Feature Friday: Light Drive

Posted April 22nd, 2011 / By John Kostrzewski in Curated, Feature Friday, Featured, Stop Motion

Sometimes when looking for inspiration you’ll come across something so brilliant you can’t take your eyes away from it. This was the case when I ran across Light Drive by . Using stop motion photography, and some ingenuity, he manages to capture something completely amazing that’s reminiscent of the old Sprint light drawing commercials.

I’ve been interested in taking my Light Study photo series and evolving them into motion pieces. I shot a lot of footage for a VJ gig for FITC San Francisco. So I edited together those stop motion sequences, mashed up some audio from the Tron Legacy trailers, and out came Light Drive.

The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.

To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.

The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.

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