Shakeyface: Tissue vs Torsion

Ah, it's the end of September, which is the best part of September, because it's the first part of Fantastic Fest, which is the best part of the whole darn year. Fantastic Fest is a magical far away place with hobbits, Irish bare knuckle boxers, and movie theaters that kick out texters and give you beer (great combo!)! And every year for Fantastic Fest there is the Fantastic Fest ID Badge, which is, as you might imagine, the best damn ID badge ever.

For the last forever, Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse has used a method known as Shakeyface for badge pictures. Shakeyface sounds exactly as you might imagine it sound. It involves shaking your head wildly back and forth, allowing the kind mistress Torsion to whip your softy gushy human face parts(and incidentally, intracranial parts) into a presentable cream of you. Humans are the only animals known to have used shakeyface succesfully, and it is truly what seperates us from apes and sabu's.

You wear this example of evolutionary superiority around your neck proudly, like a peacock, who got the idea to wear his tailfeathers around his neck and get women to look him in the eyes for once and stop treating him like some piece of colorful eye candy. It's a great equalizer. Now everyone can look equally ridiculous ALL of the time (as if we didn't do that already).

So I couldn't help but geeking out on shakeyfaceing a little bit.

The standard set up for shakeyface is decent camera, decent lighting, feet shoulder length apart, and try to twist your vertebrate right off. Luckily enough, at the coworking space where I work, one of our resident photographers was kind enough to help me out. With a professional grade camera set to kill a high shutter speed, they turn out something like this.

The general punched-by-the-wind look.

This flesh smearing action is desired, and will absolutely give you a massive headache for the next 2 minutes or so.

I was pretty excited with the way these turned out, but I couldn't resist trying it myself, and break out the ol' Incredible 2.

The fine Incredible 2 has a forward facing camera which makes such things like taking ones own shakeyface pictures possible (The future is here!), and because of the design of camera phones these days has nifty little feature. In order to minimize size and maximize photo quality, the camera in your phone uses a rolling shutter. Traditionally, cameras use a round aperture that opens and closes to expose the film and digital cameras use a variation on that. In a rolling shutter, a small bar passes across the lense, but never completely covers it up. You actually end up with the pixels of the photo being captured at slightly different times moving from left to right. Normally, this doesn't make a difference, but when dealing with and object moving faster than the rolling shutter was timed for produces neat results, like with my face.

Better yet, you can do it with really high speed objects like plane props. In this video captured from a Nokia, you can see this plane is shedding it's propeller blades.

Hopefully, this is the first of a couple rambling diatribes about something I find interesting. Try it out, see what looks cool. Point your iPhone/Droid/Nokia(HAH, not really) at the nearest mass of speeding cars and observe the wonders of modern technology. 10 000 years of civilization. We should be proud.