Flag Vectorization Timelapse

Hobbits, in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, give gifts to others on their birthdays, so have a little something from me today! Well, alright, my birthday was Tuesday so it's a bit late, but that's just how it worked out.

After last's week's experiment with narrating a flag vectorization, I decided to try something different and record a timelapse version of another flag sans narration. I vectorized another flag (for the Navajo this time), then sped up the footage by five times (and added some music and annotations).

Making this video turned out to be surprisingly confidence-building. I've watched timelapses of people making art on YouTube and found them rather intimidating, because I wasn't really noticing all the times they rubbed out something they'd just drawn, or went back and tweaked something. I just saw this linear experience where the artist starts with a blank canvas (or whatever) and proceeds to crank out some amazing piece of artwork like an assembly line. When I recorded this video and watched it I realized I'd been missing all those little experimental excursions, all the stops and false starts that make up the finished product because I could see them in my own work, and that allowed me to see them in other peoples' work as well, and that's a surprisingly powerful observation. I've pointed out a few places I missed something or had to go back and fix something in the video, but there are a few more I didn't point out.

Also, apparently the recording didn't pick up the options dialog I was clicking on near the very end of the video, so when it says I'm “fixing” things and apparently randomly waggling the mouse about I'm actually reverting an option I'd changed right before recording out of curiosity. Though watching this video, I feel like I do do a lot of random-mouse-waggling—I guess it's just the computer equivalent of talking with my hands.

Anyway, like with the last video, please let me know how you liked this one! I like this idea a bit more, as it has several advantages: shorter (and thus smaller) videos, and not needing to talk, think, and vectorize at the same time (which turned out to be more challenging than I'd expected!). And I personally prefer the dynamism and action in timelapses, so there may be more of these in the future. We'll see! A hui hou!