High Rise
High Rise is a city made of animated GIFs.
Growing up in New York City, I have always been in awe of the skyscraper. We are in a new boom era for the super-tall buildings, especially in regions new to city-making. High Rise is an endless digital city made from actual photographs I have acquired traveling cities on four continents.
High Rise is an endless city; it never stops trying to get taller and taller.
Scroll right (and down) to see the full extent of High Rise.
Using your Browser's zoom you can see High Rise at different scales. ("Cmd -" and "Cmd +" or "Ctrl -" and "Ctrl +" work as shortcuts on most browsers)
How it's made: I take a high-resolution photo of a tall building (Left, made with a Canon 5D Mark II at full resolution). The building is "straightened" in Photoshop (Right).
After the building is straightened, I mark off each floor at the same location (see horizontal guides drawn above). Each slice then becomes one frame in a GIF animation.
Isolating each building storey in a quick-moving animation gives the appearance of the building stretching taller and taller.
Repeating the GIF vertically creates the illusion of a tall building growing taller in the final High Rise composition.