Berg and Dentsu showcase light painting on an iPad

London creatives has teamed for a new project 'Making Future Magic,' which uses Apple's iPad to create light paintings.

The video was created as a collaboration between creative communications agency Dentsu London and design agency Berg.

"We developed a specific photographic technique for this film. Through long exposures we record an iPad moving through space to make three-dimensional forms in light," explains Berg's Jack Schulze in a blog post.

"First we create software models of three-dimensional typography, objects and animations. We render cross sections of these models, like a virtual CAT scan, making a series of outlines of slices of each form."

"We play these back on the surface of the iPad as movies, and drag the iPad through the air to extrude shapes captured in long exposure photographs. Each 3D form is itself a single frame of a 3D animation, so each long exposure still is only a single image in a composite stop frame animation," adds Schulze.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

"Each frame is a long exposure photograph of 3-6 seconds. 5,500 photographs were taken. Only half of these were used for the animations seen in the final edit of the film."

"The light appears to boil since there are small deviations in the path of the iPad between shots. In some shots the light shapes appear suspended in a kind of aerogel. This is produced by the black areas of the iPad screen which aren't entirely dark, and affected by the balance between exposure, the speed of the movies and screen angle."

The creatives have compiled the best stills from the film into a print-on-demand 'Making Future Magic' book which is available for £32.95/$59.20 in hardback, or softcover for £24.95/$44.20.

Photographic experiments and stills are also available in a Flickr stream.