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 , , ,

ZeD

I’ve been a member of ZeD for while and have been watching and lurking without uploading anything. In the past the only thing that I’ve uploaded has been a tiny thumbnail image for my profile page which is called bitdepth. ZeD is a great project initiated by the CBC who have some talented, creative people working on digital media stuff. ZeD is a tv show on the CBC and a web site that shows and collects content as well as discussions. It’s a community of creators and viewers and they give you a space to upload and share your work. They also broadcast uploaded work on tv and tv work on the Web. The name of the community is phonetically how the last letter of the English alphabet should be pronounced, which is a point of pride for some Canadians.
Today I uploaded video that I made last summer. It’s called Truro Loop and it is only 3 1/2 seconds long, but it loops so it can be just about however long you want it to be. I’ll be uploading more stuff soon.

June 12, 2004 , , , ,

Hand Processing Workshop Photos

I put some of the photos that I took during the recent hand processing film workshop at the NB Filmmakers Co-op up on my Mac.com site. They are in the Hand Processing Workshop Gallery. I had a great time and the images give a bit of a glimpse of things that I noticed during the workshop.

June 11, 2004 , , , ,

The Work of Director Michel Gondry

I’ve liked just about everything that I’ve seen from Michel Gondry, from music videos for The Chemical Brothers and Bjork to the film Human Nature. While he’s brilliant at music videos, in Human Nature it felt a bit forced, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a great combination of his talents within a great script with what appears to be little studio manipulation. I’ve been watching the Directors Label DVD The Work of Director Michel Gondry and I’m amazed by the talent of the man. After watching many of the videos you begin to see patterns of repetition and common themes and everything is dreamlike. The most amazing video is Bjork‘s breathtaking Bachelorette which makes your head spin to watch it.
While the videos are great to watch, the neatest part of the DVD is the documentary about Gondry growing up and how and why he works in the way that he does. I’ve Been Twelve Forever takes you through his childhood and mind in an entertaining and visually exciting way that lets us behind the curtain of some of the visions that he has brought to the screen. It’s a lot more than a promo piece that consists of people talking about how wonderful it is to work with him and Gondry himself tries out a lot of different visual tricks to show how he’s thought about his life and the music videos and manages to keep coming back to the same themes in different visual styles. It’s a great DVD that I’ll be spending a lot more time with. It’s fun and inspirational.

April 26, 2004 , , , , ,

Digital Dialogues

I’ve had the good fortune to be included as part of an exhibition at the Acadia University Art Gallery called “Digital Dialogues: connecting in art and science”. The exhibition was curated by Gair Dunlop who is a visiting artist from Scotland who I met in New Brunswick at the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference in May. One of the other people that I met there was Jan Marontate who thought that it would be neat to get Gair back here. Flash forward a year and a half later and thanks to funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art Science and Technology, Gair has been back and he’s curated a great show that explores the area around here, which is next to the Bay of Fundy, and explores art and science, science and art, and it gave me a chance to explore some things I wouldn’t normally explore. The project was coordinated by the talented Janice Hudson who toiled away in the Peter Gzowski room with Gair. The amazing crew at the Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology also were an integral part of the whole process and they did some neat stuff (as they usually do). This is just the perspective that I have looking from slightly outside the whole process, which always requires a lot of people to make something wonderful happen.

Circular Logic stillFor my contribution I took a series of 1005 digital stills to form a set of 7 loops around 3 locations in Wolfville. I would take a still, step to my right and then take another still and repeat the process from between 60 to 400 times. I then combined the stills together to form animated loops. Then I played with it in Final Cut Pro and made filmstrips that remind me of working with 16mm film. Finally I put it all together onto a DVD that I burned. It’s called “Circular Logic: 7 Loops in Wolfville” and it’s part of what I think of as the inappropriate use of technology. It involves using technologies is way that they aren’t really supposed to be used. It was a lot of fun. Eventually it will be up on the Web and I’ll let you know more about it and I’ve also got to go back and explore more of works as the opening was tonight and I didn’t get a chance to explore much. The show runs until September 24 at the Acadia University Art Gallery in the Beveridge Art Centre in Wolfville.

September 11, 2003 , , , , , ,

iPod AV?

I was playing with the new iChatAV beta using audio chat and wanted to use the new iSight, but I don’t have one, and my G3 PowerBook is too slow for video chat. But I was thinking about the amazing design of the new iSight and how it just uses FireWire to connect. Then I was thinking that it would be cool if you could take that camera off of the computer to take pictures unconnected…then I thought about the iPod, which is a FireWire hard drive. Hmmm… if you plugged the camera into an iPod you have a camera and a hard drive. (But now the iPods have a Dock connector instead of straight FireWire.) What if the iPod 2 or iPod AV had a colour screen, video playback and recording capability? That would be cool. Plug in the iSight, look at the iPod screen and record video… and maybe if the iPod had AirPort you could stream video from the iPod or have a neat wireless iChat without needing a keyboard…maybe sort of an iPhone for around the house? It seems as if all of the parts are in place for this and maybe it’s just a matter of time.

June 25, 2003 , , , , , , ,

About

widening the web

    http://bitdepth.tumblr.com/post/17367317937http://bitdepth.tumblr.com/post/17122224976http://bitdepth.tumblr.com/post/17048897314http://bitdepth.tumblr.com/post/16755682460

Archives

Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License
Creative Commons License