week 13

The topic of a short semester paper was concerning the decisions a film production management makes in case a key figure, main or important actor, passes away in the process of production. The example discussed was a Terry Gilliam movie called The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, where Heath Ledger died while being in the production.

Due to the length limitations of study, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was the only example shown and argued. To further develop the topic it would be essential to discuss the examples of other film productions, such as The Crow, Harry Potter series, Game of Death, etc. The aspects of the study primarily would be the handling of the problem, effect on the quality and effect of the final product on the public.

here is the link to the semester paper:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11812908/Parnassus.pdf

week 12

Koyaanisqatsi is the first film in the Qatsi trilogy depicting the world consisting of nature, humans and technology. The word 'koyaanisqatsi' itself is translated as 'life out of balance'

absence of dialogs is compensated by the sequence of powerful images, shown at different speed that creates an interesting effect of first getting a viewer bored for a while (when showing slow motion landscapes) and then speeding up the footage so it is impossible to look away, because instinctively a viewer is afraid to miss something (we can compare it with music videos where scenes are changing very fast and a viewer is able to see it, but unable to get the multiple details, thus he is kept interested as he can never get enough)

week 11

V Magazine, issue 67, fall 2010

photographer: Mario Sorrenti

photostory based on Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain

week 10

Due to unexpected problems occurred during the implementation of the planned project, the project and the idea itself were left behind, as the feasibility was quite doubtful.

I was fortunate to find out that another group, which was dealing with a very interesting installation project, was still in the process of putting things together and what is more important lacked the technical solution for the implementation.

The video installation was designed for the school charity toy collecting and was planned to be an interactive project. The concept was build around the idea of the Christmas spirit and giving. A viewer was supposed to face a continuous video track of close ups of children's sad facial expressions, then he was supposed to read the project description with the instructions directing him to hold a hand placed below the installation screen. The hand was designed in a way that it was a red glove, later it became a pair of gloves, stuffed with soft material and it also had a mouse inside it with the scroll and the right side blocked.

A viewer was supposed to hold the hands that would click the left side of the mouse inside and switch the first sad video to the happy one, which would continue unless the hands are let go.

Before I joined the project, the hands and video footage were already done. The question was how to make it work and implement the idea of interaction which was the essential one for this project.

Programming the mouse button to react in a specific way would be a possible thing to do in Adobe Flash, however due to time and resources limitations, some of the aspects of the idea of interaction were modified. A viewer was now supposed to hold the hands in red gloves in order to click the left button and change the first to the second (happy) video track, which after a while will be automatically switched to the first continuous track. This seemed more feasible, and the proposed solution was very surprising and unexpectedly easy - a recently introduced Microsoft Office 2010 had added some new options to Power Point and now it was possible to implement the idea doing the following:

- 1st slide - 1st video, size of the whole slide, looped

- when clicking holding the hands, mouse would click and the first slide will naturally be followed by the second one

-2nd slide - 2nd video, size of the whole slide, played once (time = 1 min)

the whole slideshow was set to loop, so the second slide with the happy close-ups after its 1 minute would change to the 1st slide, which was looped and was playing until interrupted

after the actual presentation some faults were found:

1) second track (1 minute) was too long to watch and uncertainty appears when standing 1 minute in front of the installation, mouse hidden in the hands was not reacting

2) the two tracks could have been split and combined in several sets to show the variety of shots, thus the second slide with happy close-ups does not go back to the 1st again and again starting with the same frame

3) the design of the box where the screen and the rest was put had a winning color contrast of black and red, which grabbed attention, however even though the black looked quite elegant and sleek, in connection with the video content it had lack of correspondence, which could be easily fixed if using the black surface as a reference to a classroom board

week 9

With the creative part ready and edited I was waiting for the technical part to be completed which was the task of my project partner. Unfortunately it turned out to be an impossible task for him to realize the initial idea in practice. The technical part was the main problem we had with the project, but the underlying problems of the project failure were related to the project management:

- timeline: we did not set a timeline for this projects which should have included the testing dates in the early period to check the feasibility and make sure that we ourselves were able to e.g. modify the mouse or that the necessary software will run on the computer we had

- my personal mistake was trusting my project partner and not supervising his progress, because in the end my part was completed and his wasn't

week 8

My biggest part of the project was mainly the creative side of it which means I was responsible for getting the paint spray video done.

The footage then can be used for the implementation of the project as a second layer with 50% transparency put on the 50% transparent layer of a live stream video.

