Testing application

Testing out the final animation before leaving the show build! Low quality video unfortunately but this is just to give a brief idea of how the final application should work.

...And a preview of the book documentation using the Blog-to-Book Blurb service:

Putting the show together

Day one was spent painting and putting together the plinth. Luckily Jonathan found a large plinth for the screen and laptop and we just had to attach the back of it on the top, so to have more area for all the equipment. I was still a bit disoriented and trying to find my way around the college so decided I would go back tomorrow and start testing out the application.

Day two:

Connecting everything

Making sure the touch screen reflects the laptop exactly

testing the application once more time

Everything seems to be working!

Jonathan had the idea to put the light in the corner which worked out quite well.  This is how it will look in a dark environment. Better than in brighter light in my opinion.

Day three:

Connected everything once more and brought the book and instructions.

Testing the multi-touch, zooming in and out, panning etc...

Testing sound

Visuals looking good even zoomed in

Day four:

Last day, everything seems to be working fine, just need to hide the cables!

Hidden cables, and slightly tilted for easy access to laptop

Videos soon!

My Space

So this is my space, kindly sent to me by Jessica Barr. I have also managed to get two Clamp LED flexible lights from my workplace:

Book has arrived!

The Book printed with Dust Jacket from Blurb

Front

Back

Blog-to-Book

Have been thinking of various ways of how to display my blog / documentation, and have now found a blog to book option using the Booksmart application on Blurb.com. I have tested it today and it's really easy to use so it shouldn't take me a long time to produce. There are various options for layouts and if I prefer I can even design my own in InDesign or Illustrator and import them directly.

I think that this way the process of my project will be presented in a clear and concise manner.

Madonna Cat

Just finished editing another video and it's all about stray cats. I was lucky to find a whole bunch of them very close to where I work.

It's working!

So Maria spent three and a half hours here today trying to make the application work on Chrome using a local host (for faster browsing) and it worked!

I will be conducting the Case study on friday with my students.

A few things I wish to fix for August:

At the moment the videos are not auto playing. The problem with auto play is that the play action triggers a random generator, so the code does not see the difference between play and auto play. Consequently videos keep randomly generating before stopping.

Removing the play bar. The play bar looks slightly ugly and I would like for it to only appear on roll over. Once again there is a code conflict since the roll over already has an action attached to it, i.e. the user can move the video and resize.

I want the variation in the video sizes to be much larger. As one can see in the screenshot the videos vary in size but not much. I want the contrast to be bigger and therefore more dramatic.

A few more things: Play option is invisible when browser is full screened & localhost sometimes needs to be refreshed a couple of times in order to work properly.

I've also decided to only have one story on the screen at one go so the user is more focused on one thing, but can also see multiple videos at one go. This way there is not absolute confusion but rather a balance between order and chaos. I believe this will make the user want to find meaning rather than giving up completely. At the same time however there might be multiple sound effects going on simultaneously; these are the ones attached to the water colours.

All in all at the moment I'm just happy to see all the videos working together successfully.

More Documentation Ideas

One of the books I got from the library lately is "Things I have Learned in My Life So Far" once again by Stefan Sagmeister. I got it solely for the way it is bound together. This could be ideal for the way I want to present my work since I want to split it into four different parts. Of course I will not be copying Sagmeister's ideas but stapling the four parts individually is very cost efficient, and then I will only need to think of a way to have them exhibited together as one. I was thinking of ways of how to view them together as one book, or have the option to take them apart. Tried some maquettes already that I will put up soon.

Ideas for Documentation

So for my Documentation I want to have a book that will be split into 4 parts: Sketchbook / Water Colours / Video & Interface. Last week I went to the college library and tried to get some ideas for the layout. Below are some shots of "The art of looking sideways" and "Sagmeister".

I was basically was looking for interesting ways to display my images / texts as well as looking into how to bind the final book.

I like the extra large bold text on the left in contrast with the super small text on the far left, and then a whole page image on the opposite side.

Possible way to display a large landscape image & sideways text

Grid for text

Possible text over imagery? Although the text will not be completely legible so it should not be something of great importance, but rather annotations and reflections

Just a very raw hand written 2-page spread that I really like and could work well in my layout

The middle visual reminded me of my water colours; possible ways to display them perhaps

Sagmeister's book was just full of hand-written annotations in combination with very structured type grids. Found this idea to be very immersive and casual at the same time

Possible way of displaying various frames from an animation / video

A simple 2-page spread but displayed diagonally. Ideal for the sketchbook part.

I am currently exporting several videos and water colours so Maria and I can finalise the interface for the casestudy that will hopefully happen this week!

Chat Reflective writing and interface updates

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.

Sound tests

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."



Recording without effects
Recording with effects

A bulb

Possibly one of the simplest stories I have; about a bulb.

Sendikajra

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.

New video / inspirations

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.