flick it

January 21, 2006 3:13 PM

Flickeur, infinite random movies from Flickr images
posted by onkelchrispy (46 comments total)

That's amazing. I got a really creepy image of an eye in the mix the first time I loaded it.
posted by phrontist at 3:29 PM on January 21, 2006

How is Flickeur pronounced like Voyeur?
posted by thirteenkiller at 3:33 PM on January 21, 2006

Oh, Jesus. I've spent hours manually animating exactly that sort of thing for projection behind local bands. Now I know what it feels like to be replaced by a machine. Damn you, machines!
posted by brundlefly at 3:35 PM on January 21, 2006

neato
posted by fungible at 3:39 PM on January 21, 2006

That's, like, trippy yo.
posted by jmd82 at 3:41 PM on January 21, 2006

The eur in Flickeur sounds like the eur in Voyeur?
posted by Orange Goblin at 3:43 PM on January 21, 2006

That's pretty great. Is there a way to turn off the sound though?
posted by muckster at 3:44 PM on January 21, 2006

It'd be really interesting if the audio was randomly selected as well. I have no idea what the source would be, though.
posted by brundlefly at 3:45 PM on January 21, 2006

Hmm - close ups of somebody's photo of a sheep.
posted by jamesonandwater at 3:46 PM on January 21, 2006

I got a naked woman artfully concealing her goodies at first, interspersed with a red slash of blood spatter across the screen. Now I'm getting a slightly-toothless old dude in a T-shirt and what looks like one of those World's Fair spaceships from Men in Black. The discordant music and jumping around/changing colors/fading in and out between the images is rather nightmarish.

I mean that in a nifty way.
posted by Gator at 3:47 PM on January 21, 2006

How does it *work*?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 3:58 PM on January 21, 2006

The scene opens up upon a plate of sushi. Suddenly we are taken to a laundromat. It is about noon. Suddenly, grass begins growing at us from the left side, staining the sushi, the laundromat, and us. It starts to rain and construction workers put out warning signs to that effect.

We're taken to a cabin where a nun and a businessman man wait anxiously. Between them is a briefcase. Their fingers grasp something tightly in close-up as the sky grows cloudy once more. Then we go to paris.
posted by The White Hat at 4:00 PM on January 21, 2006

I got a pretty creepy "Drowning Danger" sign mixed in with a little kid praying, which segued into a picture of a pond surrounded by leafless trees and a picture of a family.

Creepy. And cool.
posted by WolfDaddy at 4:03 PM on January 21, 2006

Very cool. I felt that the pictures kept repeating themselves too much, though. It would flicker back and forth between the same two pictures for quite a while before the next picture would come in.

Question - is this an app which loads unique pictures onto each viewer's browser? Or is it an app that is streaming the same movie to all browsers? That is to say, if we watch at the same time, are we seeing the same thing?
posted by PigAlien at 4:15 PM on January 21, 2006

The first picture I got was a closeup of an enormously fat and hairy belly moving around the screen. That's not cool, just creepy.
posted by kumonoi at 4:18 PM on January 21, 2006

I'm getting bare foes, trees in sillouette, a beach... NYCs new profile... I like the music, but the tick-tack typing sound has to go.

Chonks on the processor, though.
posted by squirrel at 4:48 PM on January 21, 2006

I wonder if there's a way to capture a high-quality stream of it...
posted by squirrel at 4:49 PM on January 21, 2006

It would have to suck it straight from the server, though, without displaying it, because to decode the stream and encode it into some video codec at the same time would torch the processor of anything but a top-end station.
posted by squirrel at 4:51 PM on January 21, 2006

I sense this not a random selection of all flickr photos. I reloaded it five times: the first time it was a dirty, muddy pile of leaves, the second time it was a close up of an insect head, the third time it was a demented old woman with a big gun near her grotesque camel toe, the fourth time a creepy twisted tree, the fifth time a dour ornamented Indian man and barbed wire. The only "non-creepy" pictures I got (and they weren't heavily repeated) were some hair dye and an ugly dog in a darth vader costume (who was still fittingly ugly). I don't know what people generally post at flickr, but this isn't even close to the assemblages I see at the latest 40 Live Journal image site.
posted by dgaicun at 4:56 PM on January 21, 2006

dgaicun, I was thinking that it would totally change the mood if the music were bright and cheerful. The movie I watched had a girl in a clown nose, a girl in a bikini reading a book, some guy whose face was partially obscured, a bunch of flowers and trees, and what looked like an artist's rendering of the Statue of Liberty.

With the creepy music, it was unsettling... with shiny happy music, it would have been a lot of fun to watch.

I think it IS a random collection, and you're assigning negative weights to the pictures because of the sound.
posted by Malor at 5:12 PM on January 21, 2006

I considered that, but if it is truly random I suspect a better explanation is a coincidental bunch of images, because they were definitely all skewed in that direction with or without all the built in mood.
posted by dgaicun at 5:20 PM on January 21, 2006

OK, one more try flickeur: antique doll and old sienna photograph of rabbis.

