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