iPads, Light Painting, And A Lot Of Calculations

I remember when I was first playing around with my first SLR camera and someone explained to me the concept of painting with light over the course of a long exposure. Well the guys over at Dentsu London have decided to make light painting extremely complex by creating a sort of stop motion animation with ipads displaying different shapes. There is really no way I can explain this so you pretty much just have to watch this for yourself. You can read more about this project over at Dentsu London's blog here.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Patrick Hall's picture

Patrick Hall is a founder of Fstoppers.com and a photographer based out of Charleston, South Carolina.

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10 Comments

This is insane! Who said the iPad was useless???!

I don't know why but when i try to view Vimeo on fstoppers front page it never plays, if i go to the same video on the Vimeo page it works just fine. Mac 10.6.4 with Safari. I don't have any problems with fstoppers youtube vids.

I don't really see the point in this all that trouble why not just composite the CGI elements into the video?...........Talk about making life hard for yourself!

As a piece of art it's a nice concept but..............

This is such a unique idea. I don't know if you would see this in commercial photography, due to all the software, but I can see it becoming huge in music videos and personal photography.

Awesome!
I made some tests like this with my iPhone after the first time I saw it. The result is great, but the iPhone screen is smaller and in some angles it 'shines' too much, even when the video is black. I need to try harder.

@andy: sometimes its the process that makes it great. You can do anything with CGI and Photoshop these days, but to bring in hand created elements into a design or a film take it to a whole new level. Try to notice how many advertisements out there contain photographs of hand crafted things and see how much that changes the quality of the creation.

Would anybody even care about this if it was all CG? Hell no they wouldn't. Everybody sure is freaking out about it though because someone spent a lot of time making something insanely creative in a way it hasn't been done before. This video rocks.

That was so great. Thank you so much!

Awesome video, and insanely creative, but I do think Andy has a good point. All this can be done with a lot less effort and more effectively in After Effects, so I don't see this technique catching on many places. I also agree with Thomas when he says that hand crafted things in motion pictures can change the quality, but I don't think that's a good analogy in this case. Hand crafted elements are great, but what they are doing here is still 3d digital composing, so it still has that CG look to it. So if its going to have that CG look to it, you might as well save some effort and do it in After Effects, and have more control.
Amazing concept, and I enjoyed the video. Awesome demonstration of technology and creativity.

I agree with Thomas Woodson; It is not that something similar can be done by other methods, it is the craft of figuring out something really cool. I bet that this will inspire a ton of creative uses with this or a derivative technique. Great to see people with this much imagination.

Hi Timo and Marjut!
Love it!
All the best Matthew from ATV!