hours with no breaks, while Timothy checked the camera and read the exposure sheet out loud to keep me on track.

This was a fascinating experience, and my whole body aches now from the yoga-like work and lack of sleep. I saw plenty of meteors that night, sometimes I had no choice but to hold my head up and stare at the stars, it was like a very long meditation.

This type of animation is called “pixilation”, but it’s normally played at 12 frames per second and each frame is shot instantly, no long poses. I haven’t seen anyone do this with long exposures and the Milky Way moving in the background, so it might be a first, but if anyone knows of someone else doing it before, let me know!

I’m putting this film up under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License.

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