Eye Floaters Video
This is an old video I made by compositing hand-drawn “floaters”, scanned and placed into a video I shot with a Sony DCR-VX1000.
What are eye floaters?
Eye floaters are tiny bubbles, specks, or strands shapes that appear in your field of vision. They’re caused by small clumps of collagen or debris suspended in the gel-like substance inside your eye (vitreous humor). For this reason they’re also called vitreous floaters or muscae volitantes (latin for flying flies).
Most near-sighted people notice them earlier, and most folks will have them at some point in their life. You can see floaters most clearly when looking at bright, even backgrounds, like a blue sky or a white wall.
How to draw eye “floaters”
To draw my eye floaters, I went out in a field, and laid down on my back. By laying on your back, you can get the particles to “land” right on the top of the “globe” of your eye ball. Gravity keeps them right in the center of your vision. So I would let one land, take a long look, and then lean over and sketch one of these bubble floaters out. I have one that looks like a saxophone.
Then I scanned my drawings and pulled both the video and my hand-drawn floater PNGs into a 3DFX program to animate them (thank you Matt Bell for the technical support). This was completed in 2005 and uploaded to my YouTube channel in 2006. The quality there is heavily compressed, so I tracked down the original files to show it in a better light.
One last thing
When I moved to Brooklyn in 2012, my cousin was living in Manhattan. She was about to move back to Texas and asked me if I wanted some old stuff including some screenprints that my dad had made back in college.
I was like “Yeah!”
And to my surprise, one of those old prints illustrated several entoptic phenomena, including eye floaters. Other entoptic effects in the print: solar retinopathy, where you look at the sun and it burns in a color negative for brief time. And the Purkinje Tree effect, where you see the veins in your eyes if you shine a bright light on the edge of your vision.
The print lives in my children’s bedroom.
Wait for real