What is Bodylapse?

Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge, BodyLapse was a real-time art project that employed a motion-control camera to document weight loss and body image through time and motion. The primary focus was the creation of 18 animations over a 6 month period of the subject, me, transforming my body through heavy exercise and diet.

The in-progress film was shown at SIGGRAPH 2008, but unfortunately was not finished due to injury.

I intend to finish it using new DSLRs and a fully self-developed motion control camera sometime in the future.

To keep track of my diet and exercise, I developed a weight, exercise and food tracking app in HTML for the newly released iPhone. Using this app I logged what I ate and when I exercised, and it would post the results to a personal site that friends and family could watch, comment on, and ultimately keep me motivated.

The food and exercise data from the app would also be paired with every frame of animation from a certain day, creating a layer of metadata to accompany the final animations.

SIGGRAPH 2008

Bodylapse was accepted as a Work-In-Progress film and shown at the Space-Time interactive gallery at SIGGRAPH 2008. It was also featured online in SIGGRAPH's first ever Second Life Gallery and on Virginia Tech's homepage. 
The paper was published in the 2008 SIGGRAPH Proceedings, and can be read below in PDF Format: