2 · Pulse: slowing down
Oct 30. Thirteen takes become one shot when you decide when each one shows. That decision is a rhythm.
This field moves so fast that its forms die before anyone understands them. Tools from four years ago no longer exist. A pulse is the opposite of that speed: something that comes back, and so can be studied. Today we slow down on purpose: thirteen takes of one shot, six seconds, looked at frame by frame.
A short history of making images move
| 2021–22 | Disco Diffusion, a Colab notebook. Its v5 (Feb 2022) added 3D animation: every image is born from the one before it, pushed by a camera you write. |
| 2022 | Deforum takes that to Stable Diffusion. A new way of animating: not frames drawn, not footage shot, but an image that feeds on itself while numbers move the camera. Hybrid video mixes a real video into every frame. |
| 2022 | WarpFusion, by Sxela (Alex Spirin): diffusion painted over real video, each frame warped along the movement of the one before, so the style sticks to the motion. |
| 2022–23 | Parseq, by Robin Fernandes (rewbs): every value of a Deforum animation (zoom, rotation, strength, seed, the prompt) becomes a curve in time, written in frames, seconds or beats, locked to the music. |
| 2023 | AnimateDiff: a motion module trained on video, plugged into Stable Diffusion. The model itself learns to move. |
| now | Video models (LTX, Wan, Sora...) replaced all of it in about two years. |
Watch: Parseq tutorial, part 3: audio sync by rewbs. The explanation and the image are on screen at the same time: the teaching is the work. (The whole series.)
What survives the tools: time is a variable you write (frame, second, beat) · the music is a curve · the image follows; it does not illustrate.
The cut in time
Artists who worked the single frame, by hand, long before any of this.
Conrad and Sharits flash light and dark very fast. If flashing light affects you, skip them.
| Norman McLaren Synchromy (1971) |
The picture is the soundtrack: the same cards are photographed onto the sound strip and the image. Watch at the National Film Board of Canada (7 min, free) |
| Tony Conrad The Flicker (1966) |
Only black frames and white frames, in changing rhythms. The frame as the unit of composition. Watch on UbuWeb (30 min) |
| Paul Sharits Word Movie (1966) Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) |
Words and colours a frame at a time. (His N:O:T:H:I:N:G, 1968, is not online.) Word Movie on UbuWeb · Epileptic Seizure Comparison on UbuWeb |
| Ken Jacobs Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) |
A 1905 film re-filmed, slowed, stopped, re-framed, for nearly two hours. The full film is not online. An 8-minute excerpt (Austin Film Society) · A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), his return to the same film, on UbuWeb |
| Martin Arnold pièce touchée (1989) |
Eighteen seconds of a 1954 film stretched to about sixteen minutes, frame by frame, forward and back. Watch on YouTube (16 min, uploaded by a viewer, not the distributor) |
They had one take and an optical printer. We have thirteen takes of the same moment, and a script.
Arc and pulse
A Fibonacci pattern (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...) never repeats: it reads as a gesture, a startle that settles. A tresillo (x..x..x., 3-3-2) repeats: it reads as a groove.
Godfried Toussaint, The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms (2005, PDF): spread k hits as evenly as possible over n steps with Euclid's algorithm, and out come rhythms from all over the world. 3 in 8 is the tresillo, 5 in 8 the cinquillo, 7 in 12 a West African bell pattern.
The dose
Cut every shot and the cut stops reading as a decision; it reads as a filter. Nothing rests, so nothing lands. Establish the shot, make it alive, then break it a little.
In the lab
- Update the tools (Install, step 2).
- Queue 13 takes of one shot from your page: workflow 03, type 13 next to Run, press once.
- Move the 13 takes into a folder of their own. Copy
RUN.batandscripts\pulse_cut.pyinto it. - Your page's rhythm. Read one line of your page aloud. Write it as
xwhere it leans and.where it rests. Put that string inRHYTHMat the top of pulse_cut.py. Save. Double-click RUN.
Example, a line of Whitman (1855): I celebrate myself, and sing myself →.x.x.x.x.x - Try the dose:
WINDOW = (2, 4)cuts only between seconds 2 and 4. - A script of your own. With a chat, from an idea of yours: how. RUN.
Bring next time
One script that is yours, what it made, and a name for it. The name does not have to exist yet.