Filmmaker Anthony Cerniello decided to work on an odd side project. When attending his friend Danielle’s large family reunion, he and a photographer photographed all of her youngest cousins up to her oldest relatives. With the help of 3 animators, they processed all of the photographs via computer software (After Effects, 3D Studio Max, and Nuke) after selecting family members who shared similar bone morphologies. The result is an impressive video that encapsulates the decades-process of aging down to about 5 minutes. Somewhat magical and bit eerie. I challenge you to watch it without being distracted.
Cerniello notes:
I wanted to make a person, I felt like I could tell a story with that, but it ended up feeling slightly robotic, like an android. I’m OK with that. Things never come out the exact way you plan them, but that’s the fun. The score I imagined would tell this woman’s life, with events speeding by as she aged, but in the end I thought it would be more interesting to go with an abstract piece of sound, and my friend Mark Reveley really came through because I love how it sounds.
Although the video was published in 2013, it still remains a favorite video of mine regarding aging.
The visualization team at the American Museum of Natural History created a video that compresses 200,000 years of the Earth’s human population down to 6 minutes.
The video is a visual teaching tool that allows one to grasp big picture concepts in a small, digestible format. It depicts the human population evolving from 1 million to 1 billion within a span of 200,000 years, and from 1 billion to 7 billion within the short period of 200 years.
As of 2017, the Earth’s human population is currently at 7.5 billion with the United Nations projecting world population to rise at 10 billion by the year 2056.
I wanted to make a person, I felt like I could tell a story with that, but it ended up feeling slightly robotic, like an android. I’m OK with that. Things never come out the exact way you plan them, but that’s the fun. The score I imagined would tell this woman’s life, with events speeding by as she aged, but in the end I thought it would be more interesting to go with an abstract piece of sound, and my friend Mark Reveley really came through because I love how it sounds.
