# "2001: A Space Odyssey" retold using Processing

**URL:** https://discourse.processing.org/t/2001-a-space-odyssey-retold-using-processing/13864
**Category:** Gallery
**Created:** [September 7, 2019, 11:54am UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/2001-a-space-odyssey-retold-using-processing/13864 "2019-09-07T11:54:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
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### Author: ![LoO93](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a183cd/32.png) [@LoO93](https://discourse.processing.org/u/LoO93)
#### Post date: [September 7, 2019, 11:54am UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/2001-a-space-odyssey-retold-using-processing/13864/1 "2019-09-07T11:54:14Z")

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Hello World and dear Processing community!

Here’s my first Processing project I’d like to share with you guys.

**The idea:**

- feed the program with a database of images
- calculate the average color of each image in the database
- feed the program with an input image
- rasterize/split the input image into several equal cells
- calculate the average color of each cell
- replace each cell with the next best color match from the database

I was looking for something like this:

![3f8fd3fd728eb2999fea62f4dac83271](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/uploads/processingfoundation1/original/2X/c/c32e1f55db52e040371a80d988b3ce76754a70d4.jpeg)  
That first milestone got reached pretty quick so I decided to explore some variations of it…

**Let’s make a video:**  
I first wanted to try how this would look on an sequence of images.

- I first needed a way greater database of images since we would now have around 25fps to replace
- I searched the internet for a free database of images that would let me download these via an API
- I stumbled upon [pixabay.com](http://pixabay.com) which would let me download a reasonable amount of images simply by using a token in a http-request
- So now my little .pde would first download a new database of images on each run

I was pretty excited to see the first result, but unfortunately it turned out to look like a puree of wrong pixels rather than an interesting and pleasing mosaic look that I was looking for… But let’s not loose hope yet!

(I regrettably can’t show you the result since I deleted it (_#idiot_) and my .pde won’t run anymore since my access token at pixabay is expired… But trust me, you didn’t miss anything!)

**An infinite zoom ?**  
Alright so what could be the next variation of our little mosaic programm since videos wouldn’t do it.

Well I have an image based on images, why not create something close to an infinite zoom ?  
If we scale up one of the cells to fullscreen and so on, we could maybe get something interesting.

And so it was!

**But we need a story!**  
Since I am also into filmmaking, I wanted a bit more than just an so called “effect”. Maybe we could use it to narrate something or even to _retell_ something.

So I needed a story, and a story that people would know.

**A Space Odyssey:**  
My professor at uni came up with the idea of Kubrick’s classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” and I decided to give it a shot with an infinite **de** zoom!

- To get the database I exported every second of the movie to a an .jpg into a ‘frames’ folder
- Now I had around 9000 images
- I manually picked stills from the movie and exported these into a ‘keyframes’ folder
- The .pde would now first go trough the ‘frames’ folder and only save the images which differ enough from each other into an array list
- It’d reduce the amount from 9000 to around 400 images to play with
- Afterwards it’ll process the **n+1** still to a mosaic and place the **n** still into its center cell
- The **n+1** mosaic will then be drawn so that the centered **n** still is fullscreen
- It’ll then scale the **n+1** mosaic down on every draw call until the **n+1** still goes fullscreen
- And so on until the last still.

**See for yourself:**

[http://youtu.be/eeUTmjLwOJU](http://youtu.be/eeUTmjLwOJU)

It still got some issues like the moire that comes from the downscaling algorithm in Processing.

The next step would be to check if a picked image from the database was already picked to get more variance in the final mosaics.

I hope your guys enjoyed it and I’d be glad to get some feedback!

**Credits**  
I really would like to thank my good friend Ole who really made this possible since he is the brain behind all the math here.

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