Before mind-melting visual effects were made available on cheap software, there was slit-scan photography and cinematography, where a moveable slide with a slit was run between a camera and its subject, creating a warped and blurry effect. VFX mastermind Douglas Trumbull adapted the technology for the psychedelic “Stargate” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since then it’s been used for everything from Star Trek’s warp drive scenes, to the tesseract sequence in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
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Richie Johnston, the director behind Marconi Union’s “Weightless” video, recently put slit-scanning to use for the feature-length Ambient Zone 2 music video. Designed to accompany the album from start to finish, Johnston’s video is an uncut long take of a ballet dancer performing a live interpretation of the album. The dancer, Rachel Bodger, appears almost completely in silhouette standing in front of a colorful background, while her movements are hypnotically warped with a digital slit-scan technique. The effect is like an abstract digital residue of Rachel’s movement through time and space.
Johnston tells The Creators Project that a number of things influenced the video. He enjoys the variety of ways music can be represented visually, and this was the conceptual starting point.“Sheet music in particular has always fascinated me, the notes provide a visual documentation of a song, mapping its ever-changing patterns in a linear format,” he says. “Dancing to music is also a fundamental principle of being human. With this in mind I felt it was fitting to use a ballet dancer to visualise the album. Ambient Zone 2 was an exciting opportunity to try something innovative: hear an album with your eyes.”
To create the video, Johnston didn’t use traditional slit-scan technique. Essentially, he replaced the slit with what he calls its closest digital equivalent—a single line of pixels. “I shot the video as one continuous take and converted the footage into a digital slit-scan,” Johnston explains. “Eventually after 92 hours of number crunching, Ambient Zone 2 had landed on my desktop.”
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