Yesterday during the chat, everyone had to critique my project and I got some really good feedback. I was glad that aesthetically the project seemed to be liked, although there was some confusion as to how it would work. This was expected since although I have explained it several times, it will only be 100% clear once I actually get it to work!
I have also received suggestions such as; using a chair to further immerse the audience and get them to stay for longer during the show and also using various monitors to display the interface. I'm thinking of how I can do both however it will be very difficult to use various monitors due to transport from Malta to London. I might also create a stand in Malta; made of planks of wood that can slide into each other, and paint it in London. This might make the monitor look better so it is enclosed in a minimal white space.
Later in the day, Maria, my developer came over and we were looking at different formats of how to export the videos and water colour. After endless tests, including uploading to youtube and downloading as .mp4 (since HTML5 only accepts ogg, mp4 and WebM) we found a good export and codec.
Maria, writing code
Basically we wanted a format that would be of a decent quality but also of minimum file size; basically not more than 50mb. The best solution was to put my original water colour, which was a 720HD, in a new PAL widescreen composition in After Effects. This was then exported as a Quicktime Movie, with an MPEG4 codec set to 70% quality. After this, it was converted using Miro converter, into an .mp4 file. HTML5 seemed to like this sort of file and the quality is quite good so we're using that.
At the moment I want to export all I have using this method so I can carry out a case study / focus group as soon as possible.
This month a friend of mine will be creating sounds that are taken from the story recordings and using a different chance process each time. After the chance process is complete, he can intervene and have some sort of control over the sound, although this should be minimal. The following is the first story and the final two links are the recording before his intervention, the the recording after his intervention (basically just added some reverb).
"1) Panyaoita. Listening to track and choose 3 randon numbers from time. First test
3 numbers were chosen. Since no internet was there, 3 people chose three random times - 5, 16, 19
Panyaoita - 5 - Obviously, 16 - go to my bedroom, 19 - cried
Opened Ableton, loaded recording, created 3 separate tracks, and chose the latter words for each. Instead of looping the words / phrases, I warped each track to its maximum allowance. For each word / track I used a different warp method counting downwards in the list from the numbers we generated previously. Only 6 warp methods are available, so for 15 and 19, I restarted counting from the top of the list. For the first audio track 'Complex mode' was used, for the 2nd 'repitch mode', and for the 3rd 'Beats mode'.
The tracks were then put in the Ableton timeline, each starting midway from the previous one.
A Master Wav was then created, and reimported as one file into the timeline, where they were rewarped till the file reached a length of 1 minute. This created a further warped effect. The warp setting used now was Complex Pro, based on personal choice because of the ambient style it created.
Opened Ableton, Went to effects, and chose 5th, 16th and 19th effect, ie Chorus, Gate, Looper."
Latest filmed story. This was filmed yesterday and edited today, and is one of my favourite recorded stories. The reason being that it was recorded by accident. The woman who told it was waiting for the us to get ready to record, and in the meantime she told us a story about how the village locals are always peeking out of the windows to see what their neighbours are doing. As explained in my Manifesto, accidental stories are always preferred to the ones told on command.
I'll start this post by including some screenshots from my latest video:
I hope these images speak for themselves. The video is simply a 1 minute take of a couple sleeping together. In the last few seconds we can see another hand coming from behind the girl. I'm quite happy with the video because I think it managed to capture the essence of the story in just one shot. I also like the fact that the last few fames make it slightly humorous. The story was not filmed with the heads cut off but I felt that the identity of the couple was not needed, especially of the guy at the front, who all of sudden loses a bit of importance once the other hand is introduced.
Ok so aside from this, this week I am 'shadowing' two German lecturers at my college who are teaching and experimental film module to the BA Media students. Shadowing basically means I have to see what they are doing so once they leave I can carry on the lectures myself, and I can teach the module next year (most probably). Although most of the examples given in class are familiar to me, I have come across certain works that I hadn't seen before and that I have found to be interesting and even relevant to my Masters projects.
