Psalm 4:3
not judging your screen time at all
O ye sons of men, how long will you be dull of heart? why do you love vanity, and seek after lying? (Psalm 4:3 DR)
One of my favorite techniques in a design is to take a pre-existing image or asset and re-work it in an interesting way. Sometimes it’s using the source as a bump map, a depth map, a color map; basically all kinds of maps.
Other times it’s re-composing the elements that comprise the image differently to do something more unexpected, where things that originally fit together don’t do so any more, except insofar as they form a new composition.
Pixel sorting is great for this sort of thing since it doesn’t add any new information to the composition per se, but rather re-sorts it according to the algorithm you utilize.
Plus it just looks pretty cool.
For this verse I found this great image at Unsplash that I think perfectly captured the essence of the verse. I imagine the Psalmist is using vanity in a different context than how moderns conceive of vanity, but I think there’s still a relevant conjunction. Vanity in our sense certainly makes one dull of heart, in that it deafens one to God’s voice and will. I am reminded of St. Augustine’s famous prayer in his Confessions: “Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness.” (Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Ch. XXVII)
It is perhaps no accident that immediately preceding this he laments how he was kept from God by the very beautiful and lovely things of creation that God had made. When we turn ourselves towards the created things— especially towards ourselves— we close ourselves to the source of those very things.
At any rate, I thought the image would be an excellent base, and then I simply had to mask out the area of a duplicated image and then applied some pixel sorting to that masked image. I animated the pixel sorting to flow from face to device. I seem to remember what is probably an urban legend about people at the dawn of photography thinking that photos of themselves captured or sucked out their souls.
Turns out they were totally right.
I also added some fake camera shake (just an adjustment layer with a Transform effect applied and some wiggle hold expressions on the position and rotation) to give it a bit of an unsettled feeling, some color correction, and that’s it.
Pretty simple, but I liked how it turned out.
Enjoy.
O ye sons of men, how long will you be dull of heart? why do you love vanity,
and seek after lying? (Psalm 4:3 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: