vog (a BETA videoblog)

No idea anymore if I wrote commentary on this in one of the several blogs I had going at the time. The footage came from a train trip from Zurich, south to Lugano, on my way to the EdTech conference in 2004 (a dull, insular sort of event). I could have flown to somewhere closer to Lugano, possibly even managed to fly to Lugano itself, but Zurich was a pretty good series of flights and I really like the space, time, and comfort that a decent train provides so decided that a trip south by train, through the mountains, would be pretty damn good. It was, though it was overcast so the peaks were invisible, but I saw a lot of countryside which always gives me a lot of pleasure.

So, the work. Well, it is large in dimensions so needs QuickTime Player. I could design a template that fits the thing but then you are still constrained in your practice by what can fit your design, whereas if you target QuickTime Player then you can just have works of varying sizes and dimensions. This one uses a photo as a background so that the vog is more like a self contained work. The smaller video window is footage from the train trip itself. Mousing in to the video slows it down, progressively, and the hand drawn frame speed graphic in the lower left shows you the current play back speed of the video. In addition, in a moment of blindingly bad interface design, there are three photos (from Lugano) across the upper third of the work (you have to mouse around up there to actually find them) that trigger/control three different commentary tracks. Their play state is completely controlled by mousing in and out of the photo field, in, the photo is visible and the commentary plays. Out, image gone, sound gone.

There is a coding error (well, it seems to me an error six years later) where when the work launches you hear the soundtrack associated with the video pane, which plays regardless of the speed of the video. But as soon as you mouse into one of the commentary tracks the original soundtrack is muted, and then stays muted forever. I think restoring the video to normal speed, or even stopping one of the three commentaries, should have re-enabled the original soundtrack from the train itself. Finally, mousing into the video pane slows the video down and clicking on it restores it to original speed (18 fps).

I guess then this is yet another of the formal experiments that I favour. It treats a 'movie' not as only video but as a space which can contain video, text, image, links, buttons and so on. There is only one video but four soundtracks that play as child movies (the original soundtrack from the train and the three commentaries) and the graphic that responds to the playback state of the video. Another proof of concept, though I'm beginning to wonder what the concept is that needs proving. Well, no, actually, it is that video online is not a video pane with a slaved soundtrack. It is anything but.