Laurent Briet is a friend and very talented director repped by Little Minx at RSA. In another life Laurent was a rockstar CG artist at Method, which is where I originally made his acquaintance. I am proud to have been involved in one of his early directing efforts, a music video for the Mellowdrone track "Fashionably Uninvited".

My role in the piece was to create the wall of pictures behind Jon. I ended up splitting the pictures into five layers. Within a layer none of the photographs overlapped, which simplified the algorithm for generating the textures. I wrote a MEL command to create the geometry, and it was responsible for determining the random distribution of the photographs' positions. I then wrote a standalone application which took as input a database of photographs, the positions of the photos, and video Laurent shot - primarily images of waves crashing onto the Santa Monica beach. The program generated huge animated 3K textures which were abstracted representations of the waves composed of the photographs. The algorithm did its best to minimize photographic repetition within a region of the wall of photos, and some experimentally determined heuristics prevented the photos from changing so rapidly as to be distracting. I also cheated a bit by tinting the photos about 20% in order to force them to match their target color more accurately. Laurent handled all of the integration himself, including camera tracking and compositing.

The image above shows the untextured geometry for the photographs, with a single layer of the five we used highlighted in green.

This video won a 2004 MVPA Award for Best Video Produced for Under $25,000.