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January 4, 2005
stop motion multi-city subway animation

David Crawford has created an interesting Flash-based website montage of stop motion photographs of people traveling on subways in cities around the world. Perhaps the most hypnotic is Series #13, which combines "footage" from London, Paris, Boston, New York, and Tokyo into a roughly 7 minute animation.
According to the website: "Each installment's modular structure has provided a library of building blocks that have been edited into a linear animation approximately 7 minutes long. The algorithmic montage constituting each clip's DNA remains intact, while the individual sequences are now composited within a linear framework. The speed of the transitions is based on network connection speed."




I'm currently working on a video I'm hoping will have a similar feel to these. I hasn't considered incorporating people, but perhaps in the second run after seeing these. I love the way people jostle around on public transit, it's so unnatural. Also, I think it plays on the idea that photography loves the mundane. It draws it out and helps you notice and appreciate things that are generally taken for granted. The Japanese schoolgirls standing in the aisle in the first segment are hilarious, by the way.