American Machines

AMERICAN MACHINES

An experiment by Ryan Booth & Olaf Blomerus.

" One day I want to make a coffee table book
like Robert Frank's The Americans
... but with robots."

- Olaf Blomerus

Within minutes of that fateful tweet, Ryan Booth messaged me and asked "How do we make this happen?". Both of us (equally excited) planned out the experiment. A quick crash course on the process at his end (capturing HDRs for example) and he was out on the streets of NY with his XPan and a roll of Tri-X. What would follow would be months of those captures sitting untouched on my hard drive until one day I found a moment to test the pipeline out. I shared that image with Ryan and we both knew right away: we were on to something special.

And that we needed to finish it.

The Process

As a visual effects artist you often take for granted all the little things that make up the bigger picture. Compositing a rendered image into a photographed plate is never as simple as matching the lighting alone. You're looking at grain (or noise), abberation, softness, bokeh, abberations, flares, fringing, reflections, shadows and more. You find yourself diving deeper into an image than was almost certainly ever intended. Sifting through pixels at 400%.

Robert Frank's The Americans

CREDITS

PHOTOGRAPHER - RYAN BOOTH
VISUAL EFFECTS - OLAF BLOMERUS
3D MODEL - UNITY TECHNOLOGIES