Empty America

Empty America is a series of short videos created by Thrash Lab. They are timelapses of some American cities cleared of any human presence, including tourists and traffic.

Frankly, I'm not sure how they did it. I think that since they're timelapse videos, not continuous but rather composed of (shortly) spaced images assembled in a series, only the frames without people and traffic were selected. However, the videos also include places where it's quite difficult not to see anyone.

Furthermore, in the San Francisco video, there is (in my opinion) a hint that people were there, but they've been removed, and it's a working, but empty, escalator. Usually, escalators stop when they detect no one, after completing little more than one cycle.

With some research, I found the making of of one of the videos. There's a lot of work behind it using Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. It essentially takes advantage of the fact that the timelapse is shot with a fixed camera. Consequently, in the original footage, the space occupied by (for example) a car in one frame is empty in the previous or next frame. This makes it easy to take a fragment from one frame and copy it onto another to make cars and people disappear.

You can see the making of here.

The cities emptied so far are Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. The next will be Washington, DC. The videos have generated mixed reactions. Some have called them "eerily disturbing." stating that "It feels like everyone was abducted by aliens."

I admit that the idea of an entire metropolis as an immense Mary Celeste may sound a little disturbing, especially since some of the cases we know about are linked to catastrophes, like Pripyat, but I find them delightful. Only the music, in this context, sounds a little irritating to me.

Here are the videos.

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