"A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film in which Bruce Conner put together snippets of found footage, taken from B-movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, novelty short films, and other sources, to a musical score featuring Respighi's The Pines of Rom" (youtube, 2012)
"Directed by Peter Mays. A sight/sound combine of exotic imagry shot semi-randomly in superimposition off a TV and then cut to make a fast moving but extremely ambiguous "story". GORILLA moves through modern man's myth mind like a runaway train bursting at the seams. Prize at Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1967." (youtube, 2012)
Harry Smith's drug inspired mirror animations.
Besides the history of experimental film we are also having discussions about 'experimental' film in general, such as the fact that dreams are one ways to be experimental in traditional films as they are purely surreal and therefore allow for plenty of ways to portray the distortion of time. We also discussed the difference between MTV style editing and experimental; MTV being for the masses (albeit the young generation masses) whilst experimental is more personal and much more risky. One of the lecturers expressed that common everyday youtube videos are perhaps closer to experimental than music videos, although the pity is that the subject is always the same; cats / accidents / food / sports, since most people like the same things.
The subject of minimalist and reduction was of course a prominent one, where the lecturers constantly told the students to reduce to the extreme. They told them how minimal projects are often not taken seriously by the viewer, however they are extremely difficult to copy and reproduce because they are so simple, that a project which is even remotely similar, cannot be said to be inspired from the original since the concept is so minimal. Therefore this makes minimal experimental art rather unique. They gave us an example of Paul Sharits' Ray Gun Virus, that was essentially an experimental film using just flickering colour. The point here was not to tell a story but to instigate a mood, and the conclusion was that if a visual piece manages to change the viewer's mood, then it has definitely done its job.
Ray Gun Virus (with sound!)
1966
According to artist, sound is to be turned to max volume.
"Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame structure, etc., this is not an "abstract film"/projector as pistol/time-colored pills/yes=no/mental suicide and then, rebirth as self-projection. "... just colors and strobe ... 'light-color energy patterns (analogies of neural transmission systems) generate internal color-time shape and allow the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical functionings of his own nervous system' ... It's true." - David Curtis, International Times "RAY GUN VIRUS is a work in which no images appear yet one can get pure identity on film. ... projected film itself makes the viewer aware of where he stands. RAY GUN VIRUS is not so-called 'Psychedelic Cinema' but even more and goes beyond it through Sharits' bright clarification of the media." - Takahiko Iimura, Film Art Exhibition: Fourth Int'l Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-Le-Zoute; "Twenty Years of American Personal Film" anthology, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1966. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Royal Archive of Belgium." (youtube, 2012)
Finally I will be creating a "Manifesto" category in my blog to explain the boundaries and rules of my project, and to define exactly why I have chosen this process and what I am expecting from the viewer.
This month is going to be quite a busy one since I plan to carry out a case study with my students and perhaps even with my colleagues to test out the interface. This of course means I will have to put everything together, with a few missing videos which can then be added in June / July. I have also rethought the sound of the application. The problem was that if I was to do a chance process for the sound creation, it would not have any link whatsoever with the videos. At the same time a direct link would be too controlled. For this reason I have found a sound person whom I will meet in the coming weeks and we can discuss how to create sound generated from the videos through a chance process. At the moment I'm thinking of what the starting point could be, perhaps the waveform from the story recordings.
I have also been thinking about the link between the water colours and the videos, since this was not clear before my assessment for Unit 1. My initial idea was to combine video and abstract animation, and by observing films such as Tree of Life and Enter the void, where animated visuals accompany film, I thought it would be interesting to have some kind of moving water colour to distract from the stories. Although these water colours are disassociated from the stories, their sound will have come from a chance process applied to the recorded stories. In my case study I am interested to see how the user will play with the interface and the links they generate between sounds and visuals that are related in some way but appear and disappear through a chance algorithm and in a database environment. I want to see if they can find some kind of meaning in what they are seeing, and to observe their behaviour and level of interest.
Below is the last water colour animation I have carried out. This month I will be sorting out the sound for the interface as well as carrying out a case study. After the case study I will add more videos and perhaps water colour animations, as well as fix the method of interaction according the results.
