Sometimes you see a film and marvel at its beauty. Sometimes you watch and wonder how it was done. Sometimes you furrow your brow and say, "What the hell is this?" This film will make you do all three.

Kevin McGloughlin is a video artist who is no stranger to creating beautifully strange pieces using complicated effects. He has created mesmerizing videos for music artists such as Tucan and Somadrone, but it's the video he did in tribute to his father, "Architect", that really catches the eye, mostly because of the complicated techniques he used to pull it off. McGloughlin shared a bit about these techniques in the video's description, but he has broken down his whole process for us step by step. But first, here's the video:

According to the video description, "Architect" was made "entirely from photographs and video footage" using "various techniques in time-lapse photography and long exposure photography" along with real time footage. That's super interesting, but we wanted to know exactly how McGloughlin approached this stunning piece. He explains:

There was quite a long process in the making of this portrait. The first process was the camera work. This involved long exposure time-lapse photography of street lights, clouds, fluids and textures. With these sequences, the individual frames were laid out in 3D space and a virtual camera was flown through them. I also shot realtime video footage which was treated similarly, though in the case of the footage, the virtual camera wasn't flown through. Instead, I duplicated the footage and offset the time by one frame for each layer of video to create the illusion of forward motion. I then edited together the various sequences into a seamless clip.

With the first process complete, I rendered out the sequence, so all the images were now one flat movie. I then incorporated scans of architectural drawings as well as photographs and video footage of the man's face (Páraic Sr.) using layer blending modes, masks and luma keys. This was then again precomposed into one flat movie. With this one clip, I then duplicated it many multiple times and again layered it out in 3D space. Again offsetting the time by one frame for every layer. I then used 'keying' effects to extract data from each layer at progressively higher values from the back to the front of the layer stack, creating what is in essence a Strata Cut technique with digital media.

Thanks, Kevin!

You can check out more of Kevin McGloughlin's work on his Vimeo page, and believe me, you're going to want to do this. In fact, I'll just leave this here: a video entitled "GoogOl" whose final clip is, in fact, 10100 videos playing simultaneously.