Motion Structures is a new project by Everardo Reyes (Associate professor, Information and Communication, University of Paris 13, and an active member of our lab). Using ImageJ (the same open source science software for image analysis we use in the lab to develop custom plugins ImagePlot, ImageMontage, and ImageSlice), Everardo developed a new plugin. The tool takes any image sequence (film, video, animation) and translates into a 3D shape. The shape encodes spatial and temporal transformation in a moving image sequence.
The shape can be represented as perspectival images or printed in 3D. Here is one example from Motion Structures - a 5 second segment from Games of Thrones, visualized as a 3D shape:
Motion Structures is not the first project to extract the structure of a moving image sequence and represent in a new way. The early 20th century examples include work by Étienne-Jules Marey and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (see my article Visualizing Vertov for the discussion).
More recently, we saw Ghostcatching by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar (1999), The Invisible Shapes of Things Past by Art+Com (1995-2007), Cinemetrics by Frederic Brodbeck (2011), and a number of other projects which all use computers.
Everardo adds his own unique take on how moving images can be converted into new visual representations; and since he made available his software tool, everybody can apply to other films, videos, TV shows, recordings of dance and other performances, and all other genres of moving images.