The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a reasonably good biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch doing his reliably impressive legible acting. You don’t see someone acting, you read his interior state.
Near the end there’s an amazing video sequence of lines that blur in and out of geometric shapes and recognizable cats. I took some photos of it:
It’s by Steve Pavlovsky, on Instagram as LiquidLightLab . He describes:
helping create a visionary, trip-like sequence and video feedback / glitch textures to be used throughout the film
He’s credited as Analog Video Artist on the film. I didn’t realize the “feedback / glitch textures” were analog video, I thought they were more CGI. An article about its computer graphics highlights some of the mixing.
Interactive linked credits NOW!
It was ridiculously hard to find out who made this sequence. The credits for movies just go on and on; is this great work credited under VFX, special effects, art direction, or something else? Ever since DVDs, I have wanted interactive credits in which you can click on any name and the movie will jump to the best scene of that actor, or the scene with the best work by that person, be it set design, computer animation, costume, makeup, sound effect, or in this case the amazing video sequence. Amazon Prime Video’s excellent X-ray feature tells you who’s in a scene and often the music playing, but it’s no solution for the endless useless non-interactive credits.
Geek notes: making that animation
Because TV’s don’t have a [Print Screen] button, I stood in front of the TV and took pictures of the movie. Elsewhere I wrote up the gory details of cropping and straightening the TV screen in 10 photos, then turning them into the animated GIF above.
