Project 4 (final): Beaches

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This is a Final Cut Pro installation video for spring semester’s last Video Art project. I captured the video clips and digital images in Florida and Oregon. The most exciting aspect of this project, for me, was the seagull compositing that reminds me of Toby Schachman’s Time Travellers. I learned to use the extract matte and to work with 1440 x 1080 HD 16:9 video. Printed voile fabric was used for the library study room window covering, while matching fabric was the 72″ x 54″ projection screen.

Datamoshing

This example of datamoshing is a real-time video mirror that is currently installed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program space. There’s more about the Time Travellers project on Toby Schachman’s blog.

Joe Friedl is a Web Developer who created this video with Perl script that he wrote for datamoshing AVI videos. Here’s a link to the code.

German animator, motion designer, and artist, Robert Seidel, created the visuals for the 2010 Brazilian live performance, Meander.

Project 3 (Site-specific): Art in a Bucket

My site-specific Video Art project is a selection of Avatar movie clips that are backed by the songs, “The Bioluminesence of Night” and “Becoming One with Neytiri,” from the movie soundtrack. The idea is to carry the projector, GorillaPod, and Earth Day banner (window covering) in the same white plastic pail that is turned on its side, to become the projection screen. With Earth Day approaching, I wanted to take the war out of Avatar and focus on its scenes of life.

This was my first video mapping experience. I started the project by taking still images of the bucket bottom (from the inside) and using those images as a video template. I created the three-minute project in Final Cut Pro with special effects integrated from Adobe After Effects. I like that the looping video can be viewed from the top or bottom of the plastic bucket. The translucent pail lights the darkened room to enhance the mood created by James Horner’s score. I chose a library study room as the projection site, where viewers can sit around the study table to see the video. The light from the main library filters through the blue Earth Day flag that covers the door window. Although, this project is specific to library study room 206, in concept, its portability can transfer to future projects—art in a bucket, art in a rolling suitcase, etc.—that are not site-specific.

An interesting side note to this project is that the owner of Earth Flag, a New Jersey company, offered to introduce me to John McConnell, the man who created Earth Day in 1970. John is 95 now and lives, with his wife Anna, in Denver.

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Project 2 (Narrative): Mannequin Screen Test

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With video clips and still shots from Breckenridge, I created a short movie about an open casting screen test. During the Video Art class assignment, I learned about Final Cut Pro’s nesting feature, sound settings, and compressor exports. The class critique was based on the project DVD that was created in iDVD.

Cristóbal Vila

I was searching for examples of in-camera video editing when I came across an artist from Zaragoza, Spain. Cristóbal Vila works with computer generated 3-D imagery in this Fallingwater video.

Two Narrative Videos

Kenneth Onulak used the stratastencil technique to create his RISD project.

Kseniya Simonova creates a visual narrative for “Ukraine’s Got Talent.”

Project 1 (Appropriation): Water and Ice

This first critiqued project in Video Art is based on appropriated video clips. I selected clips from the Internet and from nature DVDs. One video artist on Vimeo, Don Whitaker, experiments with slit-scan style videos. He takes movies of the Oregon coastline and runs them through a script he wrote in the program, Processing. I used three segments of his Surfing the 4th Dimension. HandBrake was helpful in ripping segments of BBC’s Planet Earth DVDs. Two YouTube audio tracks accompany Enya’s Aniron, an iTunes purchase.

Software and conversion resources for this project were:
Final Cut Pro
iMovie
Camtasia
Convertfiles
HandBrake
KeepVid
Wondershare AllMyTube
Zamzar

Water and Ice is an environmental statement of awareness: Earth can slip away, faster than it evolved.

Photoshop Animation

I’ve been learning how to use Adobe Flash in CS4 but I didn’t know that I could accomplish a lot of the same animations in Photoshop. One advantage of animating in Photoshop is being able to use the filter gallery. This is a 12-frame gif that has been saved for web and devices. If you click on the image, the animation should play twice in the browser.

Sand Signature

Bungee Cords

Fireworks

The bungee cord images are from Tobias Rehberger’s Embrace exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. I used 6 frames from a movie file to create the gif. I took advantage of the Photoshop import feature: Video Frames to Layers to create the fireworks 3-frame gif.

Two Videos

The first Video Art assignment for spring semester is to blog two videos. It’s no secret that I really appreciate the imagery of ink bleeding into wet paper and have watched the Sherlock Holmes movie end credits more times than I will admit. This is a brief Jake & Dan video that accompanies a tutorial for creating Danny Yount’s “ink and paper” effect.

Shinichi Maruyama takes amazing strobe photographs of ink and water. This is his video, Kusho.