I've been experimenting with a technique that transforms video into something that looks hand-drawnโlines that curve around faces and shapes that react to edges.
The idea came from wanting to create that classic "data visualization of a portrait" look. You've seen it: a face rendered in horizontal lines, like an old plotter drawing. But I wanted the lines to actually follow the contours of the face, not just scan across horizontally.
The first version was too rigid. Straight horizontal bars in a grid. It worked, but felt dead. The reference I was chasing had this organic quality where shapes seemed to flow around features.
The fix was surprisingly simple. Instead of fixed horizontal lines, I sample the image gradient at each pointโbasically asking "which way does the brightness change here?" Then I rotate each shape perpendicular to that. Where there's a strong edge, like the rim of a nose or the curve of a cheek, I switch from bars to dots.
Pink dots on edges. Blue bars everywhere else. The pink naturally clusters where the interesting stuff happens.
Processing video this way creates something hypnotic. As the subject rotates, the pattern shifts. The pink highlights chase the contours around like they're alive.
Getting the settings right took iteration. Too sensitive and you get noise everywhere. Not sensitive enough and you lose the contour-following effect entirely. There's also a balance between filling in bright areas (the sculpture is white marble) and keeping the background clean.
The elliptical crop happened by accidentโI was testing with Instagram's portrait format and the oval mask just felt right. It frames the subject and hides the messy edges where the effect breaks down.
What I like most is how it reveals structure. A rotating head becomes a study in topology. You see the face as a landscape of ridges and valleys, not just features.
Source Material
Here's the original video I used as input:
