Cinematographer Drew Geraci shoots a lot of timelapse intros. His work, which includes aerials and motion graphics, has appeared on David Fincher’s and Netflix’s House of Cards, as well as in intros for the NFL, PBS’s Frontline and HBO documentaries. His latest work is the mesmerizing short film, China: A Prisma Tale, for which the filmmaker shot an entire timelapse video with the popular Prisma app.
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Like Pikazo, the neural network behind Prisma turns videos or stills into works of art. That is, it applies filters to imagery so that it looks like, say, a Picasso or van Gogh painting, or gives it other well-known patterns and textures. The effect that Prisma has on Geraci’s video is gorgeous, making it look not so much like an arty timelapse, but rather like a hallucinatory animation.
By Geraci’s estimation, his company District 7 spent 80 hours in post-production “hand-stitching” together 2,500 individual frames. “The result is an immersive experience that paints a completely different picture from reality,” Geraci explains in his video's description. “Each frame of the one minute and 20 second video had to be processed via the Prisma App which took almost 80 hours to complete. The processing/rendering was at the mercy of the servers. Most of the project had to be completed between 11pm and 4am EST because the app would freeze or shutdown due to overloaded servers or too many users on at the same time.”
To create the neural timelapse, Geraci had to physically take a photo of the video on a 4K monitor using an iPad, then save each photo directly to the tablet. Once all of the photos were taken, Geraci used a PC to pull the images off the iPad and onto the hard drive for additional processing and editing. A tedious process, no doubt, but just like animating a film frame-by-frame, the work ultimately pays in beautiful dividends.
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