Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting



These animators came up with a brand-new method of light painting, one that's simple but leads to unearthly and very cool results. The animators create 3D models of whatever they want to show in the film--in this case, often typography, but also various objects and little anthropomorphic characters--a...nd chop them up into cross-sections. It's like a CAT scan, more than anything else--a whole bunch of individual slices of a 3D whole.

Those slices are compiled into animated movies, and played back on an iPad. But here's where it gets interesting: The team then drags the movie-playing iPad backwards while capturing the path with long-exposure photographs, about 3-6 seconds apiece. The photographs (of which about 5,500 were taken) capture the path of the iPad's light.