This exercise began as a piece of conceptual art. A scientist might call it a thought experiment.
The experiment was to create an abstract impression of water made from a short video of a waterfall, where both the images and the audio from that video are transformed into rhythms expressive of water.
The video has been made using a couple of transformations. One which gives it a cartoon appearance. The other which creates an impressionist feel.
The cartoon effect picks out the edges of the water as it cascades down. So as each frame jumps to the next, new shapes appear but the eye/brain sees these as shape changes.
The impressionist effect is obtained by scraping the pixels vertically in each frame. This has a blurring effect, but keeps the blur confined to the direction of motion.
The two video effects are interleaved my cross-fading back and forth between the two.
The audio is similarly made from a couple of transformations of the original soundtrack from the video, made to give the sound some rhythm and to synchronise with the cutting in the video.
The audio transformations involve layering copies of the recorded sounds at different speeds and repeating sections every few bars.
A simple pulse has been added in the form of a repeated chord that gets more dense before returning to its original simplicity. Both the original sound and the musical chord are faded in and out in a regular fashion.
Updated July 2018