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