Touch of Evil

(click for a larger image) Touch of Evil 2010 Digital Print 200cm 64cm Algorithmic auto-collage of the still images of opening scene of Touch of Evil - a single take where the camera spans the space of unfolding story. Long Take + Auto Panorama Long take is a continuous shot in a film that lasts longer than the conventional editing pace. Long take is used to show long dialogues continuously, and to show wide and complex space using camera movement and direction, which often lasts for minutes. Panorama shows a wide view, and often several spatially continuous images are joined together to compose a wider view impossible to capture in one still shot. Since a long take in a film is made up of continuous still images, these still images, potentially, can be used to create a panoramic image. The attached three works use still frames from long takes of three separate eponymous films, which have used the long take technique famously to drive the films forward and show the space, where the stories happen. Unlike, conventional continuous images used to create panorama images, the camera moves, changes focus, switch direction, zoom in and out for the long takes in film. For this reason, when an automatic panorama compositing program analyses and composites continuous images from long takes, it tries to "correct" the distortions in the set of image sequence based on the historical assumption of panorama-making - continuous image plane as if the whole view has been shot from a single viewpoint. The works here, the output of the panorama stitching program from unexpected input, exemplify the dynamic nature of space in cinematography.