I enjoy good music, and when it’s paired with creative videos – well, that’s a true delight! So, I really enjoyed this video for Tycho Jones’ song Don’t Be Afraid. It’s beautiful, unique, and made entirely from hand-printed cyanotypes. Over 5,000 of them were used for the painstaking process of creating the video, but it was well worth the effort!
The man behind this work of art is a talented photographer and filmmaker Edd Carr. It took him a good three months to create this video, and he had total creative freedom to express himself. “To my knowledge, this is the first start to finish cyanotype video in history,” Edd writes on his Instagram. As far as I know too, it really is the case, which is what makes this video extra-special.
Speaking with PetaPixel, Edd revealed what his process looked like. Even though the video was made from hand-printed cyanotypes, it required digital and analog processes combined. He first shot the footage on a Canon 650D with a 10-22mm lens at 24 frames per second in Full HD.
Next, Edd had to split the entire footage into individual frames. He used Final Cut Pro for this, and since the video was shot at 24fps, this gave him 24 jpg files per one second of footage. He turned them into digital negatives and printed them on A4 acetate paper, printing nine frames per A4 sheet.
Then came the hardest part – processing the cyanotypes. “This took a month, full of errors and changes and mistakes,” Edd told PetaPixel. But even when this was done, it wasn’t over yet. He scanned each frame with a desktop scanner to make them digital again. He cropped each of them in Lightroom, and then finally dropped them into the timeline for the video.
Other than the footage he initially filmed with the digital camera, Edd also added some archival footage from his personal library, as well as some stock footage. Of course, that too had gone through the same process before he added them to the final piece.
The final result is beautiful to watch. You can even see the texture of the paper in some frames, which gives some special charm to an already charming video. The song is pretty cool too, so watching the video for Don’t Be Afraid is a fantastic experience overall. Make sure to watch the video above, follow Edd on Instagram for more of his work, and find Tycho on YouTube for more of his music.
[via PetaPixel]
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