Photos Movie Barcode: Tangled

These kinds of "movie barcodes" recently have been somewhat popular in various online outlets. From an artistic point of view (and as someone whose earliest career ambition was animation) I enjoy seeing how the color palette changes over the course of a movie - how the director uses color to help build each scene and portray different moods. Seeing an entire movie laid out in one stretch gives you an appreciation for those color decisions, and if you're at all familiar with the movie it's not difficult to pick out exactly when different scenes happen. My wife, daughter, and I had fun this morning picking out all the different scenes from this piece.

This was my first attempt at one of these, and based on the result I want to do more. I also want to experiment with different frame rates, sizes of individual slices, and other techniques. One of my family members is a huge Star Wars fan, so I know at some point I'll do the original trilogy. I want to get them printed so he can hang them in his office.

This particular attempt was created from 1,444 frames from the movie Tangled, using every 90th frame. Each slice is a single frame that has been slightly blurred and then resized to 3 pixels wide.

 

That's amazing. I've never come across one of these before. What software were you using to extract the frames? (I'm assuming you can do it as an automated process?)

 

Thanks. Automated is absolutely the way to go; I don't have the patience to grab that many frames manually.

To get the frames, I use a Command Prompt to run VLC with a couple of additional commands to tell VLC to automatically grab ever X frame and save it to a specific folder.

I started with this workflow, but I changed the information in the command prompt a bit because the commands in that link didn't work right for me. In addition to those changes, I use Photoshop instead of ImageMagick to resize/assemble the images. This is because I can't figure out how to use ImageMagick and I'm more comfortable with the Adobe workflow. I created a custom action for the batch processing to blur, resize, then save each image as a new file.

I use this script to do the actual assembly. It worked just fine on my work computer (running Photoshop CS6), but on my home computer (running Photoshop CC) I had to modify the script because I kept getting a weird font error.

 

I wonder what 50 Shades Of Grey would look like :/

 

Just a smear of brown?