I can’t wait to see and hear the SHYNOLA folks speaking at acmi tomorrow night. The UK based animation and illustration collective have produced some of the most amazing beautiful animations in the form of music videos, ads and ‘blipverts’. They are currently working on the feature film “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with Hammer and Tongs (be sure to check out ‘Tongsville’ too).
Archive for the 'Film' Category
The full text of Gene Youngblood’s classic 1970 book on experimental film and video Expanded Cinema has been made available online. It has some really great information on the Whitney brothers’ films.
Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded cinema. Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited.
Office Voodoo is a great example of an interactive video project that uses a cinematic/televisual aesthetic with real life actors whilst maintaining meaningful real time user interaction. It is rare to a project which achieves all these aims at once.
Office Voodoo features footage of two bored workers as they sit in an office. By physically manipulating ‘voodoo’ dolls with red flashing eyes, two users may control the characters’ emotional states. Depending on the combination of the two characters’ moods a real time editing engine cuts together shots which form a kind of ‘algorithmic sitcom’, as the site says. The editing engine respects the conventions of shot / reverse shot and continuity editing, making for a fairly seamless TV like program.
While I haven’t played with it myself, the About Office Voodoo movie on the site shows examples of people using the system and the effects of their actions on the characters. It reminds me of being a director holding casting auditions where I would get actors to act out a scene in a couple of different ways. My favourite was when I asked an actor to rap a David WIlliamson play.
From the site:
“With advances in compression standards and faster, larger hard disks, the film form is finally freeing itself from the inherent linearity of the celluloid or tape substrate, as it becomes chunks of data that can be retrieved instantaneously. This explosion of the film medium is redefining our approach to narrative filmmaking and over the viewer’s control of the time flow and the plot. In the attempt to carry on the tradition of mimetic storytelling with real actors, this piece brings together the craft of cinema with automated editing techniques, trying to replicate in new media semiotics what 1920s soviet filmmakers like Kuleshov did to film with montage. Here, the knowledge of the editor is represented in the machine, and the rules are scripted according to user interaction. As a filmmaker and a programmer, the author is telling a story not only with audiovisual media but also with computer code.” [my emphasis]
More Links:
Michael Lew
Media Lab Europe
A while ago Adrian Miles’ posted Video Blogs, Vidblogs and Vogs, presenting an ongoing discussion about the nature and definitions of video weblogging.
He writes:
“At the moment all video blogs are video inside text orientated CMS [Content Management System] engines. But here’s a simple idea (more complex backend), you make a movie that has a sprite and a text track. The text track is there to show a number. The sprite reads an external XML file which simply indicates how many trackbacks that video has.”
So I set about looking for examples of alternative content management systems which deal natively with video rather than text. I’m still working out how to get Quicktime movies to read and write to my own XML databases using Livestage Pro.
WaterCooler provides a very slick looking and functional interface for their content management system in a small 265k host movie.
Navicast provide another ‘aqua’ styled interface to their CMS, this time with more controls such as three levels of compression quality and playback size. The selection and organisation of clips is, however, not as well executed as WaterCooler (for example the first movie loads by itself - slowing down access on a slow connection before the user has made a choice).
The two sites provide good examples of what is possible using the Quicktime Player as a front end for content management, accessing online clips and data. While both feature linear movie clips, a similar approach could be used to deal with interactive and dynamic ‘hyper’ media. This is a direction I am looking to explore as I learn more about the tools.
I recently saw the World Rush_4 Artists exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and was particularly impressed with Doug Aitken’s work Interiors, a multi screen video installation. KultureFlash has an interview with Aitken by Andreas Leventis and a nice picture of the installation. The viewer is surrounded by three large projection screens each portraying a different character in a vastly different location. Sound plays a big part as each visual source has an accompanying speaker playing the ambient sounds of the location. The three channels are tightly edited together so that the whole piece moves from being slow, reflective and almost tranquil to a rapid cacophony as a worker in a helicopter factory breaks into tapdancing, a young woman plays hand ball, Andre 3000 from the amazing hip hop duo Outkast breaks into rap and a Japanese business man grunts and moans in a kind of vocal percussion. While there are only three screens, there are four ‘channels’ of video each with a different character so the work repeats, each time with a different combination of sources on different screens. This was the coolest part, since each of the channels was edited to fit with any of the other channels in terms of both audio and video, the work was fascinating to watch over and over as each new combination was played.
While my current (and near future) work is based on the single (small) screen of the computer, I think this multi screen approach could be implemented to interesting effect using multiple windows and frames. Unlike a large scale video installation like Interiors where the user is physically surrounded by the work, overwhelmed by which way to face, a computer screen base work could generate a similar affect as viewers are more inclined to sit closer to a computer screen and focus their attention on a particular part of the screen (of their choosing). A video work composed of multiple channels on the one screen, generated and assembled randomly or by algorithm as it plays it may produce an interesting, similar effect.
Another 3-screen video work featured in the exhibiiton was The House by Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Rather than contrasting different locations, each at a perpendicular orientation like Aitken’s work, in The House Ahtila uses the two extra screens at the sides of the main screen to extend the screen space. While the middle screen may focus on a woman sitting in a room, the others look out the windows and doors.
- - - W A X W E B - - - D a v i d _ B l a i r - -
“The first online feature-film since 1993″
I don’t think I could watch this in its intended form so I’m not sure how much I can comment. The idea for the film seems to be a feature length documentary styled narrative which lets you explore a particular scene or idea by clicking on the video. Unfortunately on my computer the result is a javascript error. It is interesting to note how heavily the site promotes a CD-ROM version of the film:
“The movie is much larger and cleaner, the sound is better, and your speed of access will improve.”
I think it sort of makes the whole “first online feature film” a bit misleading. Maybe it was the “first CD-ROM interactive feature film online”. Like many similar projects it seems like a fairly good idea that never really took off, partly because of technological limitations and partly because the work seemed to be a ‘re-re-mediation’ from the start. A film, in a CD-ROM interactive, on the web.
In my research project I am looking to produce works which are specifically designed for the web. These will invlolve re-mediation of techniques and content but hopefully the outcome will be works which are ‘comfortable’ on the web and ‘conscious’ of their medium.
If you can get Waxweb to work please comment!
Charney, L. (1998). Empty Moments. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
