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Entertainment

Creative Code: A Look At Generative Filmmaking

Take a look at some of the most inspiring and breathtaking examples of code-based animation.

Generative filmmaking is about utilizing code to create often abstract, stunningly beautiful images. Rather than shooting a film in the real world and tweaking it in After Effects, the visuals are created through automated computer processes in Flash, Trapcode, VVVV, openFrameworks, Processing, C++, and other software, then tampered with in After Effects to add the finishing touches. The results are often experimental and eclectic, with otherworldly visuals set to a piece of music which drives the narrative.

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As a relatively new form of filmmaking, it’ll be interesting to follow its development and evolution, seeing what collaborations may come about between musicians and filmmakers, for instance, to create original scores that coincide with these fluid visuals.

So here, we take a look at some examples that caught our eye:

Created using Trapcode and set to the music of Ensa’s “Maps And Diagrams,” this is a film called

Ensa

by

Misha Shyukin

. The visuals glitch along with the music, with a pulsating ball of crackling energy at its center.

This film starts off deceivingly simple, with just a single dot of light falling through space. But before long, we’re treated to myriad exotic dancing forms from what looks like a pond at the bottom of some unearthly being’s garden. Called

Ascension

and created using Trapcode, it is, according to its author

Chris Lavelle

, “a narrative of a cycle of life.” Whatever it is, it looks magnificent.

To show that it doesn’t always need to be about abstract visuals,

Silent

by

Chandler B. McWilliams

, was created by custom software that selected and combined frames from five Silent Era films—

Metropolis

,

Faust

,

Nosferatu

,

Holy Mountain

, and

The Dragon Painter

—and compared the data from their soundtracks with modernist composer Charles Ives’ piece “Hallowe’en.”

Surface Details

by

Tom Beddard

(aka Subblue) features a fractal landscape that mutates and shifts, as if you’re looking into the evolving form of sub-atomic information that makes up the universe. Bizarre and captivating.

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Called

Flocking

, this short film by

Gwen Vanhee

was created using openFrameworks and is set and to Cinematic Orchestra’s “Child song.” The visuals dart about like fish swimming in an alien sea, like a snapshot from an underwater world from some weird distant solar system.