I've been thinking about facial expressions while editing people that are about to smile, laugh or look surprised — every single frame says something, a sequence of frames or photographs, between two different types of emotions are interesting. It intrigues me how much emotion a face can communicate and I thought it could be fun to shoot some friends and slow down the footage with a plug-in called Twixtor; that blends frames, it makes up frames, (numerous action-sports photography tests on vimeo) so that something that's filmed @25 FPS can be slowed down by more than 95% but still plays smoothly, as if it's playing at 25FPS.
Anyhow, I had this idea of doing video portraits of friends and then treating the outcome with twixtor to give the viewer time to observe every detail of emotion, but wasn't sure if it'd work, so I tried it with some stock footage this afternoon, and it sure does seem to work. Test_02 is going to be in my mini studio at home with dedo lights and shot at 50FPS, to see how far i can stretch it...
The object could be viewing something on a screen and be targeted by 'surprises', prepared to provoke a natural, unexpected response, like throwing something or a loud bang or perhaps could the viewer be watching something on a monitor, perhaps showing the same content to a number of people to see the difference in reaction... anyhow the ideas are a bit all over the place at the moment, but I will structure it later. I've always found it interesting to observe the observer.