One more try livejournal images: superman and nerdy emo girl giving dorky thumbs up.
posted by dgaicun at 5:25 PM on January 21, 2006

One simple filter to get decent random images is to only take photos that were "favorited" by at least one person.

As seen here.
posted by vacapinta at 5:32 PM on January 21, 2006

Ok, thanks; I got a dead dog and a graveyard statue with yours, so flickr is definitely loaded with darker art photography.
posted by dgaicun at 5:35 PM on January 21, 2006

I still prefer this non-randomized Flickr music video.
posted by maudlin at 5:40 PM on January 21, 2006

This is good stuff fer sure. Thanks.
posted by dontoine at 6:05 PM on January 21, 2006

maudlin: I still prefer this non-randomized Flickr music video.

I'm astonished that they managed to find an image for "female klingon's drunk boyfriend".
posted by blag at 6:09 PM on January 21, 2006

Ah, wait. I get it.

doh
posted by blag at 6:11 PM on January 21, 2006

The typing sound really does cut into it, but I had a beautiful moment where a time and a date were listed, with "Osaka at night" and a homeless man playing a cello staring at me. It was a moment of synergy that I couldn't have thought up.

This reminds me seriously of Brian Eno's projections, and that's a high compliment.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 6:32 PM on January 21, 2006

I definitely approve of this website.
posted by xmutex at 6:37 PM on January 21, 2006

metafilteur: its pronounced like voyeur
posted by isopraxis at 7:01 PM on January 21, 2006

very cool.
posted by londontube at 7:19 PM on January 21, 2006

All I got was pictures of brick walls. Depressing.
posted by insomnus at 7:21 PM on January 21, 2006

This was reasonably diverting, but I'll be really impressed when the cool-looking random movies are in full motion.
posted by grobstein at 8:55 PM on January 21, 2006

How to start it?
posted by lometogo at 9:09 PM on January 21, 2006

but I'll be really impressed when the cool-looking random movies are in full motion.

Then they need to start scraping Google Videos too. Any tips on how to turn this into a screensaver / some sort of full-screen display?
posted by Jimbob at 10:46 PM on January 21, 2006

What I found most startling was the notification that I needed to intall Adobe Flash 8. Still getting used to that new paradigm...
posted by tritisan at 11:04 PM on January 21, 2006

Way cool. Looks like I picked the wrong decade to stop dropping acid.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:42 AM on January 22, 2006

Creepy is right. First load was some shots of a European city interspersed with a photograph of a foot(?) and an unsettling photo of a young (Cambodian?) girl. Felt like I was watching that Johnny Depp movie based on that Arturo Perez-Reverte novel.

Second load was just two shots: nighttime distant shot of a city interspersed with bright rooftop in the Greek islands. Okay, so this one felt more like an ad for a cruise line.

Third load was red-tinged closeup of a man's head lying against a floor, glistening with what looked like water until I realized he had a *bullethole in his jaw.* WTF? What the heck is on Flickr? Snuff? Suicide shots? *Gulp* Murder shots?

I spent 20 minutes trying to track down that photo but my only clue was that ticky-tacky typing on the bottom, which read: "Callao." Who is this guy? I was, like, Callao what? Callao where? Peru, Buenos Aires, Madrid? What the heck *happened* in Callao?

I had to stop because I felt like I was no longer watching the movie but was in the beginning of one. The scary irony was that the dead head was interspersed with a close-up of typewriter keys...
posted by enakaja at 3:23 PM on January 22, 2006

Is it a problem that on my monitor some chick just crawled out of a well?
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:56 PM on January 22, 2006

Whoops, phone just rang.
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:57 PM on January 22, 2006

Whatever you do, enakaja, don't try to find your picture with the key word 'dead' or you just might run across something you really regret running across, like say - sigh - photos of a Vietnamese dog meat shop.
posted by dgaicun at 4:12 PM on January 22, 2006

I wouldn't take the gunshot too seriously, enakaja. Might not be a real image of violence. Not only can you find a picture of me with a gunshot wound in my forehead on flickt, you can also find an image of me with my chin torn off.

Of course, I am an Astro Zombie.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:53 PM on January 22, 2006

Hmm, well, okay. But I'm still uneasy. You look like you're dressing for Halloween. This dead guy looked very real. Your light is the light of someplace sociable; this guy looked like he had died someplace a lot less inviting.
posted by enakaja at 5:22 PM on January 22, 2006

Not only can you find a picture of me with a gunshot wound in my forehead on flickt

Oh, that's you? Funny, that's the only bullethole picture I ran across while trying to search for enakaja's image.

Eventually, it turns out, I lost focus of my goal and just started browsing the wonders of Flickr. I think this is supposed to be some sort of very obscure pornography, but I think it looks cool regardless. (SFW)
posted by dgaicun at 5:49 PM on January 22, 2006

very cool,

however, i'm torn between attaching significance/emotion/meaning to these 'films'

and reevaluating all the similar, documentarian, ken burns-ish stuff i've previously seen and also imbued with significance/emotion/meaning

definately worth the bandwidth
posted by [this is good] at 8:58 PM on January 22, 2006