Javascript motion picture experiment, part 2

I wasn’t very happy with the result for my first take on the motion picture so I decided to revisit them. I did the following:

• Remove the precision timing requirements by just calculating the film speed, position it correctly and have the shutter be triggered when the frame is passing through it.
• Fix the shutter so that it’s not open/closed 50% of the time, instead it opens for 10 milliseconds and closes back, regardless of the desired frame rate.

1FPS

8FPS

Much better! if frame rate is high enough this looks pretty fluid, but may be too dark! (Note that the 1FPS example is skipping some frames, that’s an artifact of the animated GIF)

To compensate for the short shutter speed I added a white mask to simulate stronger lighting, then I increase the contrast of the film to make it look sharper under the increased lighting.

Increased light

Higher contrast film

This also added a natural vignette effect to the movie. The final change I did was simulating a bit of imprecision on the shutter, making it randomly open a bit too late for some frames.

It actually looks much better when running directly (and at higher frame rates), things are happening just too quickly for the GIFs to get all important frames. I’ll clean up and push it to github soon for the curious, for the moment you can check it out online HERE.

I think I achieved what I was aiming for first, however for a real application it may be too tiring for the eyes… may be a hybrid approach (faking part of the visual effects) would be more appealing.