Watch: Artist’s Trippy Fractal Homage Video to His Father

Of all the videos I’ve seen online, these two have to be some of the most interesting. The first one is like an incredible kaleidoscope, but possibly a little unnerving. The second, a video portrait of creator Kevin McGloughlin’s father, is quite unique as well.

McGloughlin describes himself as “a self taught artist with a background in painting [who has been] working primarily with moving images for about five years.” I think this comes out in the abstract nature of the portrait of Páraic McGloughlin Sr.

To make the final portrait, McGloughlin first started with the background imagery. He drove around city lights and took a long-exposure time-lapse video of the experience. From sequence, “the individual frames were laid out in 3D space and a virtual camera was flown through them.” Real-time video footage was added and manipulated in order to create the effect of forward motion. After editing all of this together, he had something similar to the first video, directly below.

Using this process, the base video of “Architect” (below) was produced, and rendered as a normal, “flat” video sequence. After this was complete, McGloughlin “incorporated scans of architectural drawings as well as photographs and video footage of the man’s face…using layer blending modes and luma keys.” The clip was then duplicated and layered in 3D space.

The results, as with the first video, are quite amazing. McGloughlin describes it as essentially “a Strata Cut technique [a form of claymation] with digital media.”

McGloughlin used a Canon 7D to capture the video and photographic elements of this video in Sligo, Ireland and Cherbourg, France. Photoshop and After Effects was used to manipulate and edit everything together.

As someone who has tried his hand with video editing and photography (as well as 3D modeling in a very different setting), I can definitely say that this level of skill is nothing short of amazing. I suppose that skill level is something to shoot for, most of us don’t have that level of dedication!