Jellyscan

A slitscan of a swimming jellyfish.

First Try

I starting this video of a jellyfish swimming:

And broke it out into a bunch of png images, one for each frame in the video with ffmpeg:

$ ffmpeg -i aurelia_aurita.mp4 -an -f image2 "frames/frame_%03d.png"

Then I chose a line to use as the slit, in this case a vertical line 300 pixels from the left, right here:

Then I used python to go through each frame image, copy out a singe line of pixels and paste them into a new image. This stacked up to create a “slitscan”:

The x-axis (pixel number) of the output image is time! You can see swirling from the jelly movement show up as “warping” of the suspended particles (little white dots) in the slitscan.

Second Try

I combined all these scripts so you can

$ make run VID=YOUTUBE_URL

and it will make a slitscan (with the slit in the center of the frame.

So this video gives this scan: