Cat Skull Horizontal

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PhotoTimeMachine
March 16, 2007

A cat skull viewed from all sides simultaneously, assembled from a series of still images taken with the Mumford Time Machine and a rotary table. See also "Cat Skull Spiral". This video was select...

A cat skull viewed from all sides simultaneously, assembled from a series of still images taken with the Mumford Time Machine and a rotary table. See also "Cat Skull Spiral".

This video was selected by YouTube as a "Featured" video on 04-04-07. I confess to being amazed by the comments. I never would have imagined it would be possible to irritate so many people so easily. I posted this video three weeks prior to the "Featured" selection out of curiosity. I wanted to see if people would find it and how long it might take. The video is just something I did for my own amusement, and I think it's kind of interesting. But a lot of people seemed to get all worked up about it.

Many of the comments lead me to believe that a large part of the YouTube audience that takes the time to write comments is adolescent males. To many of them, the video was "gay". It's too bad they have adopted this term as a general pejorative. I might have imagined that young people were more tolerant.

I can't imagine why someone would respond with "fuck you buddy", "loser!!!", or "I fucked your mother" unless they're 15 and angry at the world.

Many people seemed to think it was cruel or hostile because the subject was the skull of a cat. The cat skull to me is just an interesting form, a part of natural history. We all have skulls. I didn't kill a cat to get the skull. This one came from a found carcass, buried in soil so nature could clean it. I suppose some people think that's creepy. I don't.

A lot of people thought the video did not merit the "Featured" status. They said a featured video should "earn" that status. But it appears that YouTube selects a few interesting videos to show you before they have been seen by many, perhaps to show you something new or different. I understand that many people found my clip boring and uninteresting, but it should be easy to move on to the next 40 seconds of amusement. I suppose it says something about the YouTube audience that two videos that stay popular and on the "Featured" list are "Farting in public" and a guy that pretends to be a drum machine with his mouth. YouTube viewers love those.

Other people thought it was pointless, stupid, or drug induced. It's actually the product of a rather laborious process of computer generated special effects. It required 1,000 different photographs, each taken from a different angle, and then combined into a movie with custom software. Every frame of the movie is composed of a tiny bit of each of the 1,000 pictures. The different frames of the movie represent this combination as it moves from left to right through the field of view. The middle frame shows the whole cat skull seen from every perspective (all sides) simultaneously. Maybe you don't think this is interesting, but I don't know how else you could ever see this. It took many days to create the tools that were used in this video, and many hours to create images after the tools were available. I think it's interesting. Not everyone does. Some people collect stamps. I tinker with computers and cameras. Sometimes you have to invest a lot of time in something before you know how it will turn out. Sometimes these projects are very profitable. Other times, they're just fun.

Several people wanted music. I agree. But what kind of music goes with a cat skull? I spent several hours working on some original music for the clip. I didn't want to copy commercial music because, well, it's not legal. I had trouble writing something I thought was appropriate and decided that this video had to stand on it's own or it would never be seen. I made the movie two years ago. If I waited to be satisfied with a sound track, it would never get posted. I have other work to do, and this YouTube posting was just an experiment to see what would happen.

Out of 101,000 views, there were 583 comments on my video. If 70% of them are negative, that makes 0.4% of the viewers. So it's not really very many people. It's been a very interesting experiment!

Category: Film & Animation

Tags:

photo time lapse special effects FX photography motion control timelapse

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