Materials required for shooting the spray video:

- camera

- paint spray (red paint was used)

- glass/transparent plastic cover to put in front of the camera (I used transparent plastic taken from a picture frame)

- light source (I chose a floor lamp with a bulb with flexible cord, so that it can be directed and adjusted under the suitable angle)

- light source strength regulator (I used foil to cover the lamp and made holes to allow enough quantity of light to come out)

The transparent plastic cover was installed on a chair, it was kept vertically with the help of strings (attaching it to the ceiling luminaire which can be pulled down) and scotch tape (attaching it to the floor lamp's pole). Because of the material used for the cover, this construction was quite reliable as the cover was not heavy as the glass could be.

The first 3 times of spraying paint were tests and helped me to adjust the light and find the best place and way to spray, e.g. my hand should be covered with dark clothe to minimize the presence of other things besides the can when it comes close and becomes lightened. Each time the paint should be washed off.

The result turned out to be quite good, especially when I adjust the color settings in the video editing software, so the can and paint became more bright, but the rest was still dark.

Photo of the set up, the transparent cover is not visible enough here, but it is placed on the side of the chair, camera was placed on the books, the reflecting shiny parts of it were covered with dark material

week 6

we have decided to change the idea of our video installation in order to add the interactive aspect to it

the idea is based on using two video layers, the one on the top with greater opacity will be a live stream showing a person who is in front of the monitor (camera will be positioned on top of the monitor), second layer will contain moving objects, people etc. therefore creating an effect of a different environment behind a person interacting with the installation; second pre-made layer will show the same location (same room), so a person will have a feeling that moving objects and people behind them are real

for this to be successful we will need to create a reason for a person to sit in front of the monitor to catch him in the right position on the live streaming layer

since layers cannot have 100% of opacity and e.g. people walking behind a viewer are going to be partly visible through him, then it is important to make sure we get rid of the feeling that there are two layers. we can shoot people walking on the background one by one and make them transparent to some extent when merging the footage, room will be static, people will be half transparent walking through each other and therefore a person who will later be placed in front of the monitor will be a part of the installation without feeling the two obvious layers

week 5

after seeing a couple of examples of video installations I was completely lost as video and moving objects are not really my field but nevertheless I had to come up with idea for the project

I decided to focus on visual and leave the formatting of the concept from my core idea for my teammate

the idea is very raw, but what I have right now in mind is the relation of people and the computer desktop environments, some of people are lost, some are pretty familiar, some locked, scared (reaction towards things they do not understand), or feel very comfortable, etc

I would like to record videos of the computer screens while doing basic and advanced operations (e.g. opening folders/typing in word and compiling codes with the use of commands in terminal) and also shoot people against the green background so later they can be placed inside the desktops videos.

here are a couple of screenshots for the idea:

desktop in mac

desktop in linux

week 4

the majority of video installations as a recent approach in the contemporary art deal with a lot of symbolic and twisted messages and aim to make the viewers look for the answers and interpretations inside themselves

and so do the dogma category films, those are the films of the avant garde movement which, apart from being valuable back at the time it began for its new shocking approaches, were quite attractive for its accessibility as they could be low budget and still get attention from the public

art films are now commonly called art house and occupy a particular niche rather than aiming for the mass audience

week 3

the issue of the difference of video and movie continued in the discussion of of the techniques of dealing the picture quality of a video signal - the two of them are interlaced and progressive techniques:

interlaced technique uses the method of displaying odd and even numbers of the lines in a picture separately, the advantages of this is the lower bandwidth requirement comparing to the progressive technique, however fast moving objects captured with this technique make the actual lines visible when played on the screen, plus as opposed to progressive video format frames cannot be used as still images

talking about fast moving objects it is important to mention the high speed film cameras that are capable to grab up to 200 m frames per second which results in high quality still images of fast moving objects and gives very beautiful slowed down moments of e.g. water drops, hits (in action movies) etc

example:

frames from Motley Crue music video - Saints of Los Angeles

music video:

week 2

after discussing the different tv video settings which vary in different regions ( e.g. in Europe, Asia, Russia etc there is PAL system with resolution of 720x576, in the US and Japan there is NTSC analog tv system with the resolution of 320x240) there was a question of hd videos which led to the discussion the differences of video and movie. Video in this particular context stands for footage got with an amateur digital camera and it can be easily distinguished from the footage got with film cameras. Since the prevailing majority of people use amateur cameras for every day things they have a particular expectations of the content shot. This is widely used in film production to create the atmosphere of the real life happenings and convince a viewer dragging him into the picture. A good example of it is the Blaire witch project.

Digital cameras are less sensitive in terms of light and colour and in comparison with film the picture looks less vivid, sharp etc.

These are extracts from Twin Peaks tv series where home made footage is inserted into the movie:

in music videos it is very common to combine both types of footage especially when giving viewers a sneak peak to the backstage:

Hinder - Up all night

week 1