One /r/movies, redditor is giving us a new spin on cinema analysis, as user vvdr12 is creating color composites that boil entire features down to a single, all-telling frame.
Using a Python script that averaged the hue of each frame, this movie fanatic reveals the most basic and simple tonal representation of various films.
This process is not dissimilar to Jim Campbell's Illuminated Averages series, where in one instance the artist scanned every single frame of Hitchcock's Psycho and generated a single new image from the result. Vvdr12's work expands on this process, and the results are both startling and kind of hilarious.
For example, his renderings of The Dark Knight and Batman and Robin couldn't be more different. Batman and Robin is that ridiculous purplish-blue color of George Clooney's batsuit and the surreal '80's lighting scheme, while The Dark Knight is an understated, sleek greyish brown tint.
Each composite takes about 12 hours to complete, since the program has to render a two hour movie at 24 frames-per-second. However, Reddit immediately began to work on improving the process.
One user offered to translate the algorithm into C++ "for some huge performace gains," while another entered a new script right into the forum for anyone to use and improve on.
It looks like more of these illuminating images will be on the way soon—we really want to see what Drive would look like with this treatment (or any Wes Anderson movie, for that matter).
