THIS IS FOUR VIDEOS, NOT ONE VIDEO.

This is a set of 4 different videos showing variations of an idea. It is not a single splitscreen video. It is not intended that the whole thing together be aesthetically pleasing. It is just a technique to show you all four variations at once, to save you time and to let you compare them.

So, like, if I were pitching this to a band, I wouldn't be saying "this is the video", I'd be saying "here are 4 possibilities, pick the one you like the best".

OK, you got that? Can I stop going on about it? Great.

What are the four videos?

"WTF" is a song from OK Go's 2010 album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. It has an official music video, and released raw greenscreen footage inviting video "remixes".

In these videos you'll find a nerdy study of the original OK Go video, taking a mathematical angle on the "trick" done in the original video to create some variations of it.

TOP LEFT: my reconstruction of the original OK Go video (in the original the effect doesn't start right away at the beginning, but otherwise it's fairly close)

TOP RIGHT: the same effect, but showing trails "from the future" instead of the past. mostly you see the same effects, just reversed in time. my favorite part is probably when they're throwing the balls, it's neat to see the trajectory before the throw.

BOTTOM LEFT: given the "trails of the past" on the top left, and the "trails of the future" on the top right, the next obvious step was to combine them in an interesting way. in this video, it fades from the past trails to the future trails, but the time of the fade depends on how far apart the trails are created. oh, just watch it.

BOTTOM RIGHT: to try to help make clearer what's going on in the bottom left, this one does sort of the same thing, but only for the "trails into the future"; the trails here fade in in exactly the same way they fade in on the bottom left, but there's no "trails from the past" so it's easier to see what's going on.

All of these videos are created using custom software I wrote explicitly for processing the WTF video. This includes my own green-screen processing, which is why the green-screen removal isn't very good in places.

Next up will be a set of variations approaching the WTF effect as the equivalent of an audio delay (i.e. echo) effect, again using only the WTF greenscreen remix video and some algorithms, without any additional source of imagery.

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