vog (a BETA videoblog)

Mousing into the video panes will play the text movie, and if you mouse into the text then other movies will load in place.

Another exercise in interactive confusion. It works, unlike some of the other movies in this series, with each (the text track and the videos) all jumping back to the beginning when they start. Creates a certain sort of stuttering.

From the original entry:

I've been working for nearly two weeks now on a new vog. Since disk space has become critical I've had to work in a rather piecemeal sort of way, which has really slowed me down. Plus my scripting sucks, so there's been way too much trial and error going on. The work, Glenelg Observations, is as much a technical as aesthetic experiment.

Technically, the work is a one second parent movie that has two child movie tracks. One child movie track has a list of six quicktime videos (each made up of 9 individual video tracks), while the other has a single text movie. Mousing into the region where the text movie appears is counted by a sprite track and controls loading of the video child movies, while mousing into the moving video panes causes the one text track child movie to play. Both of the child movie tracks are set to loop and are not slaved to the parent movie. The parent movie is just a one second container consisting of a picture track (the blue graphic), two sprite tracks (one over the video, one over the text movie) and two child tracks.

I had wanted mouse movement into the text movie to also make the child movie video to play backwards, since the work is loosely interested in the idea of the palindrome, but playback was just appalling on my tiBook so I gave up that particular dream. I might try to make one where the child movies are not each made up of nine video tracks, since that is just asking an awful lot of QuickTime and your computer's CPU.

Aesthetically, theoretically, creatively, or whatever hat I'm supposed to be wearing at the moment, the work consists of a series of photographs which have been dropped into iMovie and 'animated' via the so called "Ken Burns affect". I am interested in how this might work, what it might look like, and how to use it, largely because I am attracted to the idea of being able to use still images in work like this but not keep them as still images. I'm not happy with how it looks, though I might try the same thing using Photo to Movie or reading the 750 page manual that came with Final Cut Express to see if it can do it.

Apart from appropriating still images into movies (continuing an interest of mine which harks back, as ever, to Marker's La Jetée and Deleuze's argument that cinematic movement is not represented movement) as a lo-budget lo-tech sort of vogging, the work explores what might happen when you have a text track which is a vague sort of narrative that can run independently of the video track/s. So the textual commentary, which is user controlled, loops and has a different duration to each of the six video clips that can play. The video clips are each of round things found at one location in the Lower Glenelg National Park, and the idea was to develop a sense of place only through these minor objects. It doesn't quite work because the pans and zooms are just too lumpy and stutter, but one thing I keep returning to in my vogging is the building up of narratives, themes, ideas, worlds and movies from fragmentary fragments. The background of the movie sort of repeats this since it is one of the photos used in the work.

So this work continues my recent interest in vogs that have multiple durations, so each vog contains at least one child movie track that is not slaved to the parent time line and so is able to play as a separate movie to the parent movie. This has the effect of making a work that has two times (the time of the child movie or movies and the time of the parent movie), though that's wrong, since the more interesting and significant time is the time that happens between these two.