Tidy Art

We at Clean Air Action Group had been talking about to create a short video about the parking issue in Budapest quite a long time. Generally we talked about how to address the problem and how to reach people to get awareness and decision makers, city governance to adjust their priorities.

And because the enormous success of the video (and because we got a promotion from the district VIII. local government), we continued with a second video to even more specify the parking issue in the district VIII.

It started 2022 second half; we decided to produce a short video which:

1-2 min long
use dynamic music
provocative
convey clear (short) messages
cheap / easy to produce

First step was to find out the visual concept. We were sure that we had to show the real parking circumstances on real locations, so the I started to take photos in Budapest to introduce these very heavily car occupied areas. It was not a hard job because cars were everywhere. We saw a video before on the internet where cars were removed digitally to show how could squares be more green. We liked that concept and decided to follow to show the contrast how these public spaces would look like without or less cars would attract people attention.

Therefore I was looking for well know parking areas in the downtown to show the this contrast.

The following 3 images were the main location that I thought I can hide the cars and plant trees and grass (digitally at least).

First, it is from Madách Square I took this photo way before the project in 2014. But this area is still kind of a parking lot instead of a nice public square.

Madách square - Budapest - 2014

Madách square - Budapest - 2022

For the HD 16:9 image aspect I used this framing:

After a "bit" of digital massaging I got this image (from the video):

Madách square - Budapest - After digital landscaping

It was a complex digital image manipulation, retouching done in Krita (an open-source painting and image manipulation software) and layer animation in Blender (open-source 2D-3D-compositing-video editing software).

This contact sheet shows how the elements were separated.

The Video Sequencer Editor in Blender

Similar approach I used to create the animation for the following scenes.
The second location: before - after

Ilka street- Budapest 2023

Ilka street - Budapest - After digital landscaping

The third location: before - after:

Angelo Rotta riverbank - Budapest - 2022

Beside the before "after" theme I also wanted to show it is a global issue. Cars, parking, overuse our public spaces are the local problems which have global effect. So I edited a couple of picture for the introduction to show the Earth and to zoom in to Budapest. During this editing I realized it is easier and also a interesting way to show different places in the city if I used a special stop-motion-zoom effect for this theme. Also inspired by the music it gave that very dynamic movement.

The second episode of this Parking Zone Budapest video was based on the some visual however there were couple of additional elements. We wanted to show numerical data so I created a simple 3D pie chart setup with the so called geometry nodes – kind of a visual programming language.

The control panel of the pie chart

The node (procedure) graph "behind" the UI

We had some stunning source photos that depicted the parking issues remarkably well.

Szigony utca parking lot - Budapest 2023

To separate the certain urban elements I also used Krita to create black and white images to mask color corrections in Blender.

The original photo and the 3 separated areas

It was an easy flexible way to change the color of the separated areas. Basically we color coded the 3 types of public spaces: pedestrian, car, green areas. We did not have precise numeric data about the sizes of these areas but the open street map (top view practically) can help to get the ratios roughly.

The final frame from the video

For the intro I wanted to use something a bit provocative visual. The falling cars seemed to be a good idea. I was experimenting a particle systems in Blender but I realized it is more cost effective (or time effective) to just animate manually.

The base images for the falling cars scene

Blender's 3D viewport

This video had only one car-removal scene, but it was challenging one. I had to remove unlucky people as well...wrong place at the wrong time :)

Práter street - Budapest 2023

Práter street - Budapest after the operation

In general, I found the project to be quite interesting and challenging. My main focus was on achieving the project goals while maintaining the right balance between price (production time) and value. Throughout the project, I gained valuable insights into how aesthetics can enhance production value and streamline production costs. As an artist, I'm particularly pleased to see that open-source tools like Krita and Blender can support the entire pipeline of high-quality digital media production.