vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Recent Developments in the Diptych Department

Well, the riveting coding work continues. So I think it is time to pop out a work in progress so that things make more sense. The diptych here is not how things will be in the final work. I do want to speed up and slow down the video, but what I was doing was constraining this so that after, say, slowing or speeding it up by a factor of 5 (so 5 x faster or 1/5 of normal) I’d flip the track back to normal playback speed. After building it and experimenting and playing with it it just doesn’t make sense. As you’re clicking the thing slows, then all of a sudden after another click, Hey Presto!” we’re back to normal speed. Nah. So this work in progress is just to see this in action. What hasn’t been done yet, well, both soundtracks remain, these will be removed and one soundtrack will be added as a separate child movie so that it plays normally independent of the image track speeds. This means the effect you get when mousing into either video so that the volume for that track changes will be removed (though in this demo it does create some pretty weird aleatory outcomes). So that also means I’d better let you mute, or perhaps pause?, the soundtrack.

Next Iteration?
For the final version clicking the slow and fast buttons (‘-’ and ‘+’) will just keep speeding up or slowing down the video. QuickTime from memory doesn’t like to drop below 1/10 of normal speed (normal is whatever the video frame rate is) while I think acceleration probably depends on your CPU. Mousing into the other button (eg if you’ve sped the thing up, then mousing into the ‘-’ button) will restore the current video to normal speed. Then add a pause button for the soundtrack, and perhaps see about making the buttons semi-transparent so they’re not quite so there. That should do it. I think.

Manifesto, First Draft

In the integrated media subject I’m teaching students are writing manifestos which they will then follow (more about that another time). Partly in response to this, and partly because I have not made anything for too long, I’ve started to develop my original vogma manifesto into an interactive work. This is the first prototype where I’ve worked out the structure, but have not yet actually recorded any content. Though you can’t tell from the work it is actually a QuickTime movie that is ten seconds long. Each of the propositions is a link that, when clicked, takes you to a new chapter in this movie (each second is a chapter). The second version of this one will have audio (I think) on each screen as well, which will be commentary.

The prototype is at http://vogmae.net.au/works/2009/prototypeOne/prototypeOne.html

Trains

Trains

Train x 4

This is just trying out a few things, timers in eZedia, the video that comes off my Nokia N95 (it’s a 30fps which is way too high, I think a better option could be to shoot higher res and then compress down) and embedding using the video embed button in TinyMCE in WordPress. The work is shot on a local train platform while waiting for a (late) train. Each is a seperate movie and they all loop. It plays in QuickTime Player because of its size, total data size is around 7MB. I’ve used a Livestage authored poster movie since the QuickTime embed tag and attributes don’t really work with poster images (well they do but it is foolishly complicated as they can’t be jpg or gifs) so just plain vanilla embedding a video that, when clicked, launches the target video in QT Player is the way to go.

Blue Bath

This is filmed on a low rez domestic camera, I like its compressed abstraction.

Blue Bath

A Railway Crossing

This is the rail crossing I regularly walk across with the kids. Trains remain an elemental attractor in cinema. Mechanised, regular, industrial. Flash and movement.

A Railway Crossing

Water Hole at ACCA

We went to ACCA today to see Water Hole. The mobile in the later gallery was mesmerising in a Schwitters come Merz sort of way. The work is by two Swiss artists, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger. This is some of the video that I shot on my phone, one is the mobile (where you lay on a bench under it, gazing up). The other a series of shots of the shadows that the mobile made.

Click the poster movie to launch it in QuickTime Player.

[qt:http://vogmae.net.au/vogs/2009/february/WaterHolePoster.mov 320 240]

GPS Cinema

GPSfilm is an open source system for GPS aware cinema. As their blurb rather nicely says “not a moving picture a picture moving”. Worth reading the about screen since point two:

The movies are also interchangeable and easily matched to any place. By creating this new type of film viewing experience in an open, collaborative way, the artist hopes that both developers and filmmakers will begin to explore the idea even further.

seems to be recognising the importance of granularity for distributed film narratives.

Modern Sing Song

A sample movie. One shot every minute or so for thirty or so minutes. This is what happens when we become sample machines, rather than our recording media.

Modern Sing Song

Artefact, Ambience, Abstraction

This is another rhizome movie that is partly to illustrate the use of the templates, but also to just play a bit with some material. This is the same footage as the other recent rhizome movies have used, but I have compressed the crap out of it. Took the original, exported it to half its resolution and double its frame rate and a fraction of its data rate. Set forced keyframes to some really big number (so that there won’t be any). This is just impossible for the codec to do, so it will actually use more data than I requested since it more or less assumes I’m a dill for trying to do all that. But it helps really dirty up the video. Why? Because as the video becomes more compressed, as more artefacts appear, it shifts away from being indexical, representational video (video thought of as showing the world) towards pattern, pixels, movement, and colour. Ambient video. Ambient video is important. It is what video and the moving image becomes when it is ubiquitous, on screens, in the home, our phones. Walk past an ATM and watch the screen move, scrolling ads in bus and tram stops, pixellated signage, the list is enormous. In this world moving images move increasingly away from being of something else and become something for themselves. This is why we have VJing, for instance. So in a world where video online (just think YouTube as the banally obvious exemplar) is the norm, video can begin to free itself from being the hand maid to just mirroring (and all those efforts at narrative that seem to fall in lock step behind) and do other things. Be abstract. Make patterns. Other fragments that will only ever aspire to be fragments. Of the world. Of shape. Fragments of fragments.

Ambient Artefacts