Last weekend Amsterdam attracted many sound artists and scholars from all over the world who wanted to attend the Sonic Acts Festival. This year’s theme was “The Cinematic Experience”. Although I was in fact only able to attend very little of the Sonic Acts conference, I will try to sum up what was most interesting for me…
The session I attended was entitled ‘Interactivity and Immersion’ with presentations by Jeffrey Shaw and Marnix de Nijs. weiter…
Swedish post production company Stopp has a very clean and intuitive full screen video website. I think that you’ll see many of these overlay-interfaces in the near future, because they’ll look very nice on your flat tv, too. :-)
via Pickone.
This is how simple but atmospheric video webdesign should be! IKEA introduces us to different people’s life with a short movie featuring some impressions of their hectic work day and afterwords invites us to their bedroom in slowmotion - “You need a quiet place”
Jonathan Harris tells the story of a traditional whale hunt by a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska in new ways. He documented the entire experience with a very slow stop-motion-film: a linear sequence of 3,214 images, taken at 5-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeatâ€. But in moments of high adrenaline, this framerate/heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 8 frames per minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of his own heartbeat.
All imagery is presented in a very rich visual interface: Each photo comes with various meta-data like date, time, cadence (level of excitement), context (where it was taken), concepts (which ideas are represented) & cast (who is pictured). All the pictures can be displayed as a mosaic (all photos simultaneously), a timeline (a medical heartbeat graph whose magnitude at each point corresponds to the photographic frequency) or as a pinwheel (circular timeline).
Bruce McDonald launched Re-Fragmented, a re-editing initiative surrounding the release of his latest award-winning feature film The Tracey Fragments. Featuring a stand-out performance from Ellen Page as a 15-year-old girl who has lost her little brother and sets out on a desperate journey to find him, The Tracey Fragments is a daring portrayal of teenage angst, told in a dazzling style. The film, which opens in limited release Friday, employs multi-frame editing to breathtaking effect, pushing the boundaries of cinematic language to get inside the heart and mind of Tracey.
Tracey: Re-Fragmented makes available at www.thetraceyfragments.com all the footage from the shoot of the film for users to download and re-edit their own related projects including music videos, new trailers or to re-edit the entire movie themselves. The Creative Commons licensed initiative also makes available the score of the movie by Indie Collective Broken Social Scene.
When I saw the See Something. Feel Something. campaign from FOXTEL Australia I was a little suprised. Are they really serious?
There are showing people in front of a tv, whose feelings are diversifying between tension and joy. You don’t have to know the short film Evidence to get the impressions that all the people are looking like zombies! Is this really the impression they want to evoke?
“VideoDefunct is a Collaborative Research project by Seth Keen and Keith Deverell, with the aid of David Wolf at RMIT University Melbourne Australia. The project is an experimental work that focuses on producing a hybrid form of video blog. Currently as a work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. A key objective of the project is to explore the way video is presented within the structure of a blog from a ‘poetic’ perspective.”
One of the projects I saw at ARGOS:
“Artist Peter Horvath (CA, 1961) has experimented with photo montages for years, and in the domain of web technology he is essentially investigates how to enhance the qualities of his photo work beyond the two-dimensional context. In his current work he develops a web of fragmentary story lines, a framework of multi-coloured mosaics from which a ’spectator’ can draw his own history by navigating. According to Horvath the web reflects the ongoing process of making choices, through which we appropriate the world around us, and as such it is the ideal medium to investigate the notions of identity, subjectivity and consciousness.”
Recreating Movement is a computer program for analysing film sequences and has been developed within the diploma thesis by Martin Hilpoltsteiner.
The single frames of a pre-keyed film sequence are arranged one behind the other in a three-dimensional space. In this way a complex movement is being captured in its whole length and turned into graphic information.
“Dead Bird is an experiment in storytelling & editing.
The same story is presented 3 different ways with each edit revealing a little more about the characters personalities, through their relationship with the environment, each other and a dead bird.”
You can watch the shortfilm either in a split screen edit or two classical edits. You can learn a lot about spatial montage comparing the three edits. In my opinion the classical edits in this case are much more compelling. The split screen edit transfers a certain atmosphere but no dramatic development while the classical edits offer more suspense. The split screen shows you different view points at the same time, but in this case it’s not really leading somewhere.