Paint with light.

At some point we’ve all tried the paint with light thing with a long exposure and a flash light. That technique in itself produces some amazing photography, as evidenced by people like Dave Black. To change things around you can also get in front of the camera and use the flashlight to “draw” an image.

However, when you combine that approach with video a whole new world of imagery is opened up, which is exactly what Sprint has done in one of their recent commercials. They shot still-camera time exposures of themselves drawing with flashlights, and animate the still frames to absolutely beautiful effect. The complexity of creating something like this boggles my mind. Conveniently, we also have a behind-the-scenes clip that explains a little about the process of how something as elaborate as this was created. When you get done watching these videos, take a minute to visit the Sprint site mentioned at the end of the commercial, which is pretty interesting itself.

The behind-the-scenes version:

There is a group of performance artists in Japan who have been producing work similar to this for years. They call themselves PIKAPIKA, and you can see one of their pieces here.