Great video collage shows what 24 hours of news looks like

A lot can happen in a day. And when a lot of things happen, you get a lot of pictures, as shown to rather mind-blowing effect in Parag K. Mital and Evan Boehm’s video collage Untitled No. 1 – a piece composed entirely of images collected from the previous 24 hour news cycle. The day in question was 10 December last year, though the pair is now releasing the video with some superbly searing, brutal new music by Rob Hart.

“We decided to make a film about the ‘right now’; about the moment the film was released,” Evan explains. “News imagery provided both the animation textures and the building block imagery for the final project. Over a 24 hour marathon we watched the major news stories from across the globe and tried to source creative commons images based on those stories. You can see that the major news stories of the day (Ukrainian uprising, XBox One launch and Mandela’s funeral) dominate the imagery.”

These stories are abstracted almost beyond recognition thanks to a bespoke technique using methods created by Parag that resynthesise imagery from other existing imagery, and making it more “painterly.” To do this, Evan created an underlying animation to be rebuilt by the synthesis software, and worked with Parag on a series of experiments and the writing of new software features. It certainly wasn’t an easy process from the sounds of it, but one that’s more than worth it, managing to make something beautiful, temporal and colourful from the often grey-tinged world of news.