Home > Light-Painted Bach

Light-Painted Bach

My friends and I just finished an elaborate video using a technique called light painting. In ultra-slow motion (4 hours!), Maia Hamann played Bach’s Fugue No. 2 in C minor, while I took long exposure pictures of our friends Oanh, Peter, and Pat “painting” with colored LED lights. I took one photo for every 16th note in the piece, then combined them all stop-motion style.

We picked a Bach fugue for a couple of reasons. One, there would never be more than three notes at a time, so we wouldn’t need more lights. Two, Bach’s music usually has a ton of 16th notes in a row. Three, I had a feeling there would be a free-to-download MIDI version of the song. The one I found (at piano-midi.de) even had the three voices split into separate MIDI tracks. So it was easy to add three distinct synth sounds representing each light.

Light Painters from right to left: Maia Hamann, Oanh Vu, Peter Kirschmann, Pat Smith, and me.

We made this video for a MNKino video challenge based on the theme “trails,” and it premiered this weekend at the Northern Spark all-night festival in Minneapolis.

3 comments

  1. that was indeed awesome charlie and the gang. i listened to your original podcast every day while cutting down trees during a trip to australia, and now i’m getting into the production lessons one. awesome, thanks for sharing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *