jasper said he'd like to see a gif of my Infinite Regression entry for the Left Hand contest, so here's two of them, one in each direction
(i should point out each one is over 8Mb so they'll take a while to download)
http://users.tpg.com.au/edtc/PSC/infinite-regression.gif
http://users.tpg.com.au/edtc/PSC/infinite-regression-rev.gif
you may notice there's some weirdness going on at the edges of these gifs. i'm not sure what it is. i tried cropping the image but the weirdness remained
in case you ever want to do something similar, here's some exciting maths you can use
each of these gifs has 22 frames. i came to this figure cos successive photos are offset by about 99 degrees. 99 / 22 = 4.5 so each frame had to be rotated by 4.5 degrees
the size transform was not so straightforward. you can't just divide the size difference by 22, as you would end up with a jerky zoom effect. instead you have to enlarge the image by the same
proportion each frame. the largest photo in the image was 705 pixels wide. the image (ie the size to zoom the photo up to) was 1280 pixels wide. to calculate the correct frame-by-frame increase in size, it's:
(1280 / 705) to the power of (1 / 22). so you have to increase the size by 2.75% per frame to get the required increase of 81.6% over 22 frames
at first i thought it'd be nice and easy just to do one transform and then hit ctrl shift T to repeat it another 20 times, but of course with each transform you get a drop in quality and by the final frame it looks like pants. so i did each frame individually, using the calculator to work out the enlargement. it was great fun
there was a very obvious change in quality though right at the centre of the rotation when it reached the end of the loop. i lessened this by grabbing the centre section of the initial frame and transforming it into position on the final 4 or 5 frames, shrinking it as i went back from frame 22. this meant that the centre part of the last few frames is the result of a detailed image being shrunk, rather than a less-detailed image being enlarged. i phased in this higher-detailed layer using increasing opacity so it wouldn't look too bad
Holy my brain hurts now Batman!
