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Circular Logic: Around the Block in Fredericton

A few years ago I took a great workshop that Chris Giles gave at the NB Filmmakers’ Co-operative in Fredericton. In the workshop we found out about hand-processing 16mm film and we shot and processed films all in a few hours. This is what I shot with my friend Cathie. It’s a combination of stop-motion animation and slow motion around the old home of the film coop. This happened on May 16, 2004 and it’s silent and just under 3 minutes long.

Formats available:Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by ChrisCampbell with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

July 15, 2008 16mm, animation, art, film, video

Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville

I’ve always liked using things in ways that they weren’t intended and in 2003 for the Digital Dialogues exhibition I made an animation with a digital still camera. I went to 6 places in Wolfville, took a picture, took a step to the right, and repeated the process almost 1000 times. The video is silent and just over 3 minutes long.

Formats available:Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by ChrisCampbell with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

May 29, 2008 animation, art, film, video

Stop Motion Animation Workshop

Struts Gallery sign Last weekend I facilitated a stop motion animation workshop at Faucet, the media arts part of the artist-run centre Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick. It’s the second workshop that I’ve given there and I had a great time. The participants were a talented, motivated group who produced a bunch of animations in two days mainly using digital still cameras. It’s part of what I like to think of as the inappropriate use of technology. What was cool about the workshop is that I just started things off and they went off in various directions. There was plenty of technology to go round… almost everyone had an iBook or PowerBook and digital still cameras. The animations ranged from cut-outs to pixilation to drawing on a wall. It’s great to see people doing cool stuff with relatively cheap tools. I made up a site with links for the Faucet Animation Workshop which is over at my mac.com site.

July 16, 2004 animation, faucet, struts, teaching, workshop

Circular Logic

Last week I uploaded Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville to my space at ZeD. The Circular Logic project originally happened for the Digital Dialogues exhibition at the Acadia Art Gallery that was curated by Gair Dunlop. I’d been working with QuickTime VR for a while and was thinking of doing something with that. Then I started thinking about going around in circles and taking stills along the way. When that was combined with stop-motion I thought that I would have something that looked like pixilation but where the camera moved instead of objects.
I tried some experiments and it worked if I made sure that there was a focal point in each image. That’s the reason for going in circles around a building or large public object as it gives you something to focus on and gives me a way to keep the image in the frame consistent. I like to think of it as the (somewhat) inappropriate use of technology. I wanted to use a digital still camera to take single frames that I combined together to create an animation. For the loops around Wolfville I took over 1000 stills that I combined together in QuickTime Pro and then manipulated them in Final Cut Pro.
For the show at the gallery I burned the loops onto a DVD that looped and it played on a television set in the gallery. Later I made a shorter, more linear version for a screening at Salvation in Halifax and that’s what I have up at ZeD now.

June 25, 2004 animation, art, photos, video

People Like Us

One thing that I’ve realized is that while I have a bit of a background and interest in sound I don’t have a lot of sound-related stuff on the ‘blog. I do have images and lots of film stuff, but not much sound stuff outside of more traditional music at all. I’ve been fascinated the last few days with a radio show from WFMU, “DO or DIY with People Like Us”
hosted by People Like Us who is Vicki Bennett. The show is a neat collection of offbeat music and collages created by People Like Us that I just love listening to.

I first heard People Like Us as part of the Illegal Art exhibition where her hauntingly beautiful track “Swinglargo” is included. I then saw the video “We Edit Life” that she was commissioned to make for Lovebytes. What she cuts and mixes together is clever and fun and with obscure references that I sometimes pick up and sometimes don’t, but always enjoy. She’s also profiled as a Featured Commoner as she’s a supporter of the Creative Commons project and is one of the people who suggested a sampling license. She has a very wide range of recordings available for download on her site, so you can listen and then buy some CDs. I’ve got to listen some more myself and buy some CDs. (But People Like Us also makes me want to do more with sound on my own too…the last thing I did was silent!)

November 18, 2003 art, audio, music, peoplelikeus, podcast, sound, vickibennett

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce‘s Ulysses took place in 1904. Sip (I’m enjoying a pint of Guinness right now). Ulysses is an amazing achievement, moving through various literary styles as Stephen Dedalus moves through Dublin. I’ve never been to Dublin (hopefully someday…) but the amazingly descriptive novel paints a picture that resonates. Joyce invented one of my favourite words that works on so many levels: “alcoherently”, but in Finnegan’s Wake, which I’ve only dipped in to from time to time. Tonight I think that I’ll start to read Ulysses again.

June 16, 2003 bloomsday, dublin, finneganswake, guinness, jamesjoyce, novel, ulysses, writing

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