vog (a BETA videoblog)

NOTE: This was originally published at half this resolution. All I've done here is double the size within the embed tag. Still looks OK and just makes more sense - as our screens increase in resolution the vogs I made from the early days just appear more and more tiny, so a simple response is to just double them up.

This is another of what I describe as an 'elastic' movie. They are elastic because when you mouse into the video panel within the vog the video zooms continuously, and when you mouse out the original shot scale is restored. Another formal experiment that simply foregrounds a programmatic possibility and function with QuickTime and video work. It is also another moment of abstraction, as the rapid zoom shifts the video from being about something (its representational and recording function - it is a shot of the family's collection of Peugeots) towards pixellation, compression artefacts, patterns of colour and, well, pixels. The deep substrate of the digital video image on a screen.

In addition with the two video panels one is at a very low frame rate (by the looks of things 1 fps) while the other is something like 18 or 24 fps. This is also to play with another formal property of softvideo - that you can have multiple video windows and that these can have different states, and that by varying something as simple as frame rate between two identical video clips other relations form between them. A sort of visual complement to montage where we have what are in effect edit like relations between the two clips because they play and change along side each other.

The video was filmed in the Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne on a hill overlooking Churchill. The lower background graphic is a photo of the Hazelwood power station (brown coal), an old and dirty power station from the 60s that is still being used, but it has this elegant 60s industrial modernist austerity about it that I like. The upper background graphic are the gum trees that lined the drive way to the then family home.

The commentary is a child movie track, so loads separately from this parent video so its play state is independent of the play state of the parent video.