For a while I’ve been looking into ways to digitally create the equivalent of direct filmmaking techniques in the tradition of Stan Brakhage and others. While not necessarily trying to exactly match the look of the scratched or painted film in those works, I am trying to match their amount of visual complexity.
Check out this film by Josh Lewis for example:
There is complex fine detail that is unique to each frame, and there is also a larger compositional structure that’s cohesive from frame to frame.
So a couple years ago I decided to try implementing Jonathan McCabe’s multi-scale Turing pattern algorithm. Jonathan does a lot of amazing algorithmic work like this:
In particular, his multi-scale Turing patterns had the sort of visual complexity I was looking for. He has a brief pdf explaining how they work:
jonathanmccabe.com/Cyclic_Symmetric_Multi-Scale_Turing_Patterns.pdf
I used the visual effects software Sidefx Houdini to implement a version of McCabe’s algorithm and was able to get something with a fairly similar look:
The above is an assembly of distinct one-frame simulations that I created using initial conditions and sim parameters that change over time. Each frame is a distinct simulation of around 40 steps. In some segments the input seed noise is animated, in other segments the seed noise stays the same while the inhibitor and activator radii values are animated by noise functions. There are also some tiny pill-shaped features that I think are artifacts of the underlying grid resolution.
After that first series of tests I decided to re-implement the algorithm from scratch to give me more flexibility in controlling the look. While I had originally coded the algorithm in Open CL in Houdini, the new version is a node-based combination of Houdini sops and vex code. The node-based implementation makes it very easy to make experimental changes to the algorithm. Here’s one my first experiments with the new implementation:
Here’s another, this one used a wavy noise pattern as its initial condition:
More to come!