While not exactly filmmaking related, it seems fitting for this site to take a look at the video of this series of photographs called Silent World. Created by photography team Lucie & Simon, they imagine the world without the bustling humans that take up so much space in several sprawling cities.
Here's the video, originally posted at FilmmakerIQ:
You're probably thinking that it took a bit of editing to get all those people and cars out of the photos, but an interesting technique was used: long exposures were taken with serious ND filters and the people and cars in the photos disappear over a long enough period of time. This is something that's been used on nighttime photography for years (I've used it shooting large format), but I've never seen it used in quite this way for daytime photography. The series has received a couple of awards: the Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet Foundation prize and a grant from the CICRP center Marseille.
While this isn't something you'll be able to do in video, as FilmmakerIQ points out, these would be fantastic for visual effects plates. If you needed to remove people or cars from a particular scene, it becomes extremely simple if you've got plates that are empty except for basic structures. Lucie & Simon have some amazing photography collections and installations, so you should go to their website to check out more of them.
Link: Lucie & Simon - Website
[via FilmmakerIQ]
Here are a couple of the photos below:
