Inventive Video “Lightspeed” Combines Light Painting With Stop Motion Photography

It starts out a lot like most timelapses, a sweeping landscape, some cool star trails, a trip to a southern California desert and then BA-BAM! An illuminated skeleton pops up out of the ground and takes us on an adventure through the desert as he morphs into a menagerie of animals right before our eyes–no CGI required.

Lightspeed is photographer, Darren Pearson (aka Darius Twin’s), moving creation that combines stop motion photography with his mad light painting skills to create a radiant animation. Lightspeed is the follow up video to his similar stop motion clip, Light Goes On, which you can also watch below, but first, take a look at the artist’s latest work:

Lightspeed

Darius Twin spent about a year to make Lightspeed. The 2:45 minute long video contains over 1,000 light paintings, for which Twin logged 10’s of thousands of miles on his car traversing California just to capture. As the creative director for Danger during the day, Twin completed the project in his time off. Usually at night when he was sure to encounter disgruntled rattlesnakes and packs of hungry, howling coyotes.

Light Goes On

If you head over to Darius Twin’s website, you can learn more about the process, grab some GIF’s, and even a learn a few light painting fundamentals in a video tutorial he made a few years back.

[ Darius Twin via Laughing Squid